The Human Touch

My Friend, J.B.M., who is as Nordic-Protestant-American as Oliver Wendell Holmes, recently of the United States Supreme Court (although not so old) startled me the other day by saying in a most casual tone of voice: “Of course I can’t read Yiddish, but I can pick out a word here and there.” With difficulty I refrained from asking by what process he had learned to distinguish one letter from the other, not to mention the greater miracle of being able to distinguish printed words in the Yiddish language press.

He is a young fellow, the son of a college professor, one fairly well known in his field. He knows English well enough to write it and French and German well enough to translate from them. He is an amateur magician and entertains friends with parlor tricks. He is interested equally in typography and literature, perhaps the emphasis is in the direction of the former. All this of course does not explain how he happens to know Yiddish even as feebly as he does. His case would perhaps cause less surprise if Jews themselves could tell one letter in the Hebrew alphabet from the other.

He was born, strangely enough, on Henry Street, opposite the Henry Street Settlement. I gather that he would not have been born opposite or near the Henry Street Settlement had not one of his parents held an official connection of some sort with it. Well, the curious lettering on the shops and stores of the neighborhood puzzled the budding intelligence of our friend and in order to have some sort of chart to the universe into which he had been projected he had himself taught Yiddish letters and words, so that he knew at a very early age the precise meaning of the word kosher, for example.

I do not know how much the spoken Yiddish word means to my friend, but I do not see his curiosity setting bounds to his intelligence. He is not frantic about finding out things, in the way that hungry intellectuals are, but he is deliberate and persevering. Some day, maybe, I shall try the experiment of taking him to the Yiddish theatre and enjoying the performance through his understanding or lack of understanding. I recall once taking to the Yiddish theatre a third generation New York Jew who, literally, did not understand a single word, of what was going on. Vociferous as was the action, it was, for him, nothing more and nothing less than dumbshow. The performance might have been in pantomime, or Chinese, or a remote Hindu dialect. My Jewish friend enjoyed his post-theatre ham sandwich with greater zest. One of the few compensations for being a Jew that still remain in this vale of tears is the capacity to relish with an exclusive relish a Yiddish pun or topical or racial or religious allusion that must be lost upon Gentiles and Gentile Jews. The Jewish anecdote, sometimes at its broadest, unites Jews the world over more