In middle school, we studied the 1920s in English and social studies. It was a period ripe with new slang. I remember the long list of phrases we had to learn and interpret. The surprise was that I knew some of the expressions because my family still used them! Phrases like, “Aren’t you just the bee’s knees?” or “He thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas!” This weird phenomenon came to mind when I happened upon an ancient rabbinic discussion in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 62a.
Rabbi Zakkai taught a Baraita (an early teaching that was left out of the Mishnah, codified around 200 CE) in Rabbi Yohanan’s presence. It said that, when one did, in a lapse of awareness, a whole series of inappropriate things deemed idol worship, one was only obligated to bring one sin-offering sacrifice to wipe the slate clean.
Rabbi Yohanan responded with “Go out and teach outside.” It was the ancient equivalent of “Get out of town!” or “Get out!” This is the laughing or indignant response somebody makes when you say something unbelievable or surprising.
One can read this text in many ways. It’s possible that Yohanan earnestly thought Zakkai was teaching nonsense and that he shouldn’t teach that inside the house of study, because every action deserved its own separate offering to repent for these mistakes.
However, as the page continues, the importance of context reveals itself. Imagine a time when idol worship was everywhere. A person could inadvertently look like they were worshipping an idol or a person when they were just bowing respectfully as a custom or doing what they had to do to get along. If surrounded by idol worship, a person may do things that everyone else does, automatically and without reflection.
We still do this. Think about the phrases “knock on wood” or “crossing one’s fingers and toes.” These aren’t Jewish concepts, but many say them anyhow, just as we might use phrases from other religions in conversation. They’re part of the culture around us.
I was thinking about these cultural shifts recently because we had our own big moment a few weeks ago. We were driving home after middle school. I remarked that I’d taken the dog on the river trail for an amazing walk at lunch time. (In Winnipeg, our rivers freeze, allowing several kilometres of walking, skiing and skating trails, along with art installations and events on the ice. It’s like a pop-up provincial park in winter.) One of my kids complained that he hadn’t gotten enough skating in yet. The weather that day was perfectbut a cold snap was coming. I suggested that they head out right away onto the ice on their own.
My kids seemed astounded by the offer, but they took me up on it. We live a block from the river and there’s a convenient ramp down the riverbank. Before we could reconsider, they were off with skates, helmets, snowpants and the loan of my cellphone so they could reach me. I told them to be back in an hour. This bought me more time to make Shabbat dinner, too.
Just before 5:30 p.m., the phone rang. My responsible kids called from the ice, saying, “We got a little too far away, we’re getting tired, but we’re coming back now. We’ll be a little late.” When they got inside, both kids were wobbly, legs rubbery from exhaustion. I had to help them get off their parkas and snowpants, but they were full of triumph. They had taken off on their own and had an adventure. At dinner, they described bumping into a classmate who was out with his mom and younger siblings. While the classmate was a better skater than them, my 13-year-olds seemed puffed up with pride that they were allowed out by themselves.
Times change. As a Gen Xer, when I was 13, I babysat for two siblings on my own. I took the Washington, DC, metro by myself. I was a latchkey kid of longstanding. As the oldest child in my family and “mature,” I had a lot of leeway, as well as responsibility. Was it always good for me? I don’t think so, but it’s just the way things were.
My kids have had a longer stretch of childhood, with more supervision. While they have always had household chores and other responsibilities, these maiden voyages of independence now happen one after the next. Since the skating experience, they’ve been on their own for a Saturday night while we went out to a neighbour’s house. They take the dog walk on their own. This week, they’re headed off to a winter camp sleepaway experience with their school.
Generational shifts often lead us to believe that things are altogether different than they used to be. Yet, when I realized that I used 1920s slang as a kid, it reminded me that, while things change, some things stay the same. We no longer do sin offerings when we’ve made a mistake as part of Jewish practice. We don’t live in a culture surrounded by physical idols and their worship. However, we still make mistakes and seek absolution. Our kids still learn and grow through graduated steps towards independence, complete with worry and insecurity. One rabbi’s “Go and teach outside” becomes “Get out of town!” – after 2,000 years, the inference isn’t that different.
For each generation, something old becomes new again, or seems new, at least. For every parent, those amazing first moments of change in their kids are important. I burst with pride, telling others about the skating adventure. I revel in being able to go out socially (down the street), while my kids put themselves to bed. These ages and stages happen for everyone, but, each time, we’re still ecstatic with the individual circumstance.
My kids told me later that they had read until 8:40 or 9 o’clock when we were out, but, when we got back, their room was silent, lights were off, with the dog on guard. It was a moment of success. I nodded, feeling impressed. Inside, I was thinking, “Get out of town! Look what we accomplished here!” “Rabbi,” I wanted to say, “check these big bar mitzvah boys out! Look at this growth! That, too, is Torah.”
Joanne Seiffhas written regularly for the Winnipeg Free Press and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.
According to the Babylonian Talmud (Eruvin 53b), the Hebrew-speakers of ancient Judea were so precise in their speech that they would never describe a cloak they were trying to sell as merely green, but would tell you instead that it was the colour of newly sprouted beet greens trailing along the ground. Galileans, on the other hand, were less punctilious:
“What do you mean when you say that Galileans are not careful in speaking? It is taught: There was a Galilean who used to go about [the marketplace] asking, ‘Who has amar? Who has amar?’ They said to him, ‘Stupid Galilean, do you mean khamor [donkey] to ride or khamar [wine] to drink? Amar [wool] to wear or imar [a lamb] to slaughter?’ And don’t forget the woman who wanted to say to her friend, ‘to-i de-okhlikh khalovo, come, I’ll give you some milk,’ only to have it come out as ‘tokhlikh lovya, may you be eaten by a lioness?’”
