New York languages

-


Hi everyone. Resurfacing at last in NYC or to be more precise Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (thanks to I & A for a wonderful time). Reappearing also with a new and exciting Nikon D40 replacing my beloved but limited little Olympus. So without further ado.. above is the Empire State Building, over the East River, as seen from the kitchen window on a grey day. Strange to see it from this angle.

Polish rules and Yiddish lives.

Green Point is a blue-collar Polish neighbourhood: decent, unpretentious, and a bit down at heel. Everyone here speaks Polish. The newspapers are in Polish and every sort of service (food, travel, DVDs) are advertised in Polish. If you go into a shop, people will assume that you are Polish and then be surprised that you aren't since non-Polish speakers are the foreigners around here. This is the perspective I'm getting from this trip. Each neighbourhood in Brooklyn (as in Bronx and Queens) has its own character, quite separate, even segregated, from its neighbours. Just up the road, along Bedford Avenue, is hip, gentrified/student type Wiliamsburg followed by Puerto Rican Williamsburg followed by Hassidic Williamsburg, Italian Williamsburg and so forth .

A poster in Chinatown.


Street art in Spanish Harlem where we ate at a Dominican restaurant. Inside, everyone was Spanish speaking, the TV was on a Spanish language station and the food was good and cheap.

It's a bit of a shock to see how New York's immigrant communities still rely on their native languages despite being resident here for generations. The Jews relied heavily on Yiddish in the beginning but, in their quest for assimilation, their children turned their backs on the language, regarding it at best as quaint and at worst as an embarrassing relic of the Old World. Perhaps because these Jews felt that they had no particular country to relate to (which European country wasn't anti-semitic?) the Yiddish legacy was easier to drop? In any event, it seems that today close-knit immigrant communities are less interested in assimilating into mainstream America and tend to adhere to their original languages (Spanish & Chinese for example) to the extent of barely bothering with English at all.


A poster advertising excerpts from the autobiography (?) of Haim Weizman, Israel's first President - from the exhibition at the New York Historical Museum devoted to the role of the Yiddish language 'Daily Forward' newspaper. The socialist Daily Forward served as a chronicler and a guide to the mass Jewish immigration of the beginning of the 20th century.

As one of the Forward's editors said,


And indeed it still prospers in the ultra-orthodox ghettos like Williamsburg and Crown Heights, although it sometimes gets transliterated into English too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of both sides would somehow provide me with the tools to weave a b
Read more

Four Views From the Roof - Introduction

-
Image
  Four Views From the Roof   Introduction      In 1994, against the advice of friends and family, we managed to scrape together the deposit for a dilapidated three room, third floor flat in an old apartment building on Yehuda Halevi Street in south Tel Aviv.  It was all we could afford if we wanted to put down a stake in Tel Aviv.    The building and its environs literally reeked of negligence. The once impressive but now deserted building opposite ours that had once served as a courthouse, was populated by  drunks and junkies. To the west was tumbledown Neve Tzedek just starting to attract artists and students. To the east was a business area heavy on cheap eateries, wholesale textiles and low-end fashion outlets. Old men on tricycles navigated long bales of textiles against the traffic on the narrow streets (and still do). On parallel Lilienblum Street, dubious characters would whisper “Dollar? Dollar?” to passers-by interested in by-passing official restrictions against holding for
Read more