Michael Chabon - Maps and Legends - Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

After many years, and during a time of relative peace between intifadas, I finally visited Israel, though not at Passover. I plunged deep into the history of the Jews and of my wife’s family (she was born there), meeting cousins and mythical figures and old comrades-in-arms of my wife’s father. My wife and I drove all over the place, from the Golan Heights to Eilat, sampling the food, viewing the cruel wonders of the desert and of the Romans, and marveling at the astonishing range of Jews on display. Like all Jews I was by nature and inclination an inveterate and passionate student of our typologies, but in Israel I felt like a lifelong birder of the austere tundra let loose in the Amazon and dazzled by its profusions. But I did not experience the stereotypical moment of endogamous rapture reported by so many Jewish visitors to Israel, the stunned encounter with a world peopled entirely by Jewish postmen, Jewish cops, Jewish cab drivers, Jewish junkies and punks, Jewish pedophiles and the Jewish prosecutors who sent them away to prisons guarded by Jewish screws. For one thing I saw Arabs everywhere, heard Arabic spoken in cafés and on the street and in the desert by Bedouins, visited vast cool mosques where pigeons wheeled high among the shadows and the arches. Every morning in Jerusalem we were awakened by the melismatic call of the muezzin. So all right, I’m perverse; it was the Arab side of Israel that I loved. Or rather I loved the imperfection of the joint between Jewish and Arab, the patches in the fabric where the reverse showed through. I loved it; but God knows I didn’t feel I had come home. I love France and England too, and as with those countries I consider my culture, my history, and the language I speak every day to be vitally bound up with Israel’s. When I left, I felt that I would like to visit again, and that I would continue to take an interest, even an intense interest, in the history and the look and the weather and the fate of the place. And then I would return to the theme park in my brain.

4.

It was soon after I returned from this trip to Israel that I first encountered a little book called Say It in Yiddish, edited by Beatrice and Uriel Weinrich. I got it new, in 1993, but the book was originally brought out in 1958. It was part of a series: the Dover “Say It” books: Say It in Swahili, Say It in Hindi, Say It in Serbo-Croatian. When I first came across Say It in Yiddish, on a shelf in a big chain store in Orange County, California, I couldn’t quite believe that it was real. There was only one copy of it, buried in the languages section at the bottom of the alphabet. It was like a book in a story, by Borges, unique, inexplicable, possibly a hoax. The first thing that really struck me about it was, paradoxically, its unremarkableness, the conventional terms with which Say It in Yiddish advertised itself on its cover. “No other PHRASE BOOK FOR TRAVELERS,” it claimed, “contains all these essential features.” It boasted of “Over 1,600 up-to-date practical entries” (up-to-date!), “easy pronunciation transcription,” and a “sturdy binding — pages will not fall out.”

Inside, Say It in Yiddish delivered admirably on all the bland promises made by the cover. Virtually every eventuality, calamity, chance, or circumstance, apart from the amorous, that could possibly befall the traveler was covered, under general rubrics like “Shopping,” “Barber Shop and Beauty Parlor,” “Appetizers,” “Difficulties,” with each of the over 1,600 up-to-date practical entries numbered, from 1, “yes,” to 1,611, “the zipper,” a tongue-twister Say It in Yiddish renders, in roman letters, as “BLITS-shleh-s’l.” There were words and phrases to get the traveler through a visit to the post office to buy stamps in Yiddish, and through a visit to the doctor to take care of that “krahmpf” (1,317) after one has eaten too much of the “LEH-ber mit TSIB-eh-less” (620) served at the cheap “res-taw-RAHN” (495) just down the “EH-veh-new” (197) from one’s “haw-TEL” (103).

One possible explanation of at least part of the absurd poignance of Say It in Yiddish presented itself: that its list of words and phrases was standard throughout the “Say It” series. Once one accepted the proposition of a modern Yiddish phrase book, Yiddish versions of such phrases as “Where can I get a social-security card?” and “Can you help me jack up the car?”, taken in the context of the book’s part of a uniform series, became more understandable.

But an examination of the specific examples chosen for inclusion under the various, presumably standard, rubrics revealed that the Weinreichs had indeed served as editors here, and considered their supposedly useful phrases with care, selecting, for example, to give Yiddish translations for the English names of the following foods, none of them very likely to be found under “Food” in the Swahili, Japanese, or Malay books in the series: stuffed cabbage, kreplach, blintzes, matzo, lox, corned beef, herring, kugel, tsimmis, and schav. The fact that most of these words did not seem to require much work to get them into Yiddish suggested that Say It in Yiddish had been edited with a particular kind of reader in mind, the reader who was traveling, or planned to travel, to a very particular kind of place, a place where one could expect to find both “ahn OON-tehr-bahn” (subway) and “geh-FIL-teh FISH.”

I could neither understand nor stop considering, stop wondering and dreaming about, the intended nature and purpose of the book. Was the original 1958 Dover edition simply the reprint of some earlier, less heartbreakingly implausible book? At what time in the history of the world had there been a place of the kind that the Weinreichs’ work implied, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees? A place where you could have rented a summer home from Yiddish speakers, gone to a Yiddish movie, gotten a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairstylist, a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shine boy, and then had your dental bridge repaired by a Yiddish-speaking dentist? If, as seemed likelier, the book first saw light in 1958, a full ten years after the founding of the country that turned its back once and for all on the Yiddish language, condemning it to watch the last of its native speakers die one by one in a headlong race for extinction with the twentieth century itself, then the tragic dimension of the joke loomed larger, and made the Weinreichs’ intention even harder to divine. It seemed an entirely futile effort on the part of its authors, a gesture of embittered hope, of valedictory daydreaming, of a utopian impulse turned cruel and ironic.

Say It in Yiddish laid out, with numerical precision, the outlines of a world, of a fantastic land in which it would behoove you to know how to say, in Yiddish,

250. What is the flight number?

1,372. I need something for a tourniquet.

1,379. Here is my identification.

254. Can I go by boat/ferry to ____?

The blank in the last of those phrases, impossible to fill in, tantalized me. Whither could I sail on that boat/ferry, in the solicitous company of Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, and from what shore?

I dreamed of at least two possible destinations. The first one was a modern independent state very closely analogous to the State of Israel — call it the State of Yisroel — a postwar Jewish homeland created during a time of moral emergency, located presumably, but not necessarily, in Palestine; it could have been in Alaska, or in Madagascar. Here, perhaps, that minority faction of the Zionist movement who favored the establishment of Yiddish as the national language of the Jews were able to prevail over its more numerous Hebraist opponents. There would be Yiddish color commentators for soccer games, Yiddish-speaking cash machines, Yiddish tags on the collars of dogs. Public debate, private discourse, joking and lamentation, all would be conducted not in a new-old, partly artificial language like Hebrew, a prefabricated skyscraper still under construction, with only the lowermost of its stories as yet inhabited by the generations, but in a tumbledown old palace capable in the smallest of its stones (the word “nu”) of expressing slyness, tenderness, derision, romance, disputation, hopefulness, skepticism, sorrow, a lascivious impulse, or the confirmation of one’s worst fears.