Ur-Language

1.

My paternal grandfather, Ya’akov Faibishiak – born in 1892 in Brzeziny, Poland, twenty kilometres east of Łódź – was an illiterate Yiddish-speaking tailor in a town long noted for its Jewish tailors. Yet if to be ‘illiterate’ means to be unable to read or write, I am making an assumption about him: literacy was highly prized amongst even the most impoverished of eastern European Jewry in the nineteenth century and he would have been fluent in Polish and Yiddish (as well as prayerbook Hebrew) even before he arrived in Scotland around 1910 and began to assimilate Glaswegian English into his polyglot sensibility. But reading was something else.

My father, born in 1917, recalled reading Yiddish newspapers as an adolescent to his father Ya’akov – by then known as Jack (the Biblical name Ya’akov is traditionally translated as Jacob). Why would he have been reading to his father? Perhaps my grandfather’s eyesight was failing? Or was it the inability to read the language he grew up with? My father, Archie – he changed his name in adult life from his birth name Haskel, a Yiddishised derivative of the Biblical Yehezkel (‘Ezekiel’) – never explained what was surely more than a bonding exercise in the tenements of the Gorbals. He was a man filled with silences (and secrets), and when he let slip this rare, touching glimpse into his early life, I was too shy to inquire any further. But that my father knew how to read Yiddish was a revelation to me. For I had never heard him speak Yiddish; and although a smattering ...