Unusual Books
Wed., October 15, 04:59 PM
I’ve been very fortunate in keeping friends with some of the people I’ve worked for in the past. One of these is currently living and working in Zurich, Switzerland. He wants to know if he should call himself Bosslawyer 2, but the only thing he has in common with my current boss is that they both graduated from law school. He had risen to vice president in his last job and was happy to leave, since he had no wish to be president. (And believe me, the company suffers without him!)
Anyway, my friend MF, enjoying his life in Switzerland, was walking through the Jewish section of Zurich and stopped in a little bookstore, where he found Di Kats der Payats. He phoned me to ask if I was interested; “the first person I thought of was you.” [warm glow]
So he sent me a copy, although it turns out to have been printed in New York. Here it is, picture and all. It never occurred to me that it might be transliterated, since I can read the Hebrew characters. However, MF told me that he showed it to some colleagues, who could understand it because it was “like some old-fashioned German.” Yes, that’s the definition of Yiddish, a mixture of fifteenth century German and Hebrew, written in Hebrew letters. It’s not a word-for-word translation, because it still has to rhyme.
My history with Yiddish is strange, since I came into it from the back door, so to speak. My dad, though he was born in Connecticut, spoke only Yiddish until he started school. Remembering his embarrassment, he was determined that his children speak only English, and we never learned Yiddish as kids. But I took German in high school and began to pick up on the Yiddish he and my mother used (privacy from the kids). So my Yiddish is faulty, but I am enjoying this book immensely.
U.D. is always looking for books about the Holocaust. (I can’t read them anymore. I just can’t take the horror.) In the midst of all she found was Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller. The “holocaust” here refers not to the European events but to the atrocities visited on Korea by the Japanese army. “Comfort women” was how the soldiers termed the women who were turned into prostitutes for their use.
The protagonists of the story are Beccah, a Korean-American woman, and her mother, Akiko, who worked at a comfort station until she was “rescued” by Christian missionaries and brought to the United States. The missionaries believed they had rescued her because they saved her physical being. However, despite being baptized and marrying a Christian minister, Akiko remains more in touch with the ancient Korean spirits, who play a significant part in the plot.
Ms. Keller was born in Seoul, Korea, and now lives in Hawaii. Her depictions of the horror of Korea and her descriptions of the ambivalent love between mother and child are all very real.
This story is completely out of my experience. I have thought of recommending it to Korean children who were adopted by Caucasian Americans. Horrible though they may find it, it can still give them some insight into their heritage. Librarians or teachers with students of Korean descent might find it of interest as well, remembering that it is for the mature reader.
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Just in case you were wondering, Husband is fine. He has come to believe me, that oatmeal is magic.
