Noemi Guttfreund de Segev: The Chelita*

Noemi Guttfreund de Segev lives in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood with her two children and husband Yoav. Previous thoughts on Noemi's interview can be found in the October 8th entry: "Recording Rehavia." Below, excerpts from the actual transcript introduce us to an individual who has taken the time to truly think about her many identities, languages, and homelands.

(What language did you speak at home?)

I think we really didn’t stick to any language in particular. It was really a mixture of languages. So there was—my mother was very keen on passing German on to us. They also spoke between themselves, my parents, German. So she would speak German, and we would also speak English and speak Spanish and there was also Portuguese in the air, you know, whenever my grandmother and other relatives would come because my mother’s family went to Brazil to escape Hitler’s Germany. I really felt that I didn’t have my own language, one language--that I didn’t belong to one language. Something that I miss today, and even though I love Spanish, I think that I am funniest in Spanish, it brings out my humor, because I like the language and I like to play around with it. (pause) But with my children, I now live in Israel—with my children, I never spoke Spanish to them as a mother tongue when I raised them at the beginning, because I wanted them to belong to a language, to one language. So I spoke to them Hebrew, and of course their father is Israeli, he spoke to them in Hebrew, and I really wanted them to have a sense of belonging, and I think one of the main things for belonging somewhere is the language, to pertain to that. And I also knew that we were going to go to the United States and that they would soon be speaking English, and I didn’t want them to have so many languages.

(That’s interesting. So they don’t speak any Spanish today?)

Today, no, but they’re very curious about it. My daughter Natalie, who’s twenty and soon will finish the army, wants to learn Spanish with my mother, who’s now living here, and then go to South America. She’s talented at language, I’m sure she’ll pick it up quickly. And my son also wants to pick it up. I think it’s not too late.

(How does that make you feel, that they’re interested. Does it make you feel good or—?)

Yes, of course! It’s—there’s something important that I would like to say. I think I feel more Salvadoran in Israel than I did in Salvador, and yet Israel is my home. For me, El Salvador was a difficult experience in the sense that being Jewish, coming from a European background in which—you know, that was not negated at home, on the contrary, it was emphasized. We were playing around with all different kinds of languages. We were trying to not just be Salvadoran. Being white, tall, and a redhead really made me feel very, very different in El Salvador. I mean, if I would go to the city, I would really—everybody would look at me. I felt very, very different. I also felt my status, not only that I look like a foreigner, but also that I come from a certain class in society, and that was very uncomfortable for me.

When I arrived in Israel, one of the things that freed me so much was that I’m not a status symbol. And that this is a country that the common thing is that we’re all Jews, but it’s a country that is receiving from all different countries all over the world. So that being a foreigner is very, very, legitimate and it’s not looked upon as something strange. So I sort of—and I didn’t want to become an Israeli. I am not into negating my roots here. It’s very interesting. I mean, in Hebrew, I have a Spanish accent, and I didn’t work on it. I didn’t try to polish it and try to sound Israeli. Some Salvadorans I’ve seen have tried that. And yet, in many ways I am Israeli. I love working here. I have many different friends that are Israeli. I’m married to an Israeli. And this is my home for sure. But I can accept here being a foreigner and an Israeli at the same time.

(Do you find that people are interested in your background?)

Yes. And I must say that I also have a lot of Latin American friends. Yes. I speak Spanish. As you know, I’m a therapist, and I work in Spanish as well. So I really do have clients from the United States, from South America, and from Israel. So I’m speaking three languages, and it brings all my different backgrounds together. I love that. (laughs)

(It’s amazing.)

‘Cause that’s who I am. I’m not one thing. I’ve come to terms with that.

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(So you were in the States from fourteen or fifteen—?)

Fifteen.

(Until you were eighteen?)

Mm-hmm.

(And then what?)

I came to the United States, to the Buxton School in Massachusetts, and I really discovered that there was a whole world of people that I really had a common language with. It was exciting, you know, that I wasn’t such a strange bird like I was in El Salvador. And it was very important for me. It really, I don’t know, boosted my self-esteem. It was very important for me. Even though it’s such a paradox, because I was away from home, I should have been suffering and I was close to my parents. But I wasn’t. I was liking so much this part, the social part and the learning part, that actually it was very good.

Then, unfortunately at that point, I think there I was lacking real guidance. Maybe parents, parents that knew what was going on with the college situation—they were not involved. They expected I guess the people from Buxton to be more involved. I really made a very wrong decision there. I went to a college in the Midwest, a Quaker college, called Earlham College, which wasn’t a bad college, but it had nothing to do with me, you know, in the middle of nowhere in Richmond, Indiana, I end up in a Quaker college, you know. I mean, it was like—and I had many different choices. I could have gone to Sarah Lawrence, but when I went to Sarah Lawrence, I looked around and it all looked very snob—I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. I got lost there in my choice. I had no idea what it all meant.

So soon enough, after I was, say, a student in psychology at Earlham, and then it was also the ‘70s, so it was Kent State, Ohio, all the killings. There was Vietnam. People were very disturbed, lots of drugs, suicides, I don’t know. It was very messy. And then I said, “Well, I really don’t belong to this scene.” Even though politically I was very active with Vietnam and all that, but still I felt that it was too much. It was too chaotic for me.

So I decided, “Well, let’s see what Salvador is all about. Let’s see how I feel in El Salvador at the age of twenty-one, twenty, if I really don’t belong there.” So I went and worked there as a social worker for a private foundation. It was very, very interesting work, in which I was doing research. I was also setting up—I was doing research about birth control in this little village, in this finca (farm), actually, to see how much they knew about it, because actually the people that owned the finca wanted to teach the people, the women, how to use birth control, see what their knowledge was about it. So it was exciting. And the second thing, I was interviewing young men, young boys, what they wanted to do was, to stay on the farm, on the finca, or did they want to learn something, an apprentice type of thing in the city? What did they want to become? So that’s how—I interviewed them, and there were several that wanted to become mechanics or whatever, so I would set up that apprentice.

(Oh, you would!)

Yes. I was the facilitator. I would go with them to San Salvador and find them the place. So that was very exciting. But at the same time I felt that I was very—I was treated like a queen there, you know? I couldn’t get rid of being (pause) I don’t know, from a certain class. So I was working with middle-class social workers, I still felt very much my status, and I didn’t like that.

(So you decided—?)

I decided, no, I don’t want this. I want to be—I don’t want this. I want to try out Israel--that has something to do with my roots. And that’s how I came.

*chelita (from chele,chela: m/f)- slang word for a light-skinned girl

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC