Design a computer…
That’s the job I found in Haifa… Elbit Computers was a start-up whose ambition was the design a commercial mini computer… by using DTL chip technology… Having zero experience in chip based design… my boss gave me a book on logic design to read… it was practically the first technical textbook in English I had to read… and understand… Since I left Egypt… all technical literature I had read were in Italian… with this book I managed getting back to technical English… actually I liked the subject… I found it very interesting…
As for the languages I used… it is in itself a story…
When I was born, the first language I learned was Italian… I still count in Italian… When I was four, my mother (at the advice of my great uncle Edmond) put me in an English kindergarten, called the Home-Craft House… at age six I went to the British Boys School and stayed in that school until I left Egypt…
English became my principal language from age six to fourteen… I multiply and divide in English… which became my mother language… also because I spoke English with my mother…
Italian remained my first language… but as time passed… and at my school (BBS)…in Egypt, they taught French as second language… and Arabic as third language…
I read my first Italian book when I moved to Italy… what I lacked was a basic grammatical knowledge of the Italian language… but that was overcome…
English was quickly becoming my surrounding’s language of choice…
Later on, when I was in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem… I noted that practically all the textbooks were in English…
My knowledge of English helped me at the kibbutz to understand and decipher Bob Dylan… LP records (now called vinyls) at that time lacked the lyrics in the back of the record… I ended up being an expert in deciphering Bob Dylan’s intonations…
After the kibbutz, as I spent more time in Haifa, where I developed my knowledge of Hebrew… while reading books and weekly magazines in English…
Life in the kibbutz was totally new to me, it was village life… but a different type of village… the children in the kibbutz all live in a dorm till the age of eighteen,… when they go to the army… They then move to the young single’s section… where they live either in single or dual occupancy apartments… till they get married and move to the married section…
Another difference between European village life and life in the kibbutz is the level of education of the kibbutznik (a person from a kibbutz)… The people who settled, and founded a kibbutz, were ideologists who made it a lifetime goal to found a Jewish state. .. Most of these members had one or more college degrees… very pleasant and interesting people. Other older members were liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp,.. and they had also very interesting stories to tell…
The younger members (my age) had all finished high school, and were very interested in world affaires.
One event which I remember… occurred in the mid sixties when a retired Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, visited South Vietnam… at the invitation of general Westmorland… Dayan went as a journalist… He ended his report with one question… If the USA asks Israel to send Israeli troops in Vietnam… would you go and fight… I remember the hours we spent discussing this hypothesis…
Years later I was reading David Ben Gurion’s (the father of the State of Israel) memoir… and there was a section where Ben Gurion was in Paris discussing France’s support of a Jewish state… He was staying on the top floor of a small hotel in Rue de Rivoli… In the room next door was another guest of the French government… Ben Gurion and this gentlemen spent hours discussing their mutual problrms… At the end of their discussion, the gentleman said to Ben Gurion… “If you run out of luck with the establishment of your Jewish state… I will give you a piece of Vietnam”… the gentleman was Ho Chi Minh.
That’s the job I found in Haifa… Elbit Computers was a start-up whose ambition was the design a commercial mini computer… by using DTL chip technology… Having zero experience in chip based design… my boss gave me a book on logic design to read… it was practically the first technical textbook in English I had to read… and understand… Since I left Egypt… all technical literature I had read were in Italian… with this book I managed getting back to technical English… actually I liked the subject… I found it very interesting…
As for the languages I used… it is in itself a story…
When I was born, the first language I learned was Italian… I still count in Italian… When I was four, my mother (at the advice of my great uncle Edmond) put me in an English kindergarten, called the Home-Craft House… at age six I went to the British Boys School and stayed in that school until I left Egypt…
English became my principal language from age six to fourteen… I multiply and divide in English… which became my mother language… also because I spoke English with my mother…
Italian remained my first language… but as time passed… and at my school (BBS)…in Egypt, they taught French as second language… and Arabic as third language…
I read my first Italian book when I moved to Italy… what I lacked was a basic grammatical knowledge of the Italian language… but that was overcome…
English was quickly becoming my surrounding’s language of choice…
Later on, when I was in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem… I noted that practically all the textbooks were in English…
My knowledge of English helped me at the kibbutz to understand and decipher Bob Dylan… LP records (now called vinyls) at that time lacked the lyrics in the back of the record… I ended up being an expert in deciphering Bob Dylan’s intonations…
After the kibbutz, as I spent more time in Haifa, where I developed my knowledge of Hebrew… while reading books and weekly magazines in English…
Life in the kibbutz was totally new to me, it was village life… but a different type of village… the children in the kibbutz all live in a dorm till the age of eighteen,… when they go to the army… They then move to the young single’s section… where they live either in single or dual occupancy apartments… till they get married and move to the married section…
Another difference between European village life and life in the kibbutz is the level of education of the kibbutznik (a person from a kibbutz)… The people who settled, and founded a kibbutz, were ideologists who made it a lifetime goal to found a Jewish state. .. Most of these members had one or more college degrees… very pleasant and interesting people. Other older members were liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp,.. and they had also very interesting stories to tell…
The younger members (my age) had all finished high school, and were very interested in world affaires.
One event which I remember… occurred in the mid sixties when a retired Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, visited South Vietnam… at the invitation of general Westmorland… Dayan went as a journalist… He ended his report with one question… If the USA asks Israel to send Israeli troops in Vietnam… would you go and fight… I remember the hours we spent discussing this hypothesis…
Years later I was reading David Ben Gurion’s (the father of the State of Israel) memoir… and there was a section where Ben Gurion was in Paris discussing France’s support of a Jewish state… He was staying on the top floor of a small hotel in Rue de Rivoli… In the room next door was another guest of the French government… Ben Gurion and this gentlemen spent hours discussing their mutual problrms… At the end of their discussion, the gentleman said to Ben Gurion… “If you run out of luck with the establishment of your Jewish state… I will give you a piece of Vietnam”… the gentleman was Ho Chi Minh.
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