Maps and Legends

by Michael Chabon

  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.

  The implications of this change on the official language of the “Jewish homeland,” a change which, depending on your view of human character and its underpinnings, was either minor or fundamental, were difficult to sort out. I couldn’t help thinking that such a nation, speaking its essentially European tongue, would, in the Middle East, stick out among its neighbors to an even greater degree than Israel does now. But would the Jews of a Mediterranean Yisroel be impugned and admired for having the same kind of character that Israelis, rightly or wrongly, are widely taken to have, the classic sabra personality: rude, scrappy, loud, tough, secular, hardheaded, cagey, pushy? Was it living in a near-permanent state of war, or was it the Hebrew language, or something else, that had made Israeli humor so dark, so barbed, so cynical, so untranslatable? Perhaps this Yìsroel, like its cognate in our own world, had the potential to seem a frightening, even a harrowing place, as the following sequence from the section on “Difficulties” seemed to imply:

  109. What is the matter here?

  110. What am I to do?

  112. They are bothering me.

  113. Go away.

  114. I will call a policeman.

  In an essay that I wrote and eventually published in Civilization magazine—and from which I am here liberally quoting—I tried to imagine one possible Yìsroel: the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I had once read, the Roosevelt administration had proposed such a plan.) The resulting country would be a far different place than Israel. It would be a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars, and one long, glorious day of summer. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and almonds, in such a place. This Yisroel—or maybe it would be called Alyeska—I imagined at the time as a kind of Jewish Sweden, social-democratic, resource rich, prosperous, organizationally and temperamentally far more akin to its immediate neighbor, Canada, than to its more freewheeling benefactor far to the south. Perhaps, indeed, there might have been some conflict, in the years since independence, between the United States and Alyeska.

  This country I thought of was in the nature of a wistful fantasyland, a toy theater with miniature sets and furnishings to arrange and rearrange, painted backdrops on which the gleaming lineaments of a snowy Jewish Onhava could be glimpsed, all its grief concealed behind the scrim, hidden in the machinery of the loft, sealed up beneath trapdoors in the floorboards. But there was another destination to which the Weinreichs beckoned, unwittingly but in all the detail that Dover’s “Say It” series required: home, to the “old country.” To Europe.

  In this Europe the millions of Jews who were never killed would have produced grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. The countryside would retain large pockets of country people whose first language was still Yiddish, and in the cities one could find many more for whom Yiddish would be the language of kitchen and family, of theater and poetry and scholarship. A surprisingly large number of these people would be my relations. I would be able to go visit them, the way Irish Americans I knew were always visiting second and third cousins in Galway or Cork, sleeping in their strange beds, eating their strange food, and looking just like them. Imagine. Perhaps one of my cousins might take me to visit the house where my father’s mother was born, or to the school in Vilna that my grandfather’s grandfather attended with the boy Abraham Cahan. For my relatives, though they would doubtless know at least some English, I would want to trot out a few appropriate Yiddish phrases, more than anything as a way of reestablishing the tenuous connection between us; in this world Yiddish would not be, as it is in ours, a tin can with no tin can on the other end of the string. Here, though I would be able to get by without them, I would be glad to have the Weinreichs along. Who knows but that visiting some remote Polish backwater I might be compelled to visit a dentist to whom I would want to cry out, having found the appropriate number (1,447), “eer TOOT meer VAY!”

  What would this Europe be like, I wondered, with its 25, 30, or 35 million Jews? Would they be tolerated, despised, ignored by, or merely indistinguishable from their fellow modern Europeans? What would the world be like, never having felt the need to create an Israel, that hard bit of grit in the socket that hinges Africa to Asia?

  What, I wondered in the conclusion of my original essay, did it mean to originate from a place, from a world, from a culture that no longer existed, from a language that might die in my generation? What phrases would I need to know in order to speak to those millions of unborn phantoms to whom I belonged?

  Just what was I supposed to do with this book?

  5.

  Not long after the essay on Say It in Yiddish was published in Civilization, I received a puckish email from my uncle Stan—the late Stanley Werbow, my grandmother’s brother, a noted scholar of German and an American-born native speaker of Yiddish—congratulating me on having accomplished the trick, never especially difficult, of outraging Yiddishists.

  The offended parties belonged to an Internet listserv called Mendele, which provides an electronic forum for a freewheeling discussion—its tone ranging from academic to informal, from humorous to dry as dust—of Yiddish and Yiddish culture, and to which my uncle Stan was himself a subscriber.