Where the ancient Galileans seem to have had no choice but to sound like themselves, Adeena Karasick has elaborated, over 14 volumes of poetry, a sort of deliberate neo-Galileanism that sometimes bridges, sometimes leaps and, on occasion, just fills the talmudic chasm between utterance and meaning in a way guaranteed to drive any artificial intelligence program out of its simulated mind. As she says in the poem “Talmudy Blues II” that is dedicated to me in her new collection, Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink): “… sometimes the letters rule over her / and sometimes she rules over the letters / cleaving to the light of infinite possibility.” (p.31)
Is Karasick cleaving to the light as she rules over the letters? Or do the letters ruling her do the cleaving? Have her consonants been endowed with the naissances latentes of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”? Or, less goyishly, is Karasick turning Galilean imprecision into an aesthetic approach rooted in the modalities of elementary-level reading instruction – reading silently and reading aloud, the absorption and subsequent re-citation of a written text – as enacted in the traditional East European Hebrew school known as kheyder?
The basic level of instruction had three phases:
1. Alef-beys, literally, alphabet, in which students learn to recognize the consonants that make up the Hebrew alphabet, along with the sundry diacritical marks that take the place of alphabetic vowels. There are 11 of the latter, representing five vowel sounds.
2. Halb-traf leyenen, reading half syllables. Each diacritic is run, as it were, through all 22 of the consonants. So, for example, syllables formed with the vowel komets would be learned by reciting, “Komets alef, o; komets beys, bo; komets giml, go” … and so on, to the end of the alphabet, when the student would go on to the next vowel: “Pasekh alef, a; pasekh beys, ba; pasekh giml, ga.”
3. Gants-traf leyenen, reading whole syllables, i.e., combining the individual letters or syllabograms into words.
Karasick’s traffic is with the last two, the kheyder basics supplemented by the graphemically focused mysticism of Sefer Yetsira and Abraham Abulafia as refracted through a contemporary sensibility and range of reference: “The letter is matter which moves matter … these words are closer than theyappear.” (p.31)
We see halb-traf in full flight in, say, the coda to “Eicha,” the long poem with which Lumenations opens: “In the eros of aching ethos / The caesura screams – / Through cirque’elatory sequiturs, resistances” and continues: “Here, her / in mired err / whose scar is clear // Hear her/here/whose heir / wears err’s // shared prayer / where // care is rare….” (pp.26-27)
All you have to do is imagine a phrase like “hear her/here/” in unvocalized Hebrew, רה רה רה, and then read it as “hair hare hoar,” to realize that Karasick’s poetry, like the airplane she anatomizes in Aerotomania, constitutes “a hybridized syncretic space between cultures and idioms / where that interlingual complexity doesn’t close down but builds dialogue” (p.83), a dialogue rooted in, but quickly soaring beyond, quotidian phonemic reality.
There is an upward thrust to the book, from the dust and cracked earth of “Eicha,” the recasting of the biblical Lamentations (eicha means how, as in, “How sits the city solitary”), through the rising rabbinic commentary of “Talmudy Blues II,” a romp through ways of thought – words, that is – that now stand in place of the things destroyed: Jerusalem and the Temple (known in Hebrew as the Holy House).
An excursus on the idea of house follows, then “Checking In II,” i.e., checking into the Aerotomania flight by stowing readers’ cultural baggage for the duration of their stay on the plane. Having shaken off our dust (Isaiah 52:2), we emerge from the fog of our associations. Our lumen is come (Isaiah 60:1); we rise through the ether to embrace The Shining.
As the dedicatee of “Talmudy Blues II,” it behooves me to say something about the poem. A continuation of “Here Today Gone Gemara” from Karasick’s 2018 collection Checking In (Talonbooks), “Talmudy Blues II” consists in large part of elaborations of dialogue (and dialect) culled from our ongoing conversations about the ways in which the Talmud is reflected and refracted in Yiddish. “Carpe verbum,” reads the epigraph to “Here Today” – pluck that word like it’s a Sabbath chicken, clear away the excrescences and bite into the thing itself, ever mindful that the Hebrew davar means both word and thing, utterance and entity; my honeyed words solidified into raw material, ore for Adeena’s gold, one davar turned into another. But, as it says in the Talmud (Megillah 15), “Whoever credits a davar to the person who said it brings redemption to the world.”
Amen. Thou hast conquered, O neo-Galilean.
Michael Wexis author of three books on Yiddish, including Born to Kvetch. His songs have been recorded by such bands as the Klezmatics, and he has translated The Threepenny Opera from German into Yiddish. His one-person shows include Sex in Yiddish, Wie Gott in Paris and Gut Yontef, Yoko. I Just Wanna Jewify: The Yiddish Revenge on Wagner was recently revived (on Zoom) by the Ashkenaz Festival. His most recent major project, Baym Kabaret Yitesh, a recreation of a 1938 Warsaw Yiddish cabaret, was the surprise hit of Ashkenaz 2022 in Toronto. Bas Sheve, the long-lost Yiddish opera restored by Wex and composer Joshua Horowitz, was the not-so-surprising hit of the same festival. This book review was originally published in New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication, Vol. 3, no. 2 (2023).
Inscribing what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might call espace vital (the space we can survive), Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (2023) is an exploration of openings in a (never quite) post-COVID world. Written by poet, performer and cultural theorist Adeena Karasick and visualized by designer/author and vis lit creator Warren Lehrer, both the title poem and “Touching in the Wake of the Virus” track the trepidations and celebrations of openings read through socioeconomic, geographic and bodily space.
Both poems explore a range of intralingual etymologies laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and kabbalistic aphorisms. They foreground language and book-space as organisms of hope – highlighting the concept of opening and touching as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.
