Because Yiddish is the absent source language from which the thoughts and actions in English are experienced, it competes with English as the “home” language, or to put it another way, Yiddish is the home culture and English is an everyday language for David, but a foreign culture. Consequently, while actual transliteration from Yiddish is an intrusion in the English text, English inter-textual references can also be an intrusion in the cultural context, because the world of English culture is alien to the text’s cultural environment. The odd result is that English, the language in which the text is written, can itself be experienced as alien by the reader as well as by the characters, as a type of self-distancing or reverse interference. Yiddish reproduction in the English text, in contrast, causes no discomfort to the characters, for the selective reproduction is a mimetic device experienced only by the reader, and it brings an alien element to the text for readers unfamiliar with Yiddish. Hebrew reproductions are experienced as alien by the characters and by the American reader, but as less so by the reader who has the cultural background to identify them and to comprehend their cultural implications.
The Prologue, one of the few passages in the book rendered from an omniscient narrator and not through David as focalizer, introduces the main themes as well as the problem of translation, of bilingualism and biculturalism. It begins with a homogeneous English text and moves toward Yiddish; it moves inward, from the general description of New York Harbor and the mass immigration as part of the American experience, to the specific characters and their Yiddish world. The Prologue opens with an epigraph in italics: “I pray thee ask no questions / this is that Golden Land.” Traditionally, epigraphs provide a motto for a chapter or for an entire work, and they are often quotations from another text. In this case, the epigraph sounds like a quotation, and with its archaic second person singular, it can be associated with English prose of an earlier period. But it is not attributed to any source, nor is it a quotation that is easily recognizable on the part of a literate English reader. Moreover, the capitalizing of “Golden Land” draws attention to that phrase, di goldene medine, which in Yiddish is a popular way of referring to America, standard fare on Second Avenue but also echoed in Yiddish poetry, as in Moshe-Leyb Halpern’s poem, In goldenem land.15 The epigraph is a purely invented quotation, one that seems to be part of English literature, but at the same time seems to be a statement from Yiddish, just as the novel itself, written in English and in the modernist experimental tradition of Joyce, also partakes of the world of Eastern European Jewish culture.
Furthermore, the epigraph itself is repeated two pages later as the reported first utterance of David’s mother, “And this is the Golden Land.” Roth adds, “She spoke in Yiddish.” This explicit attribution of a different language to her speech is the first indication, after the general portrait of newly arrived immigrants, that the novel takes place in a Yiddish-speaking environment, and it provides what Sternberg has called “mimetic synechdoche.”16 Once again, after all of the dialogue conveying the miscommunication and tension between the newly arrived immigrant mother and the settled immigrant father who perceives himself to be partly Americanized, there is a further repetition of the Golden Land motif near the end of the prologue in the narrated interior monologue of Genya, “This was that vast incredible land, the land of freedom, immense opportunity, that Golden Land.” But the prologue actually ends with a short dialogue in Yiddish without any translation:
“Albert,” she said timidly, “Albert.”
“Hm?”
“Gehen vir voinen du? In New York?”
“Nein. Bronzeville. Ich hud dir schoin geschriben.”17
In short, the prologue ends with establishing the literal location of Albert and Genya, not in the Golden Land, but in a real place called Bronzeville, a city of bronze (actually Brownsville). And it is accessible only to the bilingual reader.
The movement of the prologue is inward, from English to Yiddish, from the general depiction of immigration with the image of the Statue of Liberty and the synoptic view of the couple to the individual characters and their specific plans. It moves from the metaphor of the Golden Land, first appearing in an English epigraph, to identification of the Golden Land with the dreams of the Jewish immigrant conveyed in English translation, to the final exchange in Yiddish, which displaces the figurative America with a literal geographical location. With each new repetition, the Golden Land slips into an ironic tone, reinforced by the very tarnished, industrial, and demystifying description of the Statue of Liberty marking the entry to America.
The rest of the novel moves in the opposite direction as that of the Prologue, namely outward, from David’s mother’s kitchen, the realm of Yiddish, to the street and the English world. David’s first word, “Mama,” rather than “Mommy” or “Mother,” marks him as an immigrant. For the first several pages the dialogue between David and his mother takes place in refined, sensitive, and normative language. “‘Lips for me,’ she reminded him, ‘must always be cool as the water that wet them’” (18). Only when David descends to the street and his speech in English dialect is reproduced — “Kentcha see? Id’s coz id’s a machine” (21) — does the reader realize that the previous pages were all taking place in Yiddish. The next stage in the movement toward English is the introduction of English folklore in the form of children’s street chants, transported onto the streets of New York: “Waltuh, Waltuh, Wiuhlflowuh / Growin’ up so high; / So we are all young ladies, / An’ we are ready to die” (23). Not only is the dialect comical, but the refrain is clearly a foreign element in David’s world: Walter is not a Jewish name; wildflowers, even figuratively, are not in evidence anywhere in the urban immigrant neighborhood; and the rest of the book demonstrates that romantic love, young ladies ready to die, is a concept alien to David’s world. The additional irony in this folklore is that its sexual connotations are not evident to the children who are chanting the rhyme.
Allusion to English sources, whether they be street chants, fairy tales, or songs, are always experienced as foreign, and are always ironic. When David perceives their boarder Luter as an ogre, he places him in the folk tale of Puss in Boots (36), in a world of a marquis who marries a princess; and when he tries to keep himself from fearing the cellar door, he repeats stanzas from an American patriotic song, “My country ’tis of dee!” only to reach the refuge of his mother’s kitchen with the line “Land where our fodders died!” Quotations or allusions from English culture, despite their being embedded in an English text, appear as something foreign, as translation from another place.
The felt presence of an absent source language, then, which occasionally makes the English text read as if it were a translation, is conveyed in a number of ways: by explicit attribution of phrases as Yiddish in “reality”; by selective reproduction of Yiddish phrases; by English rendered in Yiddish dialect; and by references to English culture as if it were an intrusion into the main cultural environment of the text. Before looking at intertextual elements from Jewish culture, we need to examine three other strategies for conveying the multilingualism of the text and its cultural world: interlingual homonyms, self-embedding, single-word cultural indicators.
In the first instance, English words are perceived to be homonyms for Yiddish words, and are therefore either accidentally or deliberately misunderstood. When David hears the word “altar,” he thinks it means “alter,” the Yiddish for “old man.” When his aunt announces that her dentist is going to relieve her of pain by using cocaine, the others hear “kockin,” the Yiddish equivalent for defecating (160). And Aunt Bertha herself plays on the similarity between the “molar” which her dentist is going to extract, which she pronounces as “molleh,” and the Yiddish word for “full,” to invent a vulgar pun. “I am going to lose six teeth. And of the six teeth, three he called ‘mollehs’. Now isn’t this a miracle? He’s going to take away a ‘molleh’ and then he’s going to make me ‘molleh’” (160). David makes the mental note that “Aunt Bertha was being reckless tonight.”