Made In America - Bill Bryson [94]
It was these poor eastern Europeans, however, who would more than any other group reshape America’s concept of itself. They would create Hollywood, revivify the entertainment industry and provide many of America’s most cherished creative talents, from the Marx Brothers to the composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. The latter two would get their start in the New York music district known as Tin Pan Alley (so called because of the cacophony of noise to be heard there), Gershwin with ‘Swanee’ and Berlin with the 1908 hit ‘Yidl with Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime’, a song that, in the words of the writer Marvin Gelfind, ‘speaks volumes on the process called assimilation’.24
Among the Yiddish words that found their way to a greater or lesser extent into mainstream English were to kibbitz, schmaltz (literally ‘chicken fat’), schlemiel, schlock, keister (rear end), nosh, phooey, mashuggah (crazy), schmo (a backward person), schnozzle, to schlep, chutzpah, schikse (a Christian female), bagel, pastrami and glitch (from glitschen, ’to slip’), plus a raft of expressions without which American English would be very much the poorer: I should live so long, I should worry, get lost, I’m coming already, I need it like I need a hole in the head, and many others. *22
Many Yiddish terms convey degrees of nuance that make them practically untranslatable, except perhaps through humour, a quality never far off when Yiddish is under discussion. Chutzpah, for example, is usually defined in dictionaries as a kind of brazenness, but its subtleties cannot be better conveyed than by the old joke about the boy who kills his parents, then begs mercy from the court because he has only recently been orphaned.
Such was the scale of immigration that by 1930 more than 35 per cent of white Americans were foreign born or had at least one foreign-born parent.25 Confined as they often were to ethnic enclaves by a combination of economics, prejudice and convenience, it is a wonder that America didn’t splinter into scores of linguistic pockets. But it did not, and for several reasons. First, as we have already seen, people moved on as assimilation and economic circumstances permitted. An area like that around Hester Street in New York might remain Yiddish-speaking for several generations, but the speakers were a constantly changing mass. For the most part, foreign immigrants couldn’t wait to learn English and circulate in the wider world. Indeed many, particularly among the children of immigrants, refused to speak their ancestral tongue or otherwise acknowledge their ethnic grounding. In 1927, Time magazine pointed out, older Jews were complaining that the younger generation didn’t understand Yiddish.26 At about the same time H. L. Mencken was noting: ‘In cities such as Cleveland and Chicago it is a rare second-generation American of Polish, Hungarian or Croatian stock who even pretends to know his parents’ native language.‘27
Children not only refused to learn their parents’ language, but ‘would reprove their parents for speaking it in front of strangers’.28 As the historian Maldwyn Allen Jones has put it: ‘Culturally estranged from their parents by their American education, and wanting nothing so much as to become and to be accepted as Americans, many second-generation immigrants made deliberate efforts to rid themselves of their heritage. The adoption of American clothes, speech, and interests, often accompanied by the shedding of an exotic surname, were all part of a process whereby antecedents were repudiated as a means of improving status.‘29
‘Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country,’ barked Theodore Roosevelt in 1918. In fact, almost all did. Of the 13.4 million foreign-born inhabitants of the United States in 1930, all but 870,000