In this first collaborative book, Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page through typographic compositions that give form to the emotional, metaphorical, historical and sonic underpinnings of the texts. Together, the writing and visuals engage the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the work. The book also comes with a soundtrack recording (via QR code) of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.
Produced in a smyth-sewn, three-colour foil stamped, three-piece hardcover binding, printed on acid-free paper, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings bridges the gap between art book and trade publication that will speak to lovers of poetry, philosophy, art, design, new media, performance, and anyone trying to navigate opening and touching in the wake of pandemics and other mass maladies.
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings can be purchased from most online booksellers.
Yiddish has the odds stacked against it – the vast majority of its speakers were murdered in the Holocaust, its use was repressed in the postwar Soviet Union, Israel favoured Hebrew over it, and it faced the challenges that any immigrant language faces in a new country, including in Canada. Yet, Yiddish lives on, and can continue to do so, and even flourish, contends Rebecca Margolis, director and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilization at Monash University, in Australia.
Margolis, who is originally from Canada, will be in Vancouver to launch her new book, Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission, at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture on May 23, 7:15 p.m. Introducing Margolis will be the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir with the song “Yomervokhets,” a Yiddish translation of “Jabberwocky” by Raphael Finkel, set to music by the choir’s conductor, David Millard.
The event is particularly special, as Margolis uses the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir – in which I’ve sung for more years than I can recall – as one of many examples of a “created language space.” Such spaces are “sites that are deliberately created to support the continuity of a language that is not commonly a mother tongue or widely spoken,” she writes.
The small section that features the choir cites the work of local Yiddish scholar and translator Faith Jones, who is a member of the choir as well, and the book references a paper that she and I wrote together in tandem with the 2019 online exhibit marking the choir’s 40th anniversary. I have to say it was an exciting surprise to find a paper I co-wrote quoted, but it’s a quote from Faith’s 1999 thesis on the Yiddish library of the Peretz Centre (the choir’s home, too) that helped me clarify some of what draws me to Yiddish. In commenting on the intersections between Yiddish, politics and identity, Faith wrote that “what these strands have in common is the belief in the power of human beings to alter the course of history. In left political life, in feminist theory, in the movement for lesbian and gay equality, in the political culture of secular humanism, it is not the past which is romanticized, but the future. Yiddish does not offer the path to the past as much as to a collective future which is linked with the past: a better future, but better because of human endeavour.”
It is this human aspect – the intention we can possess – that runs through all of Margolis’s examples of the ways in which people, specifically Canadians, have kept Yiddish alive. She conceptualizes her book “as a series of expanding rings of engagement with the language and culture.” Each chapter focuses on a ring, while acknowledging the rings are interconnected: families (1950s to today), youth theatre groups (1960s to 1970s), literature (1970s to 1980s), singing (1990s to 2000s) and new media/technology (2000 to today).
Margolis explains that Yiddish exists in two communities: the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox), who speak Yiddish in their everyday lives, and the secular, people “for whom continued engagement with the language has taken place despite maintaining linguistic acculturation.” Margolis’s book is mostly about the latter group, but she does discuss the Haredim quite a bit and, to a much lesser extent, the experience of preserving Scottish Gaelic, which, she says, “is undergoing revitalization in Canada and abroad,” and Indigenous languages.
Yiddish Lives On is an academic book, but easy to read, and there are common threads that recur, so that, if you don’t quite understand a concept on first encounter, you will when it is used in a subsequent context. In addition to discussing scholarly texts, Margolis talks about Yiddish writers – in Canada between 1950 and 2020, more than 200 books were published in Yiddish! – and analyzes movies and shows like the web series YidLife Crisis, which was created by and stars Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, two Montreal secular Jews who speak Yiddish, using “provocative comedic dialogue,” Margolis notes, “to address contemporary issues around Jewish identity.”
Margolis doesn’t expect that Yiddish will ever return to regular, everyday use by non-Haredim, however, she convincingly argues that “a language lives by being used” and that the many spaces that have intentionally been created for Yiddish – “from raising children as native speakers to a virtual Yiddishverse” – bode well for the language’s continuity.
To attend the book’s launch and the mini-concert that precedes it, register at peretz-centre.org.
I always look forward to reading whatever Adeena Karasick writes, even though I know I won’t understand all of it. To be generous to myself, I’d say at least 20% of her latest publication, Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Institute of General Semantics, 2022), went over my head – or will require a few more reads and some discussions with friends to get the most out of it.
Massaging the Medium is part of the Institute of General Semantics’ Language in Action series, which “publishes books devoted to creative modes of expression that can open the doors of perception and foster better understandings of the nature of language, symbols, communication and the semantic, technological and media environments that we inhabit.”
The preface is written by Maria Damon of the University of Minnesota. She explains, “For anyone still unfamiliar with the format, pechakucha – Japanese for ‘chitchat’ – is a highly stylized presentation form that comprises a public speech accompanied by 20 slides for visual demonstration, each of which is shown for 20 seconds, while the speaker addresses their (his/her) topic. Initiated in 2003 by a pair of architects working in Japan, the format (trademarked and copyrighted, by the way, in true contemporary entrepreneurial style) has spread to encompass a worldwide enthusiasm for a storytelling/info delivery style that relies on the visual as much as, or even more than, on the verbal.”
Given Karasick’s “dazzling linguistic pyrotechnics on page and stage,” writes Damon, the pechakucha format is ideal, “as the propulsive energy that characterizes her writing and reading style is given sharper urgency for being trapped in a small temporal space…. These seven tours de force of serious play celebrate meaning and unmeaning, communication and miscommunication, the happy errors/eros of semantic and sonic slippage, the glories of the im/p/precise.”
