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Speaking of Louisville ...
November 7, 2003 By Edward Ordman
At the end of the show "Fiddler on the Roof," the
residents are being evicted from the little Russian town of
Anatevka. One comments to another: Nowhere else is their language
spoken quite the same way as it is in Anatevka.
While even as a child I could tell a Boston accent from a
Baltimore accent, I can't describe or reliably reproduce either.
My love of trying to get along in foreign languages is not helped
by my tin ear for accents. But at least twice I've listened
closely enough to someone to hear not just what the person was
saying, but how he or she said it. They were memorable
conversations.
In 1971, I was visiting Jerusalem. My fiancée was in Louisville
and of course I'd promised to telephone her. It was the days
before international direct dialing, telephone credit cards, or
even an easy way to reach an American operator from overseas. I
found a post office in Jerusalem with a telephone booth, where you
could pay at the counter instead of having to put a large number
of coins in a slot. In my broken Hebrew I asked for an operator
who could speak English. I finally got to an international
operator.
I said: "I want to call the United States, Louisville, Kentucky."
Operator: "Yes, what city would you like to call?"
Me: "Louisville."
Operator: "Lou-ee-will is not in my list. Is Loo-ee-will a small
place?"
Me: "It is a big place. The area code is 502."
Operator: "No, I can not make calls by area code, only by the name
of the city."
I tried spelling Kentucky, but no such state was on her list. I
tried spelling Louisville, but we didn't seem to have enough names
of letters in common. As she finally told me there was no such
place as "Loo-ee-will," I noticed how she was pronouncing the name
of the city. Not only was English not her native language, but she
didn't have the standard American set of phonemes (sounds)
available.
I took one last try: "Do you have a city named - " and here I
changed my pronunciation - "Loo-iss-will?"
She replied, "Oh, yes, Loo-iss-will. That city is on my list. Of
course you can call Loo-iss-will. What is the number in
Loo-iss-will?"
Twenty years later, I was in Odessa, Ukraine. Our group of
American tourists was in the Museum of Western Art, and the guide
was showing us Italian Renaissance paintings. Coming to a large
painting of Samson and Delilah, he remarked on the presence of
some very important pieces by the same artist in the Speed Museum
in Louisville. (I'm happy to report he pronounced the name of
Louisville the same way I do.)
The guide then quoted a few sentences of the story of Samson and
Delilah from the Bible, in Hebrew. While his English was heavily
accented, his Hebrew was crystal clear to me. My vocabulary isn't
large, and I didn't understand much of it, but I could have taken
it down as dictation.
And then it occurred to me that my Hebrew pronunciation is not
crystal clear, it is awful. I have a dreadful time making myself
understood when I speak it. This man wasn't speaking crystal-clear
Hebrew, either - he was speaking Hebrew with the exact same
dreadful accent that I have. At the first opportunity, I asked him
where he'd learned Hebrew.
He'd learned it from his father. I'd learned it from mine. They
had each learned Hebrew from their fathers. And where had our
grandfathers come from? Vilnagebirne, his father had told him; the
same thing my father had told me. This was near Vilna, then in
Russia, now in Lithuania.
My grandparents had fled West when World War I was on the horizon.
My father was born in Somersworth, N.H., and I was born in
Norfolk, Va. The guide's parents had fled East, from the impending
World War II, and he had been born near Novosibirsk, in Siberia.
We had a memorable talk, one that wouldn't have happened without
that strange pronunciation, the one our families had carried with
them from so far away.
Somehow we had been brought together in Odessa, 600 miles south of
Vilnagebirne, 2,400 miles from his birthplace, and 6,000 miles
from mine. But the two of us met, and we can testify that the
storyteller of Anatevka told the truth.
Nowhere else, not even in Louisville, is Hebrew spoken quite the
same way as it was in Vilnagebirne.
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