The Periodic Table (2 page)

Its historical interest is meager, since it was never spoken by more than a few thousand people; but its human interest is great, as are all languages on the frontier and in transition. In fact it contains an admirable comic force, which springs from the contrast between the texture of the discourse, which is the rugged, sober, and laconic Piedmontese dialect, never written except on a bet, and the Hebrew inlay, snatched from the language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geologic, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier. But this contrast reflects another, the essential conflict of the Judaism of the Diaspora, scattered among the Gentiles, that is, the
goyim,
torn between their divine vocation and the daily misery of existence; and still another, even more general, which is inherent in the human condition, since man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. The Jewish people, after the dispersion, have lived this conflict for a long time and dolorously, and have drawn from it, side by side with its wisdom, also its laughter, which in fact is missing in the Bible and the Prophets. It pervades Yiddish, and, within its modest limits, it also pervades the bizarre speech of our fathers of this earth,
{1}
which I want to set down here before it disappears: a skeptical, good-natured speech, which only to a careless examination could appear blasphemous, whereas it is rich with an affectionate and dignified intimacy with God—Nôssgnôr (“Our Lord”), Adonai Eloenó (“Praise be the Lord”), Cadòss Barôkhu (“Dear Lord”).

Its humiliated roots are evident. For example, there are missing, because useless, words for “sun,” “man,” and “city,” while words are present for “night,” “to hide,” “money,” “prison,” “dream” (the last, though, used almost exclusively in the locution
bahalom, “
in a dream,” to be added jokingly to an affirmation, and to be understood by one’s interlocutor, and by him alone, as its contrary), “to steal,” “to hang,” and suchlike. Besides this, there exist a good number of disparaging words, used sometimes to judge persons but more typically employed, for example, between wife and husband in front of a Christian shopkeeper’s counter when uncertain about the purchase. We mention:
n saròd,
the royal plural, no longer understood as such, of the Hebrew
tsara,
which means “misfortune” and is used to describe a piece of goods or a person of scant value; there also exists its graceful diminutive,
sarôdĭnn,
and at the same time I would not want forgotten the ferocious linkage
sarôd e senssa manòd
used by the marriage broker
(marosav)
to describe ugly girls without dowries;
hasirud,
an abstract collective from
hasir,
which means “pig” and therefore is more or less equivalent to “filth, piggishness.” It should be noted that the sound “u” (French) does not exist in Hebrew; instead there is the ending “ut” (with the Italian “u”), which serves to coin abstract terms (for example,
malkhut,
“kingdom”), but it lacks the strongly disparaging connotation it had in jargon usage. Another use, typical and obvious, of these and similar terms was in the store, between the owner and the clerks and against the customers. In the Piedmont of the last century the trade in cloth was often in Jewish hands, and from it was born a kind of specialized sub-jargon which, transmitted by the clerks become owners in their turn, and not necessarily Jews, has spread to many stores in the field and still lives, spoken by people who are quite surprised if by chance they happen to find out that they are using Hebrew words. Some, for example, still use the expression
na vesta a kinim
to describe a polka-dot dress: now,
kinim
are lice, the third of the ten scourges of Egypt, enumerated and chanted in the ritual of the Jewish Passover.

There is also a rather large assortment of not very decent terms, to be used not only with their real meaning in front of children but also instead of curses, in which case, compared to the corresponding Italian and Piedmontese terms, they offer, besides the already mentioned advantage of not being understood, also that of relieving the heart without abrading the mouth.