This description is better than I could ever give. I had to look up several terms, such as ’pataphysical – “a ‘philosophy’ of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry intended to be a parody of science,” according to Wikipedia. “Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the ‘science of imaginary solutions.’”
I also had to look up some of the names of people Karasick cites as if they’re old friends. While I’ve heard of folks like Jacques Derrida and Marshall McCluhan, and of Jewish texts such as The Zohar, my knowledge barely touches the surface. I think that’s part of why I have such fun with Karasick – I’ve no preconceptions going into my reading of her work and, while I don’t take it all in, I do feel as if my mind expands from the experience. She is at once academically rigorous, poetically versatile and sensically nonsensical, or nonsensically sensical (I’m not sure which would be most accurate).
In her introduction, Karasick notes that the seven pechakuchas comprising this book were originally created for and presented at academic literary conferences that took place during the period of 2013 to 2019. For a printed publication, she had to adapt them.
“The visuals,” she notes, “consist of both found and original collaged material which both speak to and against the text. And each of the original slides were embedded with audio and video clips, gifs, other forms of kinetic digital media such as montages of sound poetry,” pop songs, movies and more. “What is illustrated here, however, are stills from the digital live motion presentation and, although originally all consisting of 20 separate components, they are now of slightly varying length.”
I can’t even begin to simplify any of the pechakuchas, in order to give an example of their content and form. Best to experience them yourself. Not everything will land – I enjoyed the first few most – but they do offer the possibility of changing how you think about many things. The list includes but is not limited to language, technology, physiology, time, space, cyberspace, mysticism, consumerism, reality, truth. As does any good Jewish text, it will raise more questions than it answers.
When someone loves what they do or is passionate about a certain topic, it’s obvious. In the case of a book, if this someone is also proficient with words and excels at writing, their enthusiasm figuratively jumps off the page and inhabits the reader, getting them as excited as the author. This is how I felt reading Jonathan Berkowitz’s latest book, Tales From the Word Guy: What Your English Teacher Never Taught You(FriesenPress). Excited about the wonder that is language – in this case, the English language.
With the help of his wife, Heather, Berkowitz has compiled a collection of essays adapted from his segments on CBC Radio 1’s North by Northwest over several years as the Word Guy. Noting that people “perceive the spoken word differently from the written word,” he writes: “Adapting the radio columns into written essays requires a sensitivity to the difference between listening and reading. Heather has that sensitivity, not to mention a keen sense of style and grammar.”
North by Northwest host and producer Sheryl MacKay has written the book’s foreword.
“I first met Jonathan when he came in to talk about the National Puzzlers’ League convention, which was taking place that year in Vancouver,” she writes. “I was struck right away by his enthusiasm, his depth of knowledge (in the field of puzzles and beyond), his sense of humour, and by the fact that he could identify patterns in words and numbers everywhere. It’s like a superpower he has!
“I immediately asked him to do a regular column on the show. Jonathan, who is always up for a new adventure, agreed and, for the next year, he was our Puzzling Professor. Every month, he’d appear on the show and introduce listeners to a different kind of puzzle, talk about its history and then challenge them to solve a few. It was such fun and so mind-bending!
“The next year, Jonathan changed focus a little and became the Word Guy for the show. Each month, he takes us on a radio journey through some of the vagaries of the English language. As Jonathan owns more dictionaries and language reference books than anyone I know, he’s well equipped to lead this particular expedition!”
In Tales From the Word Guy, Berkowitz admits that his favourite books are dictionaries, followed perhaps by thesauri (I admit that I Googled the plural of thesaurus). “In fact,” he writes, “thesaurus comes from Latin, meaning ‘treasure,’ and the first dictionary definition of thesaurus is treasury or storehouse. Indeed, what a treasure house it is.”
Words have always been a passion for Berkowitz, but he is also a fan of numbers and mathematics, having chosen a career as a statistician. With his facility for words, numbers and problem-solving, it is no wonder that MacKay, in 2015, invited him to present puzzles on her show. I never heard him in that role, but I did very much enjoy the book those puzzles led to: The Whirl of Words, also published by FriesenPress. (See jewishindependent.ca/playing-with-words-and-more.)
Berkowitz’s breadth and depth of knowledge can be overwhelming at times. To build off his metaphor of this latest book as a box of chocolates, you might get the equivalent of a sugar rush if you read too much of it in one sitting. While the chapters are short, amusing and easy to read, there is just so much information “filling,” from the erudite to the silly to Berkowitz’s trademark puns. (Among those he shares is one of his favourites: “The only thing flat-earthers have to fear is sphere itself.”)
I learned so much in Tales From the Word Guy. For example, I knew that A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y are vowel letters – but also sometimes W?! Berkowitz gives the example of the “uncommon word, cwm, a synonym for cirque, [which] means ‘a deep steep-walled basin on a mountain usually forming the blunt end of a valley.’ Linguists sometimes refer to Y and W as semivowels,” he writes. “Conversely, U and I sometimes represent consonants, as in quiz and onion, respectively.”
I can understand the U being considered a consonant in quiz, but remain confused about the I in onion. But in a good way. I enjoy having my mind challenged, my assumptions upended.
I also enjoy being wowed and there are many “really?!” moments in this book, such as W being a vowel sometimes, albeit rarely. To name just a few of the other things that made me ooh and ah – the origins of the terms uppercase and lowercase; the number of words Shakespeare created (and some examples); and the name for and function of “um,” “uh,” “like,” “you know,” all those annoying sounds or words most of us unconsciously insert into our sentences when we talk.
