Nurith Aviv’s Dual Identities and Dueling Languages

Language is a contradiction: At once home and foreign, a unifier and a divider, a liberator and an oppressor. This is the landscape that groundbreaking French filmmaker Nurith Aviv paints in her compelling 2004 documentary, “Misafa Lesafa,” “From Language to Language.” 

The film was screened at the Center for Jewish History in New York on Friday, April 25, 2025, as a part of the series “Filming Words – Nurith Aviv: Screenings and Conversation,” organized by the Center for Jewish Studies at Fordham University and the Centro Primo Levi and co-sponsored by the Center on Religion and Culture.

Through the testimonies of nine multi-generational subjects, this film explores the dichotomy of language in Israel. Within this context, Aviv — who is Jewish and was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 before the creation of Israel — examines Hebrew as a shared language that fosters a sense of belonging, but that also contributes to a double consciousness and, in turn, a rejection of one’s own history and culture.

Aharon Appelfeld, a writer, was about eight years old when World War II broke out and he was pushed into a ghetto and transferred to a camp. Separated from his father and grieving the murder of his mother, Appelfeld later escaped from the camp and hid until the war was over. 

“I came to Israel in 1946, I was thirteen and a half, with no education, no parents, and no language,” he says in the film. He was multilingual, but had difficulty communicating without a common tongue. In time, Appelfeld learned Hebrew and it became his primary language.

“Every immigrant has two languages in him, two landscapes, a dual world. The immigrant was not accepted in those years, in 1946, in the 40s and 50s. It [Israel] was an ideological country and the ideology commanded: ‘Speak Hebrew! Forget your past, forget your mother tongue and your personality.’”

He decided to learn Yiddish — the language of his grandparents — too, because he wanted “to know everything Jewish,” and he sought to replace German, his mother tongue and “the language of the killers,” entirely. 

Meir Wieseltier, a poet, also rejected his native language. Originally from Russia, he moved to Haifa at eight years old after living in Germany and Poland. Though just a child, he had a deep grasp of Russian, and was able to recite Pushkin and Lermontov from the age of four. In Haifa, he fully embraced Hebrew and decided that Russian was an obstacle in his writing.

“From the moment I wanted to get into Hebrew, in order to write … I knew I must kill Russian, eliminate it, because it stood in my way, the mother tongue,” he said.

Both first generation immigrants to Israel, Appelfeld and Wieseltier’s acceptance of Hebrew was a concrete symbol of belonging. When language serves as a loud and undeniable reminder of “otherness,” it becomes a logical first tie to sever, both because of and in spite of its cultural significance. 

“With the people of my generation, we have repressed what was inside us. And on the crust, on the surface of our consciousness, we have built another life which has broken with our past,” said Appelfeld.

In her progression of the film, which starts with Wieseltier’s and other first-generation immigration stories, Nurith Aviv traces generational trauma by providing a context for the complex pain which surrounds the decision to abandon one’s language. Then, she introduces individuals who are second-generation immigrants grieving their parents’ mother tongues, who feel like they are teetering between two worlds: One that is forever at a distance and another in which they feel they do not fully belong.

Haim Uliel, a musician, remembered his parents being ashamed to speak Moroccan, even turning down the radio and shutting the windows when Moroccan songs played. They would speak it to one another, but spoke exclusively in Hebrew to their children.

The same was true for Haviva Pedaya, a scholar and poet, who’s Iraq-born parents spoke in Arabic only to one another, so she remained on the periphery of the language. It was one she could understand but not speak. 

She found herself existing in “a blind spot, an area of amnesia, a no-man’s land” between Hebrew and Arabic, two identities that she must navigate between.

Taking this notion one step further, Pedaya explained Hebrew as “two languages: the Hebrew I learned from my grandfather and the Hebrew so full of Zionist sediment.” 

In her critique of the latter, she explained the perversion of the language within a military context. She gave the example of “purification” as a word that holds incredible spiritual importance, but that has instead been used in reference to “purifying or cleansing a territory.”

Pedaya’s exploration of the Zionist and military iterations of the language point to the pursuit of monolingualism as a tool of the powerful — a weapon of conquest and control. 

Gil Anidjar, a professor in the Departments of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, broached the topic of the Tower of Babel in his reflection after the screening, connecting it to Pedaya’s testimony, particularly her description of Zionism’s interpretation of Hebrew as an “explosion within the words themselves”  

He reminded the audience of a quote by Franz Kafka on the tower: “If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.”

The film has a babelic quality to it as it uncovers the implausibility of a Tower of Babel, especially in a nation of immigrants, where far more is lost in an attempt to create cohesion than is gained. Like in Babel, there is an ideal of a common tongue fostering solidarity, unity and peace. But in practice, the pursuit of this vision can corrupt and exclude, leaving the path to dialogue fractured. 

Near the end of the film, Aviv introduces three people who have maintained a close connection to their mother tongue: a Palestinian singer and actress, a Russian actress, and a French rabbi and philosopher. 

The rabbi, Daniel Epstein, moved to Israel to teach, where he found himself continually drawn back to French. 

“I wouldn’t say I live in one language and in the other. I run between the two like a beating heart, bobbing and tossing,” he said. “I dream in both languages.”

Epstein’s fluidity of tongues demonstrates the potential for language to transcend difference and to build bridges. He proves that there is strength in a diversity of languages, and it enables greater understanding and nuance.

His words conclude the film, “Perhaps it is my life’s challenge: to live and to pass on messages, impossible ones, I would say, from language to language, from one world to another.”