Eli Chalouh: Multilingual and
Multinice
Fluent
in Arabic, Hebrew and English, Eli Chalouh, 23, moved
easily among the diverse communities to which his
languages gave him access. He spoke Arabic at home, of
course: he moved here with his family from Damascus,
Syria, when he was 14.
At his new job at the New York State Department of
Taxation and Finance, in the World Trade Center, he spoke
Arabic with his Egyptian colleagues, who got a kick out
of him. Mr. Chalouh was not Muslim; he was a Syrian Jew,
who learned Hebrew at the yeshiva he attended in
Brooklyn.
America was the country he wanted to wrap his future
around. He was always in a rush, determined to cram every
moment with English studies and other courses: he was so
disciplined that he allotted himself only 15 minutes of
television at night.
His efforts were beginning to pay off. He had just
graduated with near-perfect grades from Long Island
University, a member of the honor society and voted by
the faculty the most outstanding accounting student of
2001.
Industrious, yes, but enormously sunny and engaging,
as well. "Whatever you asked him he would do, and
whatever you wouldn't ask, he would volunteer to do,"
said a supervisor at work, Eddie Jaeger. "He was an
unbelievably nice kid."
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