But it’s not just the many fun facts that make Tales From the Word Guy such fun to read. Berkowitz shares a bit of himself, from more serious topics, like how his mother and father influenced his life, to his favourite, or most beautiful, words, his language pet peeves and his efforts at making up new words. It is easy to see why CBC’s the Word Guy is so popular.
Tales From the Word Guy: What Your English Teacher Never Taught You book launch with author Jonathan Berkowitz in conversation with Sheryl MacKay; adapted from radio by Heather Glassman Berkowitz. Nov. 29, 7pm, at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. No registration required.
Tales From the Word Guy: Jonathan Berkowitz talks about his new book with Daniella Givon. Dec. 12, 7:30pm, at Beth Israel. bethisrael.ca.
Almost half of Adeena Karasick’s latest volume of poetry, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book’s description notes, “to our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.”
“It was a totally compulsive exercise over four years, where literally everything I read or watched or where I went or what I heard was fodder for the text,” Karasick told the Independent about the faux updates’ origins. “And, I must admit, I threw away as many lines as I kept.
“Sometimes, it was just that I couldn’t get a song out of my head and then would just riff on it,” she said, giving as examples, “Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify”; “Gustave Klimt is listening to KISS”; and “Salvador Dali is doing the Time Warp. Again.”
Sometimes, she said, it was linguistically driven, such as, “E & G are saying F off” and “Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position.” Or, “it was just pure, silly fun” to create updates like “William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud,” “Edvard Munch is watching Scream 3,” “Google is mapping the territory” and “Narcissus is using his selfie stick.”
“It was so obsessive,” said Karasick, “that even now that the book’s been published, my brain is so wired to creating those one-liners, I walk around the streets reading every sign and riff on them: ‘Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs,’ ‘Fatwa is doing a cleanse,’ ‘The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies,’ ‘The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke.’”
Karasick’s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious.
“I think I’ve always had a really dark sense of humour,” she said, “and there’s something about taking that which is frightening or deeply disturbing and disempowering it – by not so much making fun of it, but ironically or parodically making it strange, decontextualizing it, hyberbolically defamiliarizing it.
“A lot of my work takes hard-hitting political issues, whether that be the Holocaust in Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1994) and superimposing it with the policing and massacring of language, or dealing with 9/11 in The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004).… ‘There was a Big Building that Swallowed a Plane … How Insane to Swallow a Plane….’ A sense of jouissance (pleasure, play) really permeates all that I do. There’s nothing more exhilarating for me than playing inside language, finding unexpected liaisons, connections, sound clusters. It’s a type of erotics of the text that is for me very jewy; that jouissance, a jewy essence: all diasporic, nomadic, exilic, ex-static.
“I see this ‘play’ as operating with an ‘assimilationist’ brand of Jewish humour,” she explained, “not of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability – impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time – in a post-Woody Allen/Jon Stewart/ Sarah Silverman/Sandra Bernhardish kind of way. And, sometimes, it’s audacious, subversive, provocative and, in the true definition of ‘irony,’ explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability or the ‘homeyness’ of our world. That is the role of art.”
Adeena Karasick’s newest collection of poetry is Checking In. (photo by Safia Karasick Southey/talonbooks.com)
And one cannot separate Karasick’s art from her Jewish heritage – it’s “part of my DNA,” she said – and from her study of Jewish texts. With a PhD in kabbalah and deconstruction, it is not surprising that, in speaking about the concept of play, she pointed to 13th-century kabbalistic mystic Avraham Abulafia’s Science of the Combination of Letters, in which, she said, “we are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy, gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and, through lettristic ‘skips’ and ‘jumps’ slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated.
“According to kabbalistic thinking,” she said, “we are commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don’t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated, through a continual process of constructing and reconstructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls…. And, in accordance with the strictures of Abulafian play, to properly play is to travel inside the words within words, traces, affects, projections, sliding and slipping between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts’ syntactic economy. And this very play speaks both to how everything is infinitely interconnected – reverberant with our social, consumerist, communicative patterns – generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.”
She connected this type of play to “the actual conversation habits of Yiddish.”
“According to etymologist Michael Wex – in his Just Say Nu (Harper: New York, 2007) – Yiddish itself is inscribed in derailment, evasion, avoidance, where the norm is not to be ‘clear’ but to ‘seduce and lead astray,’ to say the reverse of whatever’s been said. For example, as we know, to say, ‘Hi, how are you,’ ‘Shalom aleichem,’ the answer is ‘Aleichem shalom.’ Answers are answered with a question, repetition, reversals, circumlocutions, interruptions, insertions (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). Compliments are avoided in favour of their opposite. Or, like how you should never say what you mean because naming something (such as cancer, leprosy, pig) could bring it into existence.”
As for her own existence, Karasick said, “All my life, I’ve been fiercely drawn to all that seems enigmatic or paradoxical, and get great pleasure in connecting the unconnectable; drawing from different genres, lexicons or mediums and reveling in ways they inform each other in radical and innovative ways, inviting us to see the world anew.”
While she has spent years teaching philosophic and critical theory, and media and pop culture at various universities, as well as attending lectures on media ecology and ontology, she also watches “a lot of trashy TV,” she said. “I like classical jazz and MTV videos. I read [Louis] Zukofsky, [Slovoj] Zizek and Vogue magazine. And my favourite thing to do is to mash these language systems together into a kind of linguistic tzimmes; each flavour, taste, texture informing the other, expanding the palette.
“It’s especially exciting for me to break down that binary between high and low culture; draw from the music hall and the circus, erotics and spirituality; and play with ways all of this information erupts as a palimpsestic web of both sacred and secular echo-poetic referents.”
