The South Wing

For four years, I traveled three hours every day on a Yiddish-speaking bus from a Hebrew-speaking house to an English-speaking high school in New York City. It was wonderful - the seats were thick, the leather comfortably torn, and the air conditioning cold, cold, cold. From the bus I could look out the window and see anxious commuters, unkempt forests, and downtown Manhattan.

Inside was a different world. Most of the passengers were Chasidic, members of the relatively new Jewish sect - only three or so centuries old - that emphasized an emotional connection with God. The bus was separated between men and women, a thick curtain in between. The women would sit, reading the Psalms quietly, insistently. The men would stand and pray, rocking back and forth with the moving bus and from their almost Pentacostal effort to let the spirit flow through them. I read Bernard Malamud and Ralph Ellison, New York English writers, while the sound of the shtetl - Yiddish, a blend of German and Polish and Russian and Biblical Hebrew, as well as English - all the languages which had ever passed through them moved around me.

I grew up speaking Hebrew rather than Yiddish. Hebrew is the language in which strangers speak to me on the streets of Chicago and New York and even Oklahoma City. It is the language in which I talk to my parents and tell certain stories, certain jokes. Some are surprised when I switch from language to language in the space of a phone call or even less. I’m not. For me, the gap between Hebrew and English is small. It was my first language, and it still feels that way, even now, when my Hebrew is stiff, my grammar iffy, my accent imperfect. It remains to me like an unlit home after a time away, where even the shadows can be a comfort.

But it is more than that, I think. Hebrew is, like New York English, an impeccably modern language. Its roots are old, but it was re-made by people whose names we know, whose stories we tell, whose fears we can still touch.

***

Walking in New York with Arabs and Africans, blacks and whites, Asians and Latinos, the Hebrew I grew up with feels close and contemporary. It is Yiddish, the language of the bus, the language that took me from home to school, that feels irrevocably foreign.

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If the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish confuses you, make this your legend. Yiddish is the language of the mother who sends her 16-year-old son inside the house so he won’t even try to stop the men from beating her, and maybe more. Hebrew is the language of a girl so tough she can kill you with or without the sub-machine gun she carries. Yiddish is a language so weak even its slurs are almost funny. Its word for gays isn’t the harsh faggot, but the almost charming faigele, a little singing bird. Hebrew is a language with which you can kill homophobes. Yiddish is the language of those inside the camps, too weak to resist. Hebrew is the language of those who made a nation. There were exceptions, yes. Those who escaped from Treblinka spoke Yiddish as did those who made the Warsaw Ghetto an orgy of fire and death and destruction, one more sacrifice in blood to a catatonic God. But if their voices were in Yiddish, their bullets spoke Hebrew, the language of those who insist on fighting and dying, upright.

Hebrew is the language of immigrants who refuse to accept a particular fate, and instead go on boats to a land far away with old myths ringing in their heads. It is like the language of those who went from ports in Russia and Ireland, Poland and London, with only the word America alligator ii the mutation movie download to guide them, by which they really meant New York.

Sometimes, when I speak to friends who come to this city, who come to New York for a day or a lifetime, from another country or another state, I hear old sounds. I hear people who came here because of the excitement, because it offered opportunities that were nowhere else. It is and there are. That is certainly to a degree why I am here, why I keep on coming back to the city just an hour away from the town where I grew up, the city with the bookstores I love, the paintings I adore and the pizza and bagels I need. I go to parties and listen to stories about overbearing professors and difficulties in work and I hear the next wave in a long history of journeyers to this city. I hear them speak, and I listen closely to their language.

I was raised on language-talk. My mother started college studying Indo-European philology because she wanted to study all languages, or at least as many as possible. Soon she withdrew to the comforts of particular languages; the Greek she majored in, the Akkadian she studied in graduate school, and the Hebrew she teaches to college students and bank executives, lawyers and retirees. She brought these languages and their debates home. For more than a decade in my house, we argued over the intricacies of a single Hebrew vowel, the kamatz katan - the little kamatz, which is no smaller or larger than the regular kamatz. It is found in only a few dozen words in all of Hebrew, almost all which any fluent speaker knows. But it is in the details that a language lives.

Maybe grammar doesn’t matter, maybe it is irrelevant. My mother taught me, though, that a language is a window to another set of eyes. Through a language one can learn how a whole people defines for themselves what is a tree, a life, who is God. How a language is built says how they who spoke in it, read in it, thought in it, lived in it and died in it, were. Perhaps understanding the kamatz katan is the key to a whole new world.

***

Sometimes, I walk through New York City, listening closely to the shouts and the curses, the lovers’ whispers and the inside jokes, and I can almost feel the horrors. Courteously, we call ourselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. Immigration implies choice. My mother is an immigrant. At the age of 23, she chose to move from the Israel where she was born to be with the man she loved in the country he called home, America. When her parents came from Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, they weren’t immigrants; they did not choose to make the trip. When my father’s father came to New York from the Russian pogroms, he wasn’t an immigrant. When the Irish ran from famine and British oppression, they weren’t immigrants. When the Italians escaped the backbreaking Sicilian poverty, they did not choose to travel. At no point in the slave’s journey could he be called an immigrant. The gays here from all over, from within and without America, fearing either real or theoretical death, did not come here by choice. They fled. (Is this why New Yorkers walk so fast, the memory of who’s just behind always keen in their minds?) If their circumstances are as different as that of life and blood, the people who come here from softer backgrounds, the states where belief in God does not lead to death, who come here to free themselves from the perhaps too comfortable constraints of family and faith, are too seeking a place where they can be anything. This is a city of refugees and some days I can almost touch what they are running from. Some days I hear it in the Polish stores in Greenpoint and the Francophone Africans and always, always, in the Yiddish inflections of old, old women like the storekeeper in Chelsea who gave me John Cheever’s complete stories for one dollar, perhaps because of my kippah, perhaps not.

They came when things were very bad and there was nowhere else to go to the city where the tenement houses were dirty, foods foreign, and racism rampant, but where they could control, a little, how they lived. We called them immigrants and that’s what they became. They brought resolve, they brought industry, they brought talent, and they brought their voices, their languages and made from them a New York language.  They brought the soul of a city that does not hide, and if it must run, it does so only so it can stand up again, buildings taller, footsteps longer, voices blunter, dreams bigger.

This is, I think, what my city is; a place where all come, where we can all be safe. To today, with the crime, the danger and all else, I feel sure here, secure. We are of one, singed by the same fire, though we call it by different names. And here we came. Late at night, when almost all the stores are closed and the streets practically empty, I walk in the shadows, the buildings full, beds occupied with friends so close that even eye contact seems  excessive.