REL: "I am the walrus" in Aramaic *LONG*
Rachael Bahl
by Annette Geremia.
This is the sweetest article about the man who voiced the Lazarus bowl.
He is a professor of Near Eastern languages at the University of
California, LA. The article is written by his son.
Rachael.
####
Scholar dad goes showbiz
"I am the walrus" in Aramaic
by Ariel Sabar
My father is a professor of Near Eastern languages at the University of
California - Los Angeles. Though his office is a short drive from the
big studios of Hollywood, little about him evokes Tinsel Town.
He was born in a town in Iraq with no indoor plumbing or electricity.
His hair, a froth of curls combed over to one side, embarrassed me as a
kid, even though some of my friends compared it to Einstein's.
And until my mother took charge of his wardrobe a few years ago, his
pastel plaid J.C. Penney suits would probably have won more style points
on the back nine than at the faculty club.
As for his latest book, it is, to be sure, of scholarly significance.
But it won't make Oprah or the display windows of Barnes & Noble. It is
a Neo-Aramaic-English dictionary. It is a life's work whose likely
readers would at best fill a small auditorium.
Yet twice in the career of this least glitzy of men, Hollywood has come
calling. The first time was during the making of Oh, God!, the 1977
comedy starring George Burns as the Supreme Being. There is a scene in
which the authorities want proof that God would appear on Earth in the
guise of a cigar-champing octogenarian. Burns silences them by
brandishing a few sheets of paper written in a scrawl said to be God's
language. The handwriting was, in fact, my dad's.
Then, two Sundays ago, the story on Fox's The X-Files centered on
Mulder and Scully's discovery of a biblical artifact called the Lazarus
Bowl. As the show's writers tell it, an old woman was throwing a clay
pot when Jesus uttered the words that raised Lazarus from the dead.
Those words were encrypted in the bowl's grooves as the clay dried. If
the bowl is broken, the words once again raise the dead, or so the
show's writers have it.
In a climactic scene in the April 30 episode, a balding FBI sound
engineer places the bowl on a computer sensor to "tease out" Christ's
original incantation. From the computer's speakers come a frail voice
and a lot of static.
"It's Aramaic," the sound engineer says as important-looking green
lines waver on a computer monitor.
A flash of recognition crosses Scully's face - a sign that not even
this is too arcane for her intellect. "That's the language Christ
spoke," she says.
Indeed. Yet the voice viewers heard that Sunday night was not The
Savior's. It was a voice that had groused, when I recently went home for
a visit, about the way I left my shoes in the hall instead of the
bedroom.
For my father, who is 60 and speaks with a soft Middle Eastern accent,
a brush with Hollywood is, as he put, "like a fantasy come true."
For one thing, Zakho, Iraq, the Kurdish border town where he grew up,
was no La-La Land. You found your way at night by moonlight, not klieg
light. Children walked barefoot. When the summer sun turned his family's
mud-brick house into a kiln, he and his five brothers and sisters
climbed to the roof to sleep in the night air.
For entertainment, the children gathered at the feet of one of the
town's storytellers, bearded men who spun tales about the supernatural -
tales that Mulder might have appreciated.
When his parents moved the family to Israel, in 1951, my father, then a
13-year-old boy, found escape from the rigors of life in a new country
in the darkness of Jerusalem's movie theaters. He still remembers the
way those dazzling actresses sang in Oklahoma! and Seven Brides for
Seven Brothers.
"The world in those musicals was such a beautiful world compared with
the difficult life of new immigrants," he recalled the other day. "My
dream as a child was to someday be in Hollywood. Just to see it even. It
looked like some Shangri-La."
He got there many years later, after getting his Ph.D. at Yale
University and taking a job at UCLA as a 32-year-old father.
Yet while stars attended movie galas and heavy metal bands thrashed
away on the Sunset Strip, my father was still worlds away. He taught
Hebrew to undergraduates. He sat amid the heaped papers of his office at
our house studying ancient languages no one really speaks anymore.
One of those is Aramaic. In biblical times it was the lingua franca of
much of the Middle East. Now, it is spoken by perhaps 200,000 people. My
father's family, who are Jewish Kurds, spoke it at home when he was a
boy. Others who speak it live in the remote mountains of Iraq, Turkey
and Iran. As residents of those regions have moved to the cities and
other countries, the language has stayed behind. It is expected to die
out with my father's generation.
My father has dedicated his career to preserving it for linguists.
His strain of scholarship requires so little public exposure that he
often spends the whole day at his desk, without ever changing out of his
bathrobe. The image of him in his swivel chair, swaddled in his fading
brown bathrobe, is among the most durable memories of my childhood.
When a producer for The X-Files called not long ago, my father hadn't
really heard of the show. Neither had his university colleagues. "They
say it's like Twilight Zone - that type of TV, he said. "Half
mysterious, half realistic."
He also told his department's secretaries about it. For weeks, he found
himself the subject of adoring chatter. "I thought no one would care,"
he said. "But all these secretaries got quite excited to hear I will be
on X-File," he said, dropping the "s" in one of his many
reinterpretations of American culture. "Teaching assistants are coming
up to me in the hall and saying, 'We heard you were on X-File!'"