Karasick writes “on the road, on buses, trains, subways, boats; in motion,” she said. “I write best amid the bustle of life and, oddly, when I’m really busy is when I’m most inspired. I’m always hunting and gathering, drawing on the world around me. Though, I must say, when drenched in aching nostalgia, frustrated by contemporary politics or steeped in throbbing desire is when the work especially flows.”
Approaching the poetry
“Contour XLV: With Asura,” “Lorem Ipsum” and “In Cold Hollers” are all “homophonic translations, and so they all fall under the same rubric,” said Karasick of three of the poems in Checking In during a brief poetry lesson over the phone.
She explained, “Each of these [works] take the same sounds of an original poem by somebody else and I’ve translated them. I’ve done an avant-garde, post-modern translation by using the same sounds and rhythms of the original poems but changing all the words, so that if one read it simultaneously with the original poem, it would sound like the same poem, but it’s completely different. It’s a way of commenting on the previous piece; it’s translating it, moving through and across different modes.”
“In Cold Hollers” is a translation of Charles Olson’s 1953 poem “In Cold Hell, In Thicket”; “Contour XLV: With Asura” is based on “Canto 45 with Usura,” a poem by Ezra Pound, which Karasick described as a “famously antisemitic, women-hating, Jews and women are pigs kind of poem”; and “Lorem Ipsum,” which is in English, but plays on the sounds of the Latin of Cicero’s “De finibus bonorum et malorum” (“On the Ends of Goods and Evils”). “Lorem ipsum is the standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation,” writes Karasick elsewhere. “I am interested in exploring how the notion of ‘place holding’ gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language.”
As to how to approach a poem that you’ve never read before, Karasick said, “On one level, it depends on how deeply one wants to penetrate the text. The way I like to read is to not worry about what everything means per se, but rather … in reading, I think the most important thing is to feel the text, to go inside and feel its rhythms, its textures…. I work a lot with sound, so I’m really interested how sound itself communicates meaning and so, therefore, a lot of this type of work is about moving with the rhythms and the textures and some of that crazed emotion, how that bleeds through, just through the way that it sounds and feels in your mouth.”
Turning to the poem “Lorem Ipsum,” she said the words mean “pain itself.” She has translated Cicero’s treatise on the theory of ethics into a “passionate love poem” about the “difficulties and grueling angst that one traverses through that. Just like love itself, or pain itself, isn’t something that’s easily definable, so it is with the poem itself, which takes us through this journey of multiple ways that are easily comprehensible and other parts that are strangely defamiliarized and confusing because these very strong emotions are fiercely that…. Just like in life, you come across things that are completely foreign and impenetrable, so, similarly, the poem interweaves through the familiar and the defamiliar, the expected and that which completely takes you into new arenas of wonder and confusion.”
Karasick similarly takes Pound’s “Canto 45” and, playing with the Yiddish word asura, which means forbidden, and the English word usury, creates a new work that’s both a scathing commentary on Pound’s, as well its own poem, with its own meanings.
About “In Cold Hollers,” Karasick said she used the word “hollers” because it’s “homophonically related to hell, but it’s hollering in, calling back into Charles Olson’s original ’53 piece; and his original title, ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket,’ refers to the opening of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ What seems simple, it just has layers and layers and layers of history, literary history, philosophical history, as well.”
The title of Olson’s poem refers particularly to “selva oscura,” she said, “which is the dark wood that Dante wanders into in the middle of his life … so Olson’s poem, which riffs on that, is a similar excursion into a visionary experience, where he struggles to come up with a new understanding … from his own midlife … putting a voice to his own time. It is a personal drama of experience, conflict; it really speaks to the wrenching process of living and loving that, by turns, is grueling and funny and dramatic and trivial. My translation of that is dealing with all of those things and, in a way, it’s like, do you remember that old Gwen Stefani song, ‘I Ain’t No Hollaback Girl’? – I am a hollaback girl. I am hollering back, in cold hollers, to this cold hell, and basically calling into that history of both Dante and Olson, the history of post-modernism, 65 years later.”
In talking about Olson’s work and hers, Karasick said, “I sometimes like thinking of translation as trans-elation because you can never really translate anything because of culture and all the different references – in my piece, in my trans-elation, the attention is focused on a world of connected life, the personal, the political, the poetic as a system of relations. And, lastly … highlighting how the words themselves are imaginative participants; the words themselves are creating and recreating the sense of connecting the personal, the political, the poetic.”
And it’s not just the words, but how they are placed on a page that matters in poetry. So, for example, Karasick’s “In Cold Hollers” not only plays on the sound and meaning of Olson’s poem, but also mirrors its typography. “I wanted to keep it very much as he had it,” she said of where the lines break and other aspects of the formatting.
“The notion of the physicality and the materiality of where the words are placed on the page has just as much meaning as what they are communicating. We’re so often used to looking at the left margin … but I want the phrases to be moving and fluid, and that sense of how the white space between the words is equally as important as the words themselves. We can go back to kabbalah and the black fire on white fire, that the whole page becomes a series of fiery energy.”
Tina Turner, the late Leonard Cohen, TV presenter and comedian Bill Maher, the bands Madness and Led Zeppelin, actor Richard Gere and others have recently been added to the list of celebrities like actors Tom Selleck and Ben Stiller, musician Mick Jagger and former president Barack Obama who, perhaps unknown to them, have helped learners of Hebrew around the world acquire new vocabulary. Two years after the publication of the book Hilarious Hebrew: The Fun and Fast Way to Learn the Language, a fifth print run – which is also an extended edition – has recently been published.
Co-creator and Hebrew teacher Yael Breuer is convinced that, once readers find out that singer “Tina Turner does not hold a grudge,” for example, they are not likely to forget that the Hebrew word for grudge is tina.
