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If You Speak His Language
"Howja like
dot?" asked my father.
"Not dot," corrected Mother, unperturbed by Father's twenty-year
resistance to the niceties of English pronunciation. "Not dot. Dat. T - h
- a - t. Dat." For some inexplicable reason, Mother's tutorial method with
a man who had never mastered the alphabet was premised on spelling. I
suspected this technique owed its application not so much to Mother's
belief in its validity as a teaching tool but to her desire to demonstrate
her own superior grasp of the language. "All right," said Father, in his
I-stand-corrected tone. "Dat. Howja like dat?" And, then he said, in
astonishment and delight, "`Herry' Belafonte turns out to be a Jew!"
No amount of refutation from Mother and me had the slightest effect on
him. "Herry" Belafonte sang in Hebrew. Who else but a Jew would do that?
He was obviously one of those Black Jews, like those of Ethiopia.
Strictly speaking, Hebrew wasn't my father's language. Yiddish was. But
Hebrew was the language of the Bible, the other sacred texts and, in
recent times, the language of Israel. That was good enough for Dad.
From then on, "Herry" was a favorite in our house. On those notable
occasions when he made a TV appearance, the family would gather before the
set and sit in hushed and grateful silence. One of our own was on.
Accordingly, it came as no surprise to Father when "Herry" divorced
Marguerite, his African American wife, and married Julie Robinson, a young
Jewish dancer with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe. "Nu," said Father,
with that know-it-all sparkle in his eyes. "What did I tell you? A Jewish
fellah. First, he's got to marry a shikse [a gentile girl or woman]. And
then he finds a nice Jewish girl."
The acid test of reality never had a chance with my father. He had the
exasperating ability to conform reality to his own vision of it.
©1996 by Sonia Pressman Fuentes
This piece was published in Tzum Punkt (Nov.-Dec. 1999, Vol. 1, No. 2) p. 5, the newsletter of Yiddish of Greater Washington, and in the premier issue of Cafe Ami, an e-zine dedicated to Jewish diversity at yachadbshalom.com.
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