by Primo Levi
Nona—grandmother—Bimba was beautiful: she wore an ostrich-feather boa and was a baroness. Napoleon had made her and all her family barons, because they l’aviô prestaie ’d mañòd, had lent him money.
Barbarônín was tall, strong, and had radical ideas: he had escaped from Fossano to Turin and had had a lot of jobs. He had signed on at the Teatro Carignano as an extra in Don Carlos and had written to his family to come to the premiere. Uncle Natàn and Aunt Allegra came and sat in the gallery. When the curtain rose and my aunt saw her son fully armed as a Philistine, she shouted as loudly as she could, “Rônín, co’ t fai! Posa côl sàber!” “Aronne, what are you doing! Put down that dagger!”
Barbamiclín was a simpleton; in Acqui he was respected and protected, because the simple are children of God and thou shalt not call them “fool.” But they called him Piantabibini (Turkey Planter), from the time when a rashàn (a cruel person) had made fun of him by making him believe that turkeys (bibini) can be sowed like peach trees: you plant their feathers in the furrows, and they grow on the branches. Moreover, the turkey had an oddly important place in this witty, gentle, and tidy family world: maybe because, being conceited, clumsy, and quick-tempered, it expresses the opposite qualities and easily becomes a laughingstock; or maybe, more simply, because during Passover, at its expense, a celebrated semi-ritual quaiëtta ’d pitô (turkey meatball) was made. For example, Uncle Pacifico raised a turkey hen and was very attached to her. Opposite him lived Signor Lattes, who was a musician. The turkey clucked and disturbed Signor Lattes; he asked Uncle Pacifico to keep his turkey quiet. The uncle answered, “Sarà fàita la soâ commission. Sôra pita, c’a staga ciútô.” “Your request will be carried out. Signora turkey, be quiet.”
Uncle Gabriele was a rabbi and so was known as Barba Morénô, Uncle Our Teacher. Old and almost blind, he was returning on foot, under the burning sun, from Verzuolo to Saluzzo. He saw a cart coming, stopped it, and asked for a ride; but then, speaking to the driver, he slowly realized that it was a funeral cart, carrying a dead Christian woman to the cemetery, which was an abomination, because, as it is written in Ezekiel 44:25, a priest who touches a dead man, or even merely enters a room where a dead man is lying, is contaminated and impure for seven days. He jumped up and cried, “I eu viagià côn ’na pegartà! Viturín fermé!” “I’ve traveled with a dead woman! Stop, driver!”
Gnôr Grassiadiô and Gnôr Côlômbô were two friendly enemies who, the story goes, since time immemorial had lived across from each other, on two sides of a narrow street in Moncalvo. Gnôr Grassiadiô was a Mason and very rich: he was a little ashamed of being Jewish and had married a gôià, that is, a Christian, with long blond hair, down to the ground, who was unfaithful. This gôià, although she was a gôià, was called Magna Ausilia, which indicates a certain degree of acceptance on the part of those who came later; she was the daughter of a sea captain, who had given Gnôr Grassiadiô a large, multicolored parrot that came from Guyana and said in Latin, “Know thyself.” Gnôr Côlômbô was poor and a follower of Mazzini: when the parrot arrived, he bought himself a mangy crow and taught it to speak. When the parrot said, “Nosce te ipsum,” the crow answered, “Fate furb”: “Wise up.”
But with regard to Uncle Gabriele’s pegartà, Gnôr Grassiadiô’s gôià, Nona Bimba’s mañòd, and the havertà we’ll talk about below, an explanation is indispensable. Havertà is a mangled Hebrew word, both in form and in sense, and potently meaningful. Properly, it’s a random feminine form of havèr = compagno (“companion”) and means “servant,” but it contains the secondary idea of a woman of low birth, and of different beliefs and customs, who is forced to lodge under our roof. The havertà is by nature unclean and ill bred, and by definition maliciously curious about the habits and the conversations of the masters of the house, who are thus obliged to use in her presence a special vocabulary, which obviously includes the term havertà itself, in addition to the ones cited above. This vocabulary has now nearly disappeared; a couple of generations back, it was still flourishing, with hundreds of words and locutions, consisting for the most part of Hebrew roots with Piedmontese endings and inflections. Even a cursory study reveals its dissembling and covert function, like an underworld slang, meant to be employed when speaking of the gôjím in the presence of the gôjím, and also as a way of responding boldly, with incomprehensible insults and curses, to the regime of seclusion and oppression that they had established.
