Somewhere Else Entirely by Ruth Fainlight

Author:Ruth Fainlight [Ruth Fainlight]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780374390
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Language

My aunt Ann is working in the kitchen, cooking. Steam rises from the pans on the stove. Her printed cotton housedress is short-sleeved and low-necked, but the pale flesh of her arms and chest, her face bare of any makeup, and the cloth between her shoulder blades and under her arms are damp from the heat. I am sitting on the floor half underneath the kitchen table, almost at her feet, looking at a sample book of swatches of different-coloured fabrics which a friend of hers brought over for me to play with. No other person is part of/enters this scenario – we seem to be alone in the apartment. The men: my father and her husband Roscoe, were at work; where they went to do it and what they did, were outside my range of interest.

The two sisters, my mother Fanny and my aunt Ann, lived in neighbouring apartments in the Bronx then, although I am not sure how long this arrangement lasted, and there is no one left to tell me; but not very long, I suspect. It suited them both: they enjoyed speaking Yiddish when they were alone during the day. Neither my father nor uncle spoke or understood the language, but it was the two women’s mother tongue, the idiom of their family home, the only language their parents really understood, in spite of years in the USA and the grocery store – first in Harlem and then further down the island into Manhattan – which the overworked mother ran, while her husband followed the tradition of the old country and spent his time studying Talmud and Torah and dominating the family, as well as all the neighourhood women who came into the store to buy their groceries. Or so I gathered; both those grandparents were dead before their daughters married.

The sound of my aunt’s and mother’s exchanges, whether murmured or raucous as they laughed together at some ridiculous memory, was the background of that time in my life. I never understood what they were saying, apart from the few interpolated English phrases, but whenever I hear it: Yiddish originally being a German dialect into which words from Hebrew and various European languages were incorporated, I always feel on the verge of being able to understand German.

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