Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Make Words Your Homeland

Near the town of Paarl in the South African Karoo stands a structure constructed in 1975 which may be unique in the world: the Taalmonument, an architectural symbol of the Afrikaans language. As far as I am aware, only the Afrikaners have ever chosen to commemorate their culture through a physical representation of a central tool of racial hatred and repression. Mainly used in the rural areas of Cape Province, Afrikaans is spoken by around 7 million people. The symbolism of the Paarl Taalmonument is intended to show the history of Afrikaans linguistic development from archaic Dutch, Malay, and a smattering of native dialects. The year after the monument’s construction the inhabitants of Soweto began a rebellion against Afrikaans as a main language of school instruction. The government succumbed almost immediately to one of the first acts of organised civil rebellion and virtually all non-white schools under the apartheid regime chose English as the language of instruction. Since the death of apartheid, Afrikaans remains the lingua franca in parts of South Africa but is still associated with white supremacy. It is likely to die a slow death.



Yiddish is another language put under intense pressure in the 20th century. But for precisely the opposite reasons as Afrikaans. Although much more ancient than Afrikaans, Yiddish too is a syncretic mix of German, Slavic, Aramaic and Hebrew. Just prior to WW II it is estimated that there were 13 million Yiddish speakers, mainly in an arc of trans-national Jewish culture that ran from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Thanks to the Holocaust and subsequent emigration, Yiddish today is probably understood by perhaps a million native speakers, mostly survivors of persecution. Although there are many academic attempts to resuscitate the language, it seems unlikely that it will ever be recovered as a living part of modern life. Yiddish doesn’t have a Taalmonument, quite likely because it never was a language of repression or colonisation. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t commemorated, indeed mourned in a way that the death of a language like Afrikaans could ever be.

Songs of the Butcher’s Daughter is just the kind of commemoration that Yiddish deserves. Ostensibly a sort of love story and immigrant history, its backbone and binding theme is Yiddish and the culture it expressed, first in Eastern Europe and then in New York City. What was constant about being an Ashkenazy Jew, regardless of place, was language. As the protagonist, appropriately a Yiddish poet, is advised, “The Jewish future, like the Jewish past, can only be found through words. Not nations. Certainly not land…Make words your homeland Itsik. Make them your lover as well.” The suffering of oppression and dislocation is not eliminated but at least somewhat mitigated by language: “Can any solace equal that which is found by finding the proper words for all we encounter?”

In fact, as with Afrikaans but in exactly the opposite sense, Yiddish is the central symbol of Jewish culture as the vehicle for learning which is absent in the peasant culture of ignorance and bigotry in which it had to survive. It identified precisely what made that culture different: “The goyim are a curious people…Not curious that they want to know things,…curious that they don’t.” The only weapons that Jews had traditionally been allowed to possess are words. And words are honed through practice among non-lethal opponents arguing about whether Yiddish or Hebrew is superior: “How do Jews settle anything? With shouting such has not been heard since Babel.” Words may not be magical, but they certainly are sacred: “... the kabbalist’s lessons about the significance of letters as the building blocks of creation. Each told a story if one took time to read it.”

There is of course another memorial to Yiddish, which is implicit throughout Manseau’s narrative: its legacy in other languages, especially English, and specifically American English. At one point the narrator muses, “Who but a writer in a lonely room could impregnate the thoughts of so many.” Americans, and through them other English-speakers, have been impregnated by Yiddish vocabulary and even Yiddish thought patterns, not just through translations of literature (one thinks of Singer, Aleichem and so many others mentioned by Manseau), but in the influences of Yiddish on everyday usage. Growing up in a suburb of New York City in the 1950’s, I found, demanded a minimal familiarity with Yiddish vocabulary. Mensch, mazel, mitzvah were used without conscious thought but entirely appropriately in English conversation. Tsouris, simcha, and meshugenah were universally understood as states of mind with only the most contorted, and therefore ignored, translations into English. And of course, in light of the peculiar directness of much NYC social intercourse, the numerous Yiddish designations of bodily parts and functions were heard everywhere.

So the monument to Yiddish is not some fixed totem that attracts visitors who (for a fee) want to experience some historical experience of dominance. Nor are Yiddish language and culture something to be appropriated by non-Jews as a sort of historical trinket. The monument to Yiddish lives in literature and in other languages, that is in our social existence. Manseau’s novel is but one, very enjoyable, creative component of that monument.

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