Its historical interest is small, because it was never spoken by more than a few thousand people, but its human interest is great, like that of all fluid border languages. It has a marvelous comic force, arising from the contrast between the fabric of the speech, which is the rough, sober, and laconic Piedmontese dialect, never written except on a bet, and the Hebrew framework, plucked from the remote language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geologic, smoothed by the millennia like a riverbed by the glaciers. But this contrast mirrors another, that essential conflict of the Jews of the Diaspora, scattered among “the peoples” (the gôjím, that is), and stretched between divine vocation and the daily misery of exile; and still another, more general, and innate in the human condition, for man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, of divine breath and dust. The Hebrew people, after the dispersal, lived this conflict long and painfully, and drew from it not only its wisdom but its laughter, which is missing from the Bible and the Prophets. Yiddish is pervaded by it, and, within modest limits, so was the strange speech of our fathers in this land, which I want to recall here before it disappears: a skeptical, good-natured speech that might upon superficial examination appear blasphemous, but in fact has a richly affectionate and decorous intimacy with God, Nôssignôr, Adonai Eloénô, Cadòss Barôkhú.
That it is rooted in humiliation is evident: it lacks, for example, as being of no use, terms for “sun,” “man,” “day,” “city,” while it does present terms for “night,” “hide,” “pennies,” “prison,” “dream” (the last used almost exclusively in the expression bahalòm, “in your dreams,” added sarcastically to a statement so that one’s companion, and only he, understands it as its opposite), “steal,” “hang,” and so on; further, there exist a good number of pejoratives, sometimes used to judge people but more typically employed, for example, between wife and husband pausing at the counter of a Christian shopkeeper and undecided on their purchase. We’ll mention “’n saròd,” the royal plural, no longer understood as such, of the Hebrew tzarà, “misfortune,” and used to describe goods or a person of little value, which also has the charming diminutive sarôdín. Nor would I want the fierce nexus “saròd e senssa mañòd” to be forgotten, which is an expression used by the marriage broker in the case of girls who are ugly and have no dowry; or hasirúd, an abstract collective from hasír, “pig,” and so practically equivalent to “filth, piggishness.” Note that the (French) u sound doesn’t exist in Hebrew; rather, there is the ending “út” (with the Italian u), which is used to coin abstract terms (for example, malkhút, “kingdom,” from mélekh, “king”) but lacks the strongly negative connotation that it had in the dialect use. Another typical and obvious use of these and other words was in the shop, by the owner and his assistants against the customers: in Piedmont in the last century the fabric business was often in Jewish hands, and a specialized subjargon arose that, handed down by salesclerks who became in turn owners, and were not necessarily Jewish, spread to many shops of that type and is alive today, spoken by people who are amazed when they happen to find out that they are using Jewish words. For example, someone might still use the expression “’na vesta a kiním,” to indicate a polka-dotted dress; now, kiním are lice, the third of the ten plagues of Egypt, enumerated and sung in the ritual of Passover.
Then, there is a modest assortment of somewhat improper words, which can be used not only in their literal sense in front of children but also in place of insults: in that case, compared with the corresponding Italian or Piedmontese terms, they offer the advantage, apart from the
one previously mentioned of not being understood, of relieving the heart without flaying the mouth.
