Vodden lompen & oude metalen: alte sachen & ideas?

Door 't oog & 't oor v/d nachtegaal: innerlijke gewaarwordingen binnenin & rondom ons ~ que sera sera, what Will be, Will be as far as I 'know'!

A story Chana Hacohen told about herself at a party in the neighborhood about the way we are influenced by different words & their translations.
She had asked somebody what the verb lezaken means, because she kept hearing men inn the street shouting, "Al tezaken!" WHAT they were actually saying/calling out/shouting, of course, was "Alte zaken," "old things," which they buy & resell! This is a classic nostalgia figure of immigrant Jewish life, both here in Asia, in Europe & in America - the alte zakhen man, but only in Israel do people of my gene-ration still remember him, generally as an old Ashkenazi Jew. Jonathan Boyarin continues in his 'Palestine and Jewish history', "criticism at the borders of ethnography": the day after he told me this story I heard a young man in the streets of Jerusalem with exactly the same loud cry I'd
heard the day before, only now I understood it for the very first time: "Zakhe-e-e-n! Al-te zakhe-e-e-n!" And another man the next day ...
And I don't think they were Yiddish speakers either; the phrase removed from it's original language has taken on its own character in Hebrew ...
This marginal profession, then, has been maintained and been passed on, along with its characteristic announcement, to a totally different im-migrant ethnic group. [Ook dit is 'n universeel verschijnsel: like 'apartheid', 'barbaren', culturele demografische erfenissen all over the world ...]!
Our reference to a "different immigrant ethnic group" at the end of this passage suggests that I assumed, because I was then living and heard this call in a poor neighborhood of Jerusalem occupied largely by Moroccan Jews, that the men walked the streets in search of old things were themselves Moroccans. Eventually I realized, somewhat to my embarrassment, that these "immigrants" weren't Jews at all, but poor Palestinians.
The phrase alte zakhen had survived the cataclysmic history of Palestine in the past century, its phonics and intonation transformed as it
"migrated" from the lumpen class among East European Jews in Palestine as well as in Western Europe and North America to the lumpen class among Palestinians dispossessed and suffering under military occupation, but with it's meaning still recognizable to a Yiddish speaker. Perhaps indeed the alte zakhen collectors for an intermediate time had been Moroccan Jews, shortly after their arrival in the first years after the State of Israel was established. [In a nutshell zie je de evolutie aan je innerlijk oog & oor voorbijglijden: iets dergelijks gebeurt met woorden in
alle landen en streken, tijden & typische vertalingen van begrippen uit de ene taal/cultuur naar de andere. Tussen oerwoud & wereldsteden ...