Gadai da lompa

Reminiscences.

Well that’s not English, Italian, French or Spanish and it isn’t a name of some science fiction hero, it’s simply an expression used by my late mother whenever there was a dispute between her and my late father.

The meaning is (you must have guessed it already no doubt) “talk to the lamp”. There is a synonym expression in Hebrew of course, a bit different though: “talk to the trees and the stones”; or the biblical one: “There is no voice and there is no reply… (ain kol ve ain oneh)”.

It did help me I believe to acquire foreign languages in much later stages of my life �" they believed (my parents, their memory be blessed) that I don’t understand what they said to each other in a foreign language in my presence, they were wrong of course.

Like any other child I understood much from mien, volume, and body language at first, and then the words meanings were learned and kept in my memory. For such expressions frightened me, like it does frighten any other child in such situations.

Why have I brought it up at all, I wonder myself…Let me see, well that expression is embedded in my memory, and it does come up whenever a debate takes place; be it political or private between a group or individuals in contemporary verbal or written communication, or particularly in a relationship �" just like it was in the past, there’re things that never change it seems, and keep popping up again and again.

 

© Haim Kadman 2008 �" all rights reserved.

      

Reviews

[Gedalya]

One always knew that something secretive was being said when parents were speaking in Yiddish, lol