“The method is a great way to memorize Hebrew vocabulary but, in fact, could be adapted as a teaching aid for any vocabulary in any language, and we have been asked about producing versions of the book for French, German and even Chinese speakers,” said Yael Breuer.
The book has been popular with Jews and Christians, tourists and students, and is sold in shops, Jewish museums and online. “The book was placed on the recommended book list by famous London-based Foyles bookstore and someone recently told me, half-jokingly, that our method could help lift the biblical curse of the Tower of Babel, which caused communication problems by separating people into speaking different languages,” she added.
Hilarious Hebrew is divided into sections, which helps users identify words according to their need or interest, including vocabulary for vacationers, shoppers and restaurant-goers. It has been used as an aliyah gift to new immigrants to Israel by the Jewish Agency and has also been adopted as a language teaching tool by Edinburgh Hebrew congregation, who have started converting some of the book’s illustrations into animations. Hebrew tutorials, based on the method, are now available on the internet and co-writer Eyal Shavit, who is a musician, is in the process of composing a song using the Hilarious Hebrew method. “Just like the book, the song will teach Hebrew words in an entertaining way that will stick in the listeners’ minds,” he said.
Dr. Carmit Altman of Bar-Ilan University. (photo by Carmit Altman)
“Anna,” a preschooler in the Israeli city of Bat Yam, was thought to be cognitively impaired because testing her in Hebrew showed her cognitive skills lagging behind her classmates. But, when retested in her home language, Russian, she was found to be normal. About half of all Israeli children speak a different language at home than in school, making Israel possibly the world’s best “laboratory” for researching the still little-understood phenomenon of growing up with two or more spoken languages.
One important Israeli discovery is that comparing bilingual kids like Anna to monolingual children is like comparing apples to pears, according to Bar-Ilan University Prof. Sharon Armon-Lotem. For two decades, her lab has studied language-acquisition processes of Israeli preschoolers from English-, Russian- and Amharic-speaking homes.
Roughly 20% of children entering first grade in Israeli secular public schools come from immigrant homes in which the dominant language is not Hebrew. The largest cohort is Russian-speakers, numbering about 1.2 million out of an overall Israeli population of 8.7 million.
Adding more than a million Israeli households where Arabic, Yiddish or African languages are spoken, the percentage of bilingual children climbs to as high as 50% of the general population, Armon-Lotem told Israel21c.
To evaluate bilingualism properly, one must understand that children who grow up speaking two or more languages in everyday life are not using the same brain processes as do monolingual children learning a second language in school, note Armon-Lotem and other Israeli experts. And, if bilingual children like Anna initially have a smaller Hebrew vocabulary, they have better syntax and concept-generation skills in both languages. Overall, they develop language no differently than monolingual peers, unless they have developmental language disorder (DLD).
DLD, estimated to affect five to seven percent of both monolingual and bilingual children, causes dramatic delays in language acquisition not related to other impairments. DLD might manifest differently in each of a child’s two languages, but usually shows up as difficulty with word retrieval and grammar. Since these same phenomena can happen in typically developing bilingual children as they learn the majority language, bilingual children with and without DLD are often misdiagnosed.
Armon-Lotem emphasized that bilingualism does not lead to impairment. From 2009 to 2013, she led a network of researchers from 26 European and five non-European countries in formulating standards for characterizing typical bilingual development and identifying atypical bilingual development in more than 30 language pairs. Research by Natalia Meir in Armon-Lotem’s lab was the first to show that it is possible to disentangle typical and impaired language development, and with 90% accuracy.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in this area in Israel,” said Prof. Joel Walters, professor emeritus of linguistics at Bar-Ilan and now chair of the department of communication disorders at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem, which hosts hundreds of specialists at its annual conference on communication disorders in multilingual and multicultural populations.
Walters’ study of the processes underlying how the brain merges two or more languages into a single utterance is informed by recent brain imaging of bilinguals. One of his focuses is “codeswitching,” when a bilingual speaker starts a sentence or word in one language and switches to the other.
“Codeswitching was once thought of as a random phenomenon but actually it’s very systematic and occurs in sentences, phrases and even within words,” Walters told Israel21c. An English-Hebrew bilingual child might tell her sister “muzi,” merging the English word “move” with the Hebrew “zuzi,” for example.
Walters and two co-authors recently published in the International Journal of Bilingualism about their study of Russian-Hebrew bilingual 6-year-olds asked to retell a Russian story to a Hebrew-speaking puppet, a Hebrew story to a Russian-speaking puppet and a codeswitched story to a bilingual puppet. The children were also asked to respond to conversational questions asked in Russian, Hebrew and codeswitched speech about holidays and activities at home and in preschool. In both tasks, the children did more codeswitching from Russian to Hebrew, “because that’s the language of school and street and that’s the language that will help them integrate socially.” However, in children with impaired language development, the directionality is not as predictable, said Walters.
As Israeli researchers formulate better ways of evaluating and treating bilingual children with DLD, Armon-Lotem is planning to establish a global database of voice files sent from clinicians and preschool teachers who work with bilingual children in different language pairs. Data scientists at Bar-Ilan will use new methods in machine learning and big data to better identify existing markers of DLD and possibly find new markers.
Am I Russian or Israeli?
Carmit Altman of Bar-Ilan’s School Counseling and Child Development Programs studies the social impact of growing up bilingual, looking at family language policy – what language parents want their child to speak and how they enforce that preference.
