Authors: Michael Chabon
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 Uriel 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 the
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.
I was twenty (let’s say). I accepted this curious ethos as indisputable, and found a strong appeal in the idea of transgression. I wrote a raft of stories that cross-dressed in the clothes of genre and found sure enough that when I gave
them out to workshops, workshops tended to look away from the ostrich feather in my hat. “I don’t know anything about mysteries,” said the reader of one of my short stories, a surrealist effort featuring a gumshoe working a puzzling murder in a De Chirico city, written under the heavy influence of Chandler and Donald Barthelme. “I hate science fiction,” went another frequently offered bit of helpful criticism, “so there’s nothing I can really do to help you with this.”
When I first visited the campus of UC Irvine, where I eventually enrolled in the MFA writing program, I was ushered, with the kind of clueless goodwill that might impel you to introduce the only two Mennonites at your wedding to each other, into the company of Gregory Benford, a fine writer of extremely “hard” science fiction
(Timescape, Across the Sea of Suns)
and a professor in the UCI Department of Physics and Astronomy. I don’t remember now if Professor Benford had read any of my undergraduate work, or was only going on my description of it, but I do remember his polite and kindly bafflement.
A lonely business, transgressing. There was nothing that anybody could do for me. I laid aside the epic novel I had been planning, about a Holmesian detective investigating, on Earth and along the canals of the planet Mars, the disappearance of the great and greatly mistaken astronomer Percival Lowell, and turned instead to concentrate on this other book, a straightforward realistic narrative, equally influenced by Proust, Fitzgerald, and Philip Roth, about summertime and sexual identity in the city of Pittsburgh.
It was in this period, when I abandoned the career that was both to have culminated in and been launched by that novel about Mars, that I also turned my back on Judaism. I was learning to question everything; I guess I was trying to fit in.
Nothing about my being Jewish—about my ancestors, about their languages and histories, about the stale holiday invocations of freedom, continuity, and survival—seemed to have use or relation to the ongoing business of my life at the time. Israel had lost its heroic claim on my imagination and seemed to have become, by means I did not understand, the ally and stooge of a Disneyfied president I loathed. In the meantime my mother moved away from the town where I grew up. I married a woman who was not Jewish, and began work on what was to be my second novel. I had no home, and neither, it seemed to me, did anyone—remember that I was living, at the time, in Southern California.