Made In America (28 page)

Still other Dutch terms came to English by way of nautical contacts, reflecting the Netherlands’ days of eminence on the seas, among them
hoist, bumpkin
(originally a short projecting spar; how it became transferred to a rustic character is unclear),
bulwark, caboose
(originally a ship’s galley),
freebooter, hold, boom
and
sloop.

As Dutch demonstrates, a group’s linguistic influence bears scant relation to the numbers of people who spoke it. The Irish came in their millions, but supplied only a handful of words, notably
smithereens, lallapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan
(from Gaelic
uallachán,
a braggart
²⁰
) and
slew
(Gaelic
sluagh),
plus one or two semantic nuances, notably a more casual approach to the distinctions between
shall
and
will,
and the habit of attaching definite articles to conditions that previously lacked them, so that whereas a Briton might go into hospital with flu or measles, Americans go to
the
hospital and suffer from
the
flu and
the
measles.

The Scandinavians imparted even less. With the exception of a very few food words like
gravlaks
and
smorgasbord,
and a few regional terms like
lutfisk
(a fish dish) and
lefse
(a pancake) that are generally unknown outside the upper Midwest and the books of Garrison Keillor, their linguistic presence in America left no trace.

Italian was slightly more productive, though again only with food words –
spaghetti, pasta, macaroni, ravioli, pizza
and the like. The few non-food Italian terms that have found a home in English, like
ciao
and
paparazzo,
came much later and not through the medium of immigration.

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 poor. At least one-fourth could not read or write. To the ‘uptown Jews’, these new arrivals were something of an embarrassment. They referred to them as ‘barbarians’ or ‘Asiatics’, and regarded speaking Yiddish as a mark of poverty and ignorance.
²³

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 were deemed by census enumerators to have a workable grasp of English, and most of those who did not were recent arrivals or temporary residents (many Italians in particular came for a part of every year when there was no farm work to be had at home), or felt themselves too old to learn. Although most urban, non-native speakers of English could get by without English, most chose not to. There were to be sure troubling disparities. Only 3 per cent of German immigrants did not speak English in 1930, while almost 13 per cent of Poles and 16 per cent of Italians (rising to over 25 per cent for Italian women) existed in linguistic isolation, though within a generation those proportions would become negligible.
³⁰

Occasionally rearguard actions were fought. In 1890, when a law was introduced requiring English to be used exclusively in parochial schools in Milwaukee, the German community was so incensed that it turfed out the city’s Republican administration and brought in a Democratic one. As late as the outbreak of World War I, Baltimore had four elementary schools that taught exclusively in German. Already, however, those trying to protect their linguistic heritage were fighting a losing battle.

All this is understandable in urban areas where it was necessary and desirable to venture out of the neighbourhood from time to time, and where mingling between various immigrant groups was inevitable. It doesn’t so easily explain more isolated communities. At the turn of the century throughout the Midwest there existed hundreds of towns or clusters of towns inhabited almost exclusively by specific linguistic groups. Iowa, for instance, had Elk Horn (founded by Danes), Pella (by the Dutch) and the Amana Colonies (by Germans), among many others. In each of these places, the local populace was both homogeneous and sufficiently remote to escape the general pressure to become
Americanized. Even if they learned English in order to listen to the radio and converse with outsiders, we might reasonably expect them to preserve their mother tongue for private use. In fact, almost without exception, they did not. By the 1930s in such towns English was not only the main language spoken but the only language spoken. Even those German immigrants who came to America with the intention of founding a
Kleindeutschland,
or Little Germany, in Texas or Wisconsin, eventually gave up the fight. Today it is unusual to find anyone in any such town who knows more than a few words of his ancestors’ tongue. Clearly even here the desire to feel a part of the wider culture proved irresistible in the long term.

Only one group has managed to resist in significant numbers the temptations of English. I refer to the speakers of the curious dialect that is known generally, if mistakenly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. The name is an accident of history. From the early eighteenth century to almost the end of the nineteenth,
Dutch
in American English was applied not just to the language of Holland and its environs, but to much else that was bewilderingly foreign, most especially the German language – doubtless in confusion with the German word ‘Deutsch’.

The Germans came to Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn, who believed that their ascetic religious principles fitted comfortably with his own Quaker beliefs. The German influx, eventually comprising about 100,000 people, or a third of Pennsylvania’s population, was made up of a variety of loosely related sects, notably Mennonites, Schwenkenfelders, Dunkards, Moravians and Amish, but it was the Amish in particular who spoke the Palatinate dialect of High German that eventually evolved into the tongue that most know as Pennsylvania Dutch. To the Pennsylvania Dutch the language is called
Muddersrschprooch.
To scholars and the linguistically fastidious it is Pennsylvania German.