Made In America - Bill Bryson [93]
German by contrast prospered on American soil. Germans had been present in America from early colonial times – by 1683 they had formed their own community, Germantown, near Philadelphia – but the bulk of their immigration came in two relatively short, subsequent bursts. The first, numbering some 90,000, happened mostly in the five years from 1749 to 1754 and was largely completed by the time of the American Revolution.21 From 1830-50 there was a second, larger influx focused mostly on urban areas like St Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo and New York, in several of which the German cultural impact was not just enormous but domineering. As an editorial writer for the Houston Post noted at the outbreak of World War I, ‘Germany seems to have lost all of her foreign possessions with the exception of Milwaukee, St Louis and Cincinnati.‘22
Only a few German words naturalized into English date from the earlier period of immigration, notably sauerkraut (1776), pretzel (1824) and dumb in the sense of stupid (1825). Most Americanized German terms arose during or soon after the second wave: to loaf and loafer (1835), ouch, bub and pumpernickel (1839), fresh (in the sense of being forward; 1848), kindergarten (1852), nix (1855), shyster (probably from Scheisse, ’shit’; 1856), check (in the sense of a restaurant bill; 1868), and possibly hoodlum (from the Bavarian dialect word hodalump; 1872). Rather slower to assimilate were delicatessen (1889), kaput (1895), fink (from Shmierfink, a base character, literally ‘a greasy bird’; 1892), kaffeeklatsch and hockshop (1903), and scram (1920). From German speakers too came the American custom of saying gesundheit (’health!’) after a sneeze, so long upon departing, and how as an intensifier, and the practice of putting fest on the ends of many words – for example, songfest, foodfest, slugfest and talkfest.
Many German terms underwent some generally minor modifications of spelling to make them accord with English practice, so that autsch became ouch, frech became fresh (in the sense of impertinent), krank (unwell) became cranky, zweiback became zwieback, Schmierkiise became smearcase, and Leberwurst became liverwurst.
Equally productive, if rather less diffused through society, was Yiddish (from Middle High German jüdisch diutsch, ’Jewish German’), brought to America by eastern European Jews beginning in about 1880. Though based on German, Yiddish is written from right to left like Hebrew, and uses Hebrew characters. It originated in the early twelfth century in the Jewish ghettoes of central Europe. As the Jews dispersed through Europe they took Yiddish with them, enlivening it along the way with borrowings from Aramaic, Hebrew, various Slavic and Romance languages, and finally English. By the late nineteenth century it was the mother tongue of some eleven million people, a quarter of whom ended up in the United States.
As with the Germans, Jews came to America in well-defined but far more culturally distinct waves – first a small block of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal (Sephardic means Spaniard in Hebrew) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; then, from the 1820s to the 1880s, a much larger group of Ashkenazi Jews (named for the scriptural figure Ashchenaz) from elsewhere in western Europe, particularly Germany; and finally, from about 1880 to 1924, a tidal wave of eastern European Jews, especially from Poland and Russia.
Members of the first two groups were mostly educated and comfortably off, and they slipped relatively smoothly into American life. Many of the great names of American business and philanthropy – Guggenheim, Kuhn, Loeb, Seligman, Schiff, Lewisohn, Morgenthau, Speyer – trace their origins to the first and more particularly second waves. Those in the final diaspora were by contrast almost universally ragged and