One afternoon, my father got into his 1987 four-cylinder Toyota Tercel
and drove to the Fox Studios. At the gate, a guard consulted a clipboard
and then waved him to a specially assigned parking place. "Yes Sir, we
are waiting for you," the guard said. My father had no idea he was so
important.
Inside a big sound studio, a producer asked him to read, in Aramaic,
the words with which Christ raised the dead man from his grave:
"Lazarus, come forth." This part was easy.
The part that threw my dad was when the producer asked him to say "I am
the Walrus" in Aramaic.
The writers, it seems, wanted to have a little fun at the expense of
Beatles fans. Preferring Jewish folk music to the Fab Four, my dad
didn't get any of this. He asked for an explanation. The producer
replied with a curt "Don't worry."
My father probably wouldn't have worried, except that walruses are not
native to the flatlands of Zakho, and the nearest ocean is hundreds of
miles away. Thus, "walrus" was not a word much heard in Aramaic-speaking
lands. The producer asked my father for a synonym.
As the tapes rolled, my father delivered a line perhaps never before
spoken in Aramaic's 3,000 year history. "I am," he said, "the dog of the
sea."
The experience grew even more disorienting when the producer asked him
to say, "Coo-coo-ca-choo." My father assumed that this was Hollywood's
bastardized idea of a levitation chant - not a line from a Beatles song.
So he offered to say something more biblical-sounding. The producer told
him it would be best to stick to the script.
"I assumed this must be some kind of mystery episode and that he
doesn't want to divulge the secrets of it even to me," my father told
me. "He wants me to do my share without knowing what I'm doing. And I
followed. I asked him once or twice, but he didn't respond really."
As the recording session wound down, the producer said he was impressed
with the way my father delivered his lines. He asked where he'd learned
to speak so dramatically. My dad was pleased by the compliment, but
wanted to sound modest. He said anyone could have done the same, so long
as he was familiar with the way God spoke to Moses in The Ten
Commandments.
The producer asked my father to name his usual consulting fee.
Unschooled in the ways of Hollywood deal-making, he told the producer to
decide. A check for $500 arrived in the mail a few days later, and my
father smiled.
This was a definite improvement over his compensation for Oh, God! For
penning about eight lines of Syriac, he got a check for $100 and a
half-dozen deluxe felt-tip pens.
As the 9 p.m. showtime for The X-Files neared, the anticipation in our
house in West Los Angeles grew.
Over the phone, I learned that my father had checked TV Guide and found
that a reviewer had given the episode a 9 out of 10 rating. He said he
was getting ready to record the program on two VCRs. "I'm going to make
two copies, at least," he said. "Just in case I have to lend it to two
people at the same time. Just in case."
My mother joked. "You always wondered what to do in retirement,
she said. "Here's your chance."
But up until the final moments before the show, my father worried
either that it would be embarrassing or it might offend the devout. He
took some comfort from the producer's assurances that no four-letter
words would be used in connection with Jesus.
By Sunday afternoon, I found myself getting excited too. But I was also
anxious.
My TV set in Connecticut has bad reception and doesn't get Fox. So I
called a dowdy motel near where I live with two questions: "Do you have
cable TV?" And, "Do you rent by the hour?"
When I showed up with $20 to claim the room, the motel clerk, an older
woman, gave me the once-over. Her suspicions probably intensified when a
young woman showed up in a separate car a few minutes later. It was my
wife, in her station wagon, rushing after her Sunday shift at work.
The clerk looked just as wary when I returned with the key, an hour
later. I wanted to explain about my father - how the children walked
barefoot in Zakho, how a career as an Aramaic scholar means a life of
obscurity, how excited the secretaries were about his moment in the
starlight, how he'd be so proud that I paid $20 to hear him raise
Lazarus from the dead.
I walked out into the dark parking lot in silence.
Because of the different time zones, there were two hours left before
the show would air in Los Angeles. So when I got home, I called my
father.
"You're a star" was the first thing I said.
"Really?" he asked, his voice rising.
(Ariel Sabar is a Journal staff writer.)
####
b_fraser
>
> This is the sweetest article about the man who voiced the Lazarus bowl.
> He is a professor of Near Eastern languages at the University of
> California, LA. The article is written by his son.
[snip]
This was a great article, Rachael. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Aimee
--
Ways to annoy people
#11 Finish all your sentences with "In accordance with the prophecy.".
Rachael Bahl
> Rachael Bahl wrote:
> >
> > This is the sweetest article about the man who voiced the Lazarus bowl.
> > He is a professor of Near Eastern languages at the University of
> > California, LA. The article is written by his son.
>
> [snip]
>
> This was a great article, Rachael. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Thanks Aimee, my pleasure.
I liked it so much I nearly emailed the original sender to thank her,
but laziness got the better of me. :-)
I'm glad to know it got out, actually. I saw it on my local newsserver,
but not at work, so I wasn't sure.
Rachael.
---
Rachael Bahl
Delete .smeg to email