Some respect for the dead

Today, Sept. 21, is my father's 8th yahrzeit. I'm collecting a few pictures of him which I will take with me when going to visit my mother in hospital. We'll sit and reminisce about him. Nachum (Normi) Rimon was a very nice guy, a good father, had a wonderful sense of humor, and is partly responsible for my mixed-up American-Canadian-nondescript accent. My mother says "envelope", pronouncing the en as in "entertain"; my father used to say "onvelope", pronouncing the en like in French, as in "en route". When asked a question calling for his opinion, my father often began with the preamble "Well, I'll tell ya…, " Only on my recent visits to Canada, upon hearing my dad's sister use the same expression, did it occur to me that it's a Canadian thing. (What say you guys – is it?)

At bedtime, my mother used to sit beside me and read to me from A.A. Milne, Anna Sewell, Mother Goose, Golden Books, and many more. My mother, a stage and film actress, has excellent diction and delivery that made the stories all the more compelling. My father used to sit beside me at bedtime and answer my questions about Life, the Universe and Everything. He didn't have all the answers, of course; but he always encouraged me to ask, to question, to apply critical thinking. Some would say, to criticize :-)

Ever since my only sister, Evelyn Lucy Rimon, died in a car accident (February 1984), I've been a compulsive reader of car accident reports. Perhaps to remind myself that what happened to my sister, to my family, is not at all unusual and in fact happens every day to someone, somewhere. My sister died in Van Nuys, CA -- where she was living at the time -- on her way back from the graveyard shift at Something Reservations where she worked as shift supervisor. Some stupid moron (pardon the language, I'm still mad at him) in a truck either fell asleep at the wheel or was drunk, swerved out of his lane and crashed into her car head on. As my dad used to say by way of slight comfort, the poor kid probably never knew what hit her.
I don't have the obituary handy, but I do recall the Jerusalem Post managed to make a mistake in it. And I was reminded of this over my breakfast coffee, as I scanned the News in Brief section on page 3, as is my wont, and saw the following, under "Two dead in road accidents":
"In the early morning, one of two young men seriously injured in a three-car traffic accident on the Ayalon highway, near the JNF interchange, died from his injuries."
Excuse me. Ayalon does not have a JNF interchange. It has a Keren Kayemet interchange. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_20_(Israel). Yes, I know KKL translates as JNF. Still, this is not what the interchange is called or known as.
This might seem trivial to most readers. But not to me. Not as a translator, not as an editor, and certainly not as someone who has lost her sister in a car crash. I want the facts to be recorded accurately. Go do me something.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

My condolences on your dad's yartzeit. I'm putting it all together now: Love of language + critical bent = [ta-DAH] translator!

What I don't get is how the J-Post ran an obit of someone living in CA. All the best,

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