  The Yiddish language evolved over the course of the thousand years following the migration of Jews into Western Europe and up to 1939, at which date its literature ranked among the glories of world heritage. About half of its approximately 11 million speakers were murdered during the Holocaust, with the rest dispersed, assimilated into other languages, or passed on, without passing on Yiddish. It continues to be spoken today as a home language by a far smaller if indeterminate number of older people and ultraorthodox Jews, and as a second language by scholars, students, and those devotees, like many of the subscribers to Mendele, who have made learning and preserving it their passionate pastime.

  It turned out, when I took Uncle Stan up on his tip, that some of the Mendelyaners, as the listserv’s members style themselves, were angry because of my essay, to which they had first been alerted by the following post:

  Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997

  Subject: Weinreich’s phrase book

  I should like to alert the readers of this list to a delightfully humorous essay regarding Urie
l and Beatrice Weinreich’s little paperback phrase book Say It in Yiddish in the current (June–July 1997) issue of Civilization [The Magazine of The Library of Congress]. The essay is entitled “Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts” and is subtitled “A Yiddish phrase book is an absurd, poignant artifact of a country that never was.” The writer, Michael Chabon, finds, in the pages of the phrase book, detailed directions—buying plane tickets, visiting the dentist, getting a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairdresser or a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shineboy—in a country that never existed. The charming illustrations by Ben Katchor …

  This initial post was followed two days later by:

  Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997

  Subject: Weinreich’s phrase book

  I have to take issue with the note … regarding an article in the magazine Civilization about the above book. I haven’t read the article (nor do I intend to, based on [the previous] review), but I find reference to Ashkenaz as “a country that never was” quite offensive and not “delightfully humorous” at all.…The author of this piece should be excoriated rather than praised for this article, and placed in the same kheyrem as the rest of those who think Yiddish is dead.

  To be excoriated, by the way, literally means “to have one’s skin removed”; it’s the heavy-duty version of exfoliated. Soon afterward, another angry Yiddishist came after me brandishing his loofa of outrage:

  Listen up friend Chabon.* A number of us have gotten together and created a dictionary of chemistry, in Yiddish!! (I hope it will come out in a short time) … And who needs it …?? WE need it because it is our Yiddish CULTURE … for the same reason the Guide for Travelers is needed … throughout the world.…

  The whole tsimmes went on more or less in this fashion, with some Mendelanyers writing to defend what I had written, and with the argument on the other side boiling down in the end mostly to this:

  Of course, no one can fault him for how he feels about the issue, but it seems to me that this feeling stems at least in part from his sharing the popular but quite inaccurate opinion that Yiddish has already entered the world of Latin, Sanskrit, and Gothic.

  Of course, this misses the point completely. It is not the apparent “deadness” of its language, however accurate or inaccurate such an impression may be, that makes Say It in Yiddish such a wondrous, provocative, sad, and funny book. Even if Yiddish is taken to be alive and well, Say It in Yiddish still proposes a world that never was and might have been, and makes it all feel absurdly and beautifully ordinary. But though I wrote to the membership and tried to explain myself, I had no success in diminishing the rage of Mendelyaners such as the one who declared, finally:

  The “humorous” article in Civilization was not funny, but ridiculous. No, an ignorant insult to the World of Yiddish. The author of that article has already apologized to B. Weinreich.

  In fact I had, after the article was published, received a very unhappy letter from Mrs. Weinreich, the widow of Uriel, who died in 1967. She viewed my essay as disrespectful and mocking not only of her late husband, who as I now learned had at his untimely death been regarded as the great young hope of Yiddish scholarship in America, but of the Yiddish language itself. And so I had written her to apologize, not for anything I said in the essay, but for any unintended appearance of mockery there might have been, and for having hurt her feelings. To this I received a not-at-all mollified reply to my reply.

  Back in 1991, the reviewer of my first story collection in the New York Times Book Review criticized me for being, among a number of other things, essentially too much of a nice Jewish boy. Too polite, she lamented. Too respectful of my elders. “Mr. Chabon’s parents,” said the reviewer, Elizabeth Benedict, “may not appreciate my holding up Philip Roth as an example to their son, but Mr. Roth offers crucial lessons to this … young writer, who is so evidently eager to please … Don’t worry so much about being nice.” I supposed, at the time, that the Times reviewer had a point; and since then, I have encountered nothing that would persuade me otherwise, or that would enable me, however hard I might try, to be anything else. And as a nice Jewish boy, I experienced two competing reactions to this tsimmes over Say It in Yiddish, both of them typical if not definitive, to my mind, of my lamentable species.

