The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Multilingual

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

I’ve been struck by a couple of recent articles in the New York Times dealing with the amazing multiplicity of languages in New York City.  Sam Roberts reported on April 28 that languages and dialects that are dying out in their places of origin (Vlaski, Chaldic and Kashubian to name a few) remain alive and well in New York City.   With an estimated 800 languages spoken in the five boroughs, New York is, writes Roberts, “the most linguistically diverse city in the world.”  This week the Times ran another story about a collaborative play called “167 Tongues” that dramatizes the linguistic (and human) diversity of Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood that is home to 100 different nationalities (and evidently some world class characters).

To me such reports are very welcome in the face of the police-state crackdown on immigrants just enacted in Arizona.  The crackdown is directed at illegal aliens, but of course it extends well beyond. If Russell Pearce, the Arizona state senator who sponsored the bill, and his ilk had their way, the nation’s linguistic palette would be “cleansed” and nothing but American English would be heard from sea to shining sea.  Immigrants’ “refusal” to learn English, the current crop of know-nothing xenophobes contend, is a sign of a larger refusal to assimilate, to surrender allegiance to their countries and cultures of origin and join the mainstream.   This strain of venom is not new.  “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country,” Teddy Roosevelt thundered a century ago. “There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.  We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.”

Nonsense then and nonsense now.  When the nation went to war in 1917, there was widespread fear that the “foreign element,” then nearly one-third of the population, would be unable to fight, unwilling to serve, and incapable of following (or understanding) orders.  As one native-born recruit wrote from boot camp, “Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks, a sprinkling of Chinese and Japs – Jews with expressionless faces, and what not, are all about me.  I’m in a barracks with 270 of them, and so far I’ve found a half dozen men who can speak English without an accent.  Is it possible to make soldiers of these fellows?”

I spoke to scores of descendants of these Slavs, Poles, Italians and expressionless Jews – and two things hit me forcibly: the immigrants in fact made excellent soldiers who served loyally and proudly; and with very few exceptions their children and grandchildren have only the most rudimentary knowledge of their ancestors’ language.  Poles seem to have done a better job than others in preserving their linguistic heritage; the Italian-Americans I interviewed are stuck at “ciao” and “grazie” and the Jews (myself included) have lost all Yiddish aside from schlep and oy.  How many of us now attend language class, pore over census records, and sign up for heritage trips back to the Old Country to keep some shred of our ethnicity alive?  Are we disloyal, suspect “fifty-fifty” Americans because we still make our Neapolitan grandmother’s recipe for struffoli, cherish the Hebrew scroll our grandfather hand-lettered, or hang the Polish flag next to the American flag on the Fourth of July?

Linguistic diversity should be cherished and preserved, not only in New York but everywhere.  I’ll wager that in the course of a generation or two, English will filter into and eventually dominate today’s most entrenched immigrant communities just as it did in the past.  And if it doesn’t – if there remain pockets of our great country where Spanish or Chinese or Vlaski are spoken by stubborn, proud immigrant families, so what?  This is a big country – we’ve got room for “i pluribus.”  But what if, in the nightmare scenario of the xenophobic right, America became officially bi-lingual, like Canada?  Frankly, I’d be proud as hell to live in a country where my grandkids could read both Shakespeare and Cervantes in the original.

5 Comments  |  Permalink  |  Posted in Uncategorized

Comments

1. Len E  |  May 6th, 2010

   Excellent commentary.

2. Sheri Morton  |  May 6th, 2010

   Well said, David!

3. Dan Laskin  |  May 6th, 2010

   Fear and tribalism are, sadly, such powerful forces. I wonder why the need for a sense of identity so often goes hand in hand with a need to exclude, an impulse to narrowness. Language is a delight, always — n’est-ce pas? Verdad?

4. Leona Laskin  |  May 6th, 2010

   AMEN TO YOUR VIEWS

5. michael affatato  |  May 7th, 2010

   very much enjoyed reading this

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