One of her group’s frequently cited studies, published in 2014, examined the language policy of 65 Israeli families raising their children in Russian. They found three main approaches: parents with a strict policy of speaking only Russian at home; parents who don’t forbid Hebrew at home and sometimes encourage it; and those who actively promote both Hebrew and Russian at home for speaking and reading. They predicted that the strictest language policy would result in the best performance in Russian but the middle group performed just as well. Children from this group also showed an advantage in Hebrew in tasks predictive of future Hebrew literacy skills. “In syntax, all the kids did better in Hebrew than in Russian, with no group differences,” Altman said.
Altman’s lab also studies how bilingual children and their parents perceive their children’s language abilities, and their sociolinguistic identity and preferences. They invented a “magic ladder” scale on which preschoolers can attach happy and sad magnet faces to rate their agreement with statements such as “I speak Hebrew well.”
Parents of both English-Hebrew and Russian-Hebrew bilingual children think their children prefer Hebrew, but the kids say they prefer their home language, Altman found. And, while the kids consider themselves hyphenated Israelis, their parents consider them totally Israeli.
There were also differences in performance perception. “In Russian-Hebrew families, both children and parents think the children perform similarly in Russian and Hebrew. In English-Hebrew families, children feel they perform better in English, while parents think the children have similar abilities in both languages,” said Altman.
In collaboration with Armon-Lotem, Altman’s group is developing tools to help researchers understand these differences and to help preschool teachers detect which bilingual children may need a DLD evaluation.
Advantages of bilingualism
The ability to speak more than one language is widely accepted as beneficial in ways from the practical (business, academics, travel) to the medical (possibly delaying symptoms of dementia). When Altman was doing a post-doc in New York, she and her husband spoke Hebrew to their children at home. She feels that raising kids bilingually “is a gift you can give your child for life” and that cross-generational communication is one strong motivation for doing so.
“Having more than one language and more than one culture is definitely a huge advantage in life,” agreed Armon-Lotem.
It is less clear whether bilingualism sharpens “executive functions,” such as shifting attention and inhibiting instructions, as was believed in past decades.
“In one study, we found that English-Hebrew bilingual children with DLD show an advantage in executive function over monolingual children with DLD,” said Armon-Lotem. “But we didn’t find the same in Russian-Hebrew bilinguals. We might be able to find cognitive advantages for certain populations at certain age ranges and within certain tasks.”
Armon-Lotem and her colleagues are beginning to study bilingualism in children with autism and Down syndrome, and will provide tools to help bilingual preschool children, including Eritrean asylum-seekers in Jerusalem, tell coherent stories in Hebrew and their home language.
Israel21c is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.
Lesley Morris, left, and Gayle Robyn Morris at the Bayit’s Ladies’ Sushi Night. (photo by Lauren Kramer)
In every community, and ours is no exception, there are folks who frequently capture the spotlight for their work while others quietly get things done behind the scenes, flying below the media radar. In our new Kibitz & Schmooze profile, we’ll try to highlight members of Greater Vancouver’s Jewish community who are doing outstanding, admirable and mention-worthy work out of view of the general public. If you know of profile subjects who fit this description, please email [email protected].
Shari Linde is a specialist in communication disorders and founder of Advantage Speech-Language Pathology. (photo from Shari Linde)
As a specialist in communication disorders and founder of Advantage Speech-Language Pathology, Shari Linde’s days are filled with children and adults who need help for language or speech delays or disorders, stuttering, autism, voice problems, strokes, dementia and even accent reduction.
“I see adult immigrants whose accents affect how well they are understood. Sometimes their jobs depend on their ability to communicate in good English,” says the 48-year-old Edmonton native who moved to British Columbia in 1994.
“There are lots of tears in my office and the work requires a great deal of compassion,” she adds. “You have to be able to break difficult news to a family in this field. It’s good to know that you’re helping people and making a difference, but sometimes it’s very sad, too.”
Now residing in Richmond with her family, Linde’s Steveston-based firm of 10 therapists sees a constant stream of clients of all ages – not just because she and her team are great speech therapists, but also because there’s a dire shortage of speech-language professionals across the country. “There’s only 11 schools across Canada offering the two-year graduate program and UBC has only 36 graduates a year,” she explains.
A dynamic professional who thrives on challenge, Linde enjoys sharing her personal knowledge and experiences through regular guest lectures at the University of British Columbia and at conferences, rehabilitation agencies, schools and preschools.
She also supplements her private practice with medical-legal work as an expert witness in British Columbia and Alberta. Linde’s been called to testify in ICBC cases, medical malpractice suits and insurance claims, where she helps to determine the cost of future services and equipment for people whose communication deficits result from brain or other injuries. Some of it can be “pretty awful stuff,” she admits. “But I do it because it keeps me on my toes, it’s fascinating work and it gets me out of my normal routine of regular clients. It makes me think about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and what impact my work has.”
The impact can be immense for Linde’s speech therapy patients. “There are days where the changes required from a child are easily made, or when I see adults whose speech impediments are quickly resolved. In cases like that, you walk out of the office feeling victorious, like you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing,” she says. “Other things I see make me sad and angry, such as the victims of accidents from drunk driving or abuse and kids with brain damage from strokes or serious medical conditions. Those are days when you go home extremely grateful for what you have.”
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Fifteen Richmond women attended the challah bake hosted by Chanie Baitelman of Chabad of Richmond at her home on Jan. 18, where they learned how to knead, braid and bake challah. (photo by Lauren Kramer)
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It’s no secret Vancouverites love sushi but, after the Bayit’s Ladies’ Sushi Night, held on Jan. 12, there are at least 50 women who can now make their own! The event was organized by Rivky Varnai and Matti Feigelstock. Attendees learned how to make a variety of rolls before enjoying the fruits of their labour. Pictured here are sushi-makers, left to right, Liorah Johnson, Naama Shafran-Matis, Yelena Novikov and Ayana Honig. (photo by Lauren Kramer)
Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.