  On the one hand, I was, as I wrote to Mrs. Weinreich, deeply sorry. I had never been in hot water before because of something I wrote, and I found that I did not enjoy the sensation. As Elizabeth Benedict suggested, I wanted people to like me. And over and above every other kind of people whom I wanted to like me were nice old Jewish ladies like Beatrice Weinreich. Even stronger than my regret was my sense of embarrassment. Many of my Mendele critics had taken the time to “hock me a tchainik” about my ignorance of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit, and while I freely confessed to this ignorance, it is one thing to admit something and another to have it thrown in your face. The embarrassing fact was that I had never heard of Uriel Weinreich, and the reverence in which he was evidently held persuaded me that I ought to have. I felt my ignorance, and was ashamed.

  My second typical nice-Jewish-boy reaction was—well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

  Some time after the tsimmes cooled, Janet Hadda, a professor of Yiddish lit at UCLA and a practicing psychoanalyst, wrote a series of articles and papers in which she tried to determine just what it was about my essay that had made some people so angry. Hadda claimed that the lovers of Yiddish were in mourning over their murdered language, and hence living in denial, a stage from which, as we all know, it is but one short step to anger. there may or may not be merit to Hadda’s argument; I would prefer to leave it to the analysts and analysands to duke it out for themselves, if they care to. I was more taken by another of Hadda’s claims, namely her postulating beyond questions of death and denial a kind of survival of Yiddishkeit in the imagination of my generation of American Jewish writers, in our return to Ashkenazic and Yiddish themes and subject matter, in our evocation, perhaps half-unconscious, of the deep echoes of the mother tongue of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Hadda describes us as “born into an interrupted culture” and “try[ing] to compensate for the loss.”

  The phenomenon of young writers turning to the culture of their parents for exploration is anything but rare. What is unusual, if not unique, about the culture of Ashkenaz† is that it can no longer be found today except in the memories of a very few survivors and in the imaginations of artists [italics mine].

  Another phenomenon that is far from rare, of course, is that of a Jew—hell, of any human being—longing for a home that feels irretrievable yet never ceases, age after age, to beckon. Perhaps one explanation for the improbably long survival of Judaism is the fitness of one of its central images—the unending loss of Jerusalem—to our innate human talent for nostalgia, to the aetataureate delusion, our false but certain collective human memory of a Golden Age, a time when doors had no locks and a man’s word was his bond and giants walked the earth. You find an expression of the same sense of irrecoverable loss in the “Intimations of Immortality,” where the part of Jerusalem is played by Childhood, a structure that in Wordsworthian retrospect appears to have been built, like the Golden City, nearer somehow to the heart of the mystery of things. And this is where, for me, genre fiction comes into the picture. Because when you are talking, like Hadda, about lands that can be found only in the imagination, you are really speaking my language—my mamaloshen.

  * This post is a literal translation, by its author, of the Yiddish original; in Yiddish the word chaver (lit., “friend”), when used as a form of address, has a number of possible shades of meaning, among them, as here, “enemy,” or “dickhead.”

  † By Ashkenaz, Hadda means an actual geographical region—the lands of northern European Jewry—as much as a culture and a state of mind.

  6.

  I was born the first time in Georgetown University Hospital, in 1963, and the second time ten years later, in the opening pages of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In this latter infancy t
he heaven that lay about me was the work of Conan Doyle, Ray Bradbury, Philip José Farmer, Jack Vance. Fantasy and science fiction, then horror and hard-boiled mystery; my passion and my ambition as a reader and a writer were forged in the smithy of genre fiction.

  As a young man, an English major, and a regular participant in undergraduate fiction-writing workshops, I was taught—or perhaps in fairness it would be more accurate to say I learned—that science fiction was not serious fiction, that a writer of mystery novels might be loved but not revered, that if I meant to get serious about the art of fiction I might set a novel in Pittsburgh but never on Pluto. The Long Goodbye could be parsed by the literary critic for a class on Masculine Anxiety in the Postwar American Novel, but it was unlikely to appear on the syllabus of a general twentieth-century American literature class alongside Absalom, Absalom and the stories of Flannery O’Connor.

  There were exceptions, writers whose work drew overtly on sources in genre fiction and yet was taken seriously by critics, scholars, and general readers. They had names like Pynchon, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Nabokov, and their writing was often described as “transgressive,” as if choosing a detective hero or an interplanetary setting were not merely ill-advised if you hoped to make literature but violated an outright taboo. A detective novelist or a horror writer who made claims to artistry sat in the same chair at the table of literature as did a transvestite cousin at a family Thanksgiving. He was something to be allowed for, indulged, pardoned, excused, his fabulous hat studiously ignored.