A few terms that allude to things pertaining to the Catholic faith are surely more interesting to the scholar of usage. In this case the original, Hebrew form is much more profoundly corrupted, and for two reasons: in the first place, secrecy was strictly necessary, because comprehension of such words on the part of Gentiles could have led to the dangerous accusation of sacrilege; in the second place, the mangling had the precise purpose of denying, of obliterating, the magical-sacred content of the word, hence eliminating any supernatural quality. For the same reason, in all languages the Devil is designated by names that have an allusive and euphemistic character, enabling the speaker to refer to him without uttering his name. The Church (Catholic) was called tônevà, a word whose origin I have not managed to reconstruct, and which probably only sounds like Hebrew; while the synagogue, with proud modesty, is called simply scóla, or “school,” the place where one learns and is educated, and, in parallel, the rabbi is designated not by the proper term “rabbi” or rabbénu (“our rabbi”) but as Morénô (our teacher) or Khakhàm (the Wise Man). At scóla, in fact, one is not wounded by the hateful Khaltrúm of the Gentiles: Khaltrúm, or Khantrúm, is the ritual and the religiosity of Catholicism, which is intolerable because it’s polytheistic and, above all, teeming with images (“You shall have no other gods before me; you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness . . . and you shall not bow down to them,” Exodus 20:3), and hence idolatrous. The origin of this term, which is full of loathing, is also obscure, and almost certainly not Hebrew; but in other Jewish-Italian dialects there exists the adjective khalto, precisely in the sense of ostentatiously pious, and used principally to describe the Christian worshipper of images.
A-issà is the Madonna (it means simply “the woman”). Completely—and predictably—cryptic and indecipherable is the term “Odò,” which one used, when it really couldn’t be helped, to refer to Christ, lowering one’s voice and looking around circumspectly: it’s as well to mention Christ as infrequently as possible, because the myth of the Deicide People dies hard.
Numerous other terms were taken word for word from the liturgy and the sacred books, which Jews born in the last century read more or less fluently in the original Hebrew, and often largely understood; but in colloquial usage they tended to distort or arbitrarily extend the words’ semantic reach. From the root shafokh, which means “pour out” and appears in Psalm 79 (“Pour out your anger over the peoples who do not recognize you, and over the kingdoms that do not call on your name”), our ancient mothers had taken the domestic expression fé sefòkh, “make sefòkh,” as a delicate description of baby vomit. From rúakh, plural rukhòd, which means “breath,” an illustrious word that can be read in the marvelous mysterious second verse of Genesis (“The wind of the Lord breathed over the face of the waters”), came tiré ’n rúakh, “a wind is blowing,” in its various physiological meanings: here one recognizes the Chosen People’s Biblical familiarity with their Creator. Handed down as an example of a practical application was Aunt Regina’s saying, as she sat with Uncle Davide in the Caffè Fiorio on Via Po, “Davidín, bat la cana, c’as sentô nèn le rôkhòd!” (“David, beat your cane so people won’t hear you”), which attests to a conjugal relationship of affectionate intimacy. As for the cane, by the way, it was at that time a symbol of social status, as today traveling first class on the train might be: my father, for example, had two, a bamboo one for weekdays, and the other of malacca, with a silver-plated handle, for Sunday. He didn’t use the cane for support (he didn’t need it); rather, he would twirl it jauntily in the air, to keep insolent dogs out of his path—like a scepter, in other words, to distinguish him from the common people.
Berakhà is the blessing: a pious Jew is enjoined to utter it more than a hundred times a day, and he does so with profound joy, thus maintaining the age-old dialogue with the Eternal, who in every berakhà is praised and thanked for his gifts. Nonô Leônìn, my great-grandfather, who lived in Casale Monferrato, had flat feet; there was a cobblestone street in front of his house, and walking on it was painful. One morning he came out of the house and found the street paved, and he exclaimed from the bottom of his heart, “’N abrakhà a côi gôím c’a l’an fàit i lòsi!” “A blessing on those infidels who made the paving stones.” The curious pair medà meshônà was used as a curse: literally, “strange death,” but in effect a calque of the Piedmontese assidènt. Also attributed to Nonô Leônìn is the inexplicable imprecation “C’ai takèissa ’na medà meshônà fàita a paraqua,” “May he suffer a stroke in the shape of an umbrella.”
I couldn’t leave out Barbaricô, who was closer in time and space, being almost (by a single generation) my uncle in the restricted meaning of the term. I have a personal memory of him, and so it’s distinct and complex, not figé dans un’attitude, like that of the mythical characters I’ve recalled up to now. The simile of the inert gasses with which these pages began fits Barbaricô perfectly.
