"Tiling One's Way Back into the Mother Tongue"
Gregory Levey, The Forward, March 19, 2006

In the wake of Hamas's victory in the recent Palestinian elections and the growing threat of a nuclear Iran - to say nothing of Israel's own upcoming elections - it is amazing that anyone in Israel can think of anything beyond politics. Lately, however, a certain segment of the Israeli public has been very focused on something unlikely indeed: Scrabble.

The sixth annual Scrabble by the Sea Tournament, one of Israel's three national Scrabble competitions, was held recently at a large resort hotel on the Dead Sea. For the dozens of players who turned out for the event, Middle East strife gave way to "triple word scores," "double doubles" and words like kylix and zymurgy.

Almost unbelievably, Israel is home to the largest Scrabble club in the world - not largest per capita, or largest in the non-English speaking world, but actually the largest overall. This monster club, which is in Jerusalem, sees more people per week than the corresponding club in Manhattan. In addition to Jerusalem's club, Israel boasts 10 others, including another particularly large one in Tel Aviv.

"I play to keep up my English," said Pnina, a Canadian member of the Tel Aviv club, a few weeks before the tournament. "That's probably why a lot of people play. In this room there are a whole lot of editors, English teachers and people like that."

Israel is full of Anglophone immigrants - from places like Johannesburg, London and Brooklyn - and one hypothesis about why Scrabble is so popular in Israel is because this population is homesick for its native tongue. Although there were also a few native Israelis at the tournament, and a slew of older people originally from Europe, the vast majority of the competitors were native speakers of English.

Moments before starting a game early on in the tournament, Judy Montagu, who moved to Israel from the United Kingdom in 1966, suggested that perhaps Scrabble is a way for her to stay connected to her native tongue. Montagu, originally from Liverpool, is now an English teacher in Jerusalem. "Language changes, and every time I go back home, there are new phrases," she said. "It's hard to stay rooted in English, but I feel like I should.

"Sometimes I argue with my Israeli students about correct English, and eventually they convince me that they're right and I'm wrong. That's when I know that I've been away a long time, and yeah, maybe that's why I enjoy playing Scrabble."

Evan Cohen, director of the tournament and the top-ranked Scrabble player in Israel, smiled at hearing this but didn't quite seem to believe it.

"If that's why someone plays Scrabble," he said, "I don't know if they're playing for the right reason. Scrabble is simply not English. All you have to do is look at the words used and you can see that. It's more like mathematics - statistics and memorization. If you treat it just as English, then you'll never improve."

According to Cohen, the players in the top division have backgrounds in fields like math and computer science, while people like English teachers or writers tend to be in the bottom divisions. In fact, many of the top Scrabble players in the world barely know English at all, and some of the top players in Israel are not Anglophones. They just memorize pages and pages of English words.

"At the world championships in 2003," Cohen said, "both the winner and runner-up were Thais, and neither of them could even carry on a basic conversation in English."

Cohen, 37, came to Israel from South Africa when he was nine. A doctoral candidate in linguistics at Tel Aviv University, he has represented Israel at the world championships three times. Although he is equally fluent in Hebrew and English, when the issue of Hebrew Scrabble comes up, he says simply, "Forget it."

"Hebrew is not nearly as rich a language as English," he explained, "and even native-Israeli players prefer English Scrabble."

Cohen attributed Scrabble's popularity in Israel, in part, to the social nature of Israel's clubs.

"Perhaps because Israel is just a very social place," he said, "and because Scrabble is a very social game, Israeli Scrabble clubs are far friendlier than their counterparts overseas."

Jack Eichenbaum, the only non-Israeli participating in the tournament, took issue with this opinion. Eichenbaum, an urban geographer from Queens, N.Y., said, "Scrabble players everywhere are friendly. There's a real camaraderie wherever you go."

Eichenbaum happened to be visiting Israel when he heard about the tournament. He plays regularly in New York, where, he said, there is "a higher level of play and a more rigorous commitment to the rules."

As the tournament progressed, though, several of his competitors in the highest division started joking about chipping in to buy him a one-way ticket home. This outsider had pulled ahead in the standings and, it seemed, would come in first overall.

Just minutes before he played his final winning game, though, Eichenbaum seemed to be preoccupied with something besides Scrabble. Standing in the waiting area before the game began, he was talking with another player, a religious man originally from the United States now living in a West Bank settlement. Eichenbaum was listening as the other man described a recent Saturday when he was forced to break the Sabbath in order to get his rifle and join a search for some Palestinians who had apparently infiltrated the settlement.

Indeed, where Israel is concerned, politics seems to intrude on everything,even on something as seemingly benign as Scrabble. When the 2003 world championships were held in the largely Islamic country of Malaysia, for example,the Malaysian authorities announced that they would ban Israeli players from flying or exhibiting the Israeli flag during the tournament. A debate ensued within the Israeli Scrabble community, and in the end, the Israeli team decided to boycott the championships.

But this year by the Dead Sea, even while Israel found itself in one of the most politically turbulent times in its history, for a few days at least, the clicking of Scrabble tiles seemed to drown out the sound of chests being thumped.