An Egyptian Novelist’s Passion For Hebrew

“It would have been more fitting for us to speak either Arabic or Turkish in this gathering today, especially given the common cultural heritage we share. There should have been someone present today to translate to Turkish. It is a shame really that we have to communicate in English.”
— Orhan Pamuk at the 2007 Cairo International Book Fair

One day when I was in my second year of college and my relatives had realized that I was enrolled in the Hebrew language section at the Faculty of Arts, my uncle asked, "When can you tell that you have mastered the Hebrew language so that it's as good as your English?"

I was baffled by the question simply because at that stage my Hebrew was far superior to my English, which I somehow found to be only natural. I was never good in English in the first place. I was not Americanized like my cousins were. I was a gloomy nerd, who wrote stories and was well-versed in the Arabic language. In fact, at the time and for years to follow, I hadn't had a single proper conversation in English with any foreign friend. My Hebrew was no doubt way better than my English, and my Arabic was the best of the three languages.

I stumbled upon the Hebrew language section at university by complete chance (as I mention in the article here). I initially wanted to study English, but my grades weren't good enough. The only other sections at Ain Shams University that enabled the study of a single language (rather than a bundle of them grouped under Eastern languages, European civilizations, etc.) were French and Hebrew. I had zero comprehension of French. In fact, I remember once scoring half a...