He studied medicine and became a good doctor, but he didn’t like the world. That is, he liked men and, especially, women, meadows, the sky, but not labor, the rattling of carts, the intrigues of a career, the struggle for daily bread, obligations, schedules, and deadlines: nothing, in other words, about the frenzied character of life in the city of Casale Monferrato in 1890. He would have liked to escape, but he was too lazy to do that. His friends and a woman who loved him, and whom he tolerated with distracted kindness, persuaded him to compete for the post of doctor on a transatlantic liner; he won the competition easily, made a single voyage from Genoa to New York, and on his return to Genoa quit, because in America “a j’era trop bôrdél,” there was too much noise.
After that he took up residence in Turin. He had several women, who all wanted to redeem and marry him, yet he considered not only marriage but a well-equipped office and the regular practice of his profession too demanding. Around 1930 he was a timid, bent, and shabby old man, frighteningly myopic; he lived with a fat, vulgar gôià, from whom he occasionally and halfheartedly tried to free himself, and whom time and again he called ’na sôtià, ’na hamortà, ’na gran beemà (a lunatic, an ass, a big beast), but without animosity, and in fact with a streak of inexplicable tenderness. This gôià “a vôría fiña félô samdé,” even wanted him to be baptized (literally, “destroyed”), something that he always refused, not out of religious conviction but out of indifference and a lack of initiative.
Barbaricô had no fewer than twelve brothers and sisters, who referred to his companion by the ironic and cruel name Magna Môrfina: ironic because the woman, poor thing, as a gôià, and childless, could not be a magna except in a very limited sense, and in fact the name was to be understood as its opposite, non-magna, one excluded and cut off from the family; cruel because it contained an allusion that was probably false, and certainly harsh, to a particular use she made of Barbaricô’s prescription pad.
The two lived in a dirty, disorderly garret in Borgo Vanchiglia. My uncle was an excellent doctor, full of human wisdom and diagnostic insight, but he lay on his bed all day reading books and old newspapers: he was an attentive reader, mindful, eclectic, and tireless, although his myopia forced him to hold the printed page the width of three fingers from his spectacles, which were as thick as the bottom of a water glass. He got up only when a client sent for him, which happened often, because he almost never asked to be paid; his patients were poor people of the neighborhood, from whom he accepted in exchange half a dozen eggs, or greens from the garden, or maybe a pair of worn-out shoes. He went to his patients on foot, because he didn’t have money for the tram; when, in the fog of his myopia, he glimpsed a girl on the street, he would approach and, to her surprise, examine her carefully, moving around her at a distance of a handsbreadth. He ate almost nothing, and more generally he had no wants; he was over ninety when he died, discreetly and with dignity.
Similar to Barbaricô in her reje
ction of the world was Nona Fina, one of four sisters who were all called Fina: this peculiarity was due to the fact that the four girls had been sent successively to the same wet nurse, in Bra, who was called Delfina, and who gave the name to all of her nurslings. Nona Fina lived in Carmagnola, in lodgings on the second floor, and did magnificent crochet work. At sixty-eight she had a slight illness, a caôdaña, as ladies used to have then, and today, mysteriously, no longer do: from that moment, for the next twenty years, and that is until her death, she never left her room; frail and pallid, she waved to the people coming out of scòla on Saturdays from a balcony crowded with geraniums. But she must have been very different in her youth, if what is told of her is true: that when her husband brought home as a guest the learned and illustrious Rabbi of Moncalvo, she fed him, without his knowledge, ’na côtlëtta ’d hasír, a pork chop, because there was nothing else in the pantry. Her brother Barbaraflín (Raffaele) was known before his promotion to Barba as ’l fieul’d Môisé’d Celín, the son of Môisé’d Celín. When he was already at a mature age and very wealthy because of the mañòd he had earned as a military supplier, he fell in love with a beautiful Dolce Valabrega di Gàssino; he didn’t dare to declare it, but wrote her love letters that he didn’t send, and passionate responses to himself.