Certainly more interesting for the student of customs are the few terms that allude to things pertaining to the Catholic faith. In this case, the originally Hebraic form is corrupted much more profoundly, and this for two reasons: in the first place, secrecy was rigorously necessary here because their comprehension by Gentiles could have entailed the danger of being charged with sacrilege; in the second place, the distortion in this case acquires the precise aim of denying, obliterating the sacral content of the word, and thus divesting it of all supernatural virtue. For the same reason, in all languages the Devil is named with many appellations of an allusive and euphemistic character, which make it possible to refer to him without proffering his name. The church (Catholic) was called
tôneuà,
a word whose origins I have not been able to reconstruct, and which probably takes from Hebrew only its sound; while the synagogue, with proud modesty, was simply called the
scola
(“school”), the place where one learns and is brought up. In a parallel instance, the rabbi is not described with the word
rabbi
or
rabbenu
(“our rabbi”) but as
morénô
(“our teacher”), or
kbakhàm
(“the wise man”). In fact in “school” one is not afflicted by the hateful
khaltrúm
of the Gentiles:
khaltrúm,
or
khantrúm,
is the ritual and bigotry of the Catholics, intolerable because polytheistic and above all because swarming with images (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me; Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... and shalt not bow down thyself to them,” Exodus 20:3) and therefore idolatrous. For this term too, steeped in execration, the origin is obscure, almost certainly not Hebraic; but in other Jewish-Italian jargons there is the adjective
khalto,
in the sense precisely of “bigot” and used chiefly to describe the Christian worshiper of images.

A-issà
is the Madonna (simply, that is, “the woman”). Completely cryptic and indecipherable—and that was to be foreseen—is the term
Odo,
with which, when it was absolutely unavoidable, one alluded to Christ, lowering one’s voice and looking around with circumspection; it is best to speak of Christ as little as possible because the myth of the God-killing people dies hard.

Many other terms were drawn exactly as is from the ritual and the holy books, which Jews born in the last century read more or less fluently in the original Hebrew, and more often than not understood, at least partially; but, in jargon usage, they tended to deform or arbitrarily enlarge the semantic area. From the root
shafòkh,
which is equivalent to “pour” and appears in Psalm 79 (“Pour out Thy wrath upon the heathen that have not recognized Thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not invoked Thy name”), our ancient mothers have taken the homely expression
fé sefkh,
that is, “to make
sejokh,”
with which one described with delicacy the vomit of infants. From
rúakh,
plural
rukhòd,
which means “breath,” illustrious term that can be read in the dark and admirable second verse of Genesis (“The wind of the Lord breathed upon the face of the waters”) was taken
tire ’n rúakh,
“make a wind,” in its diverse physiological significances, where one catches a glimpse of the Biblical intimacy of the Chosen People with its Creator. As an example of practical application, there has been handed down the saying of Aunt Regina, seated with Uncle David in the Cafe Florio on Via Po:
“Davidin, bat la carta, c’as sento nen le rukhòd!”
(“David, thump your cane, so they don’t hear your winds!”), which attests to a conjugal relationship of affectionate intimacy. As for the cane, it was at that time a symbol of social status, just as traveling first class on the railroad can be today. My father, for example, owned two canes, a bamboo cane for weekdays, and another of malacca with a silver-plated handle for Sunday. He did not use the cane to lean on (he had no need for that), but rather to twirl jovially in the air and to shoo insolent dogs from his path: in short, as a scepter to distinguish him from the vulgar crowd.

Barakhà
is the benediction a pious Jew is expected to pronounce more than a hundred times a day, and he does so with profound joy, since by doing so he carries on a thousand-year-old dialogue with the Eternal, who in every
barakhà
is praised and thanked for His gifts. Grandfather Leonin was my great-grandfather. He lived at Casale Monferrato and had flat feet; the alley in front of his house was paved with cobblestones, and he suffered when he walked on it. One morning he came out of his house and found the alley paved with flagstones, and he exclaimed from the depths of his heart,
“’N abrakha a coi goyim c’a I’an fait i losi!”
(“A blessing on those unbelievers who made these paving stones!”). As a curse, however, there was the curious linkage
medà meshônà,
which literally means “strange death” but actually is an imitation of the Piedmontese
assident,
that is, in plain Italian, “may he drop dead.” To the same Grandpa Leonin is attributed the inexplicable imprecation
“C’ai takeissa ’na medà meshônà faita a paraqua”
(“May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella”).

Nor could I forget Barbarico, close in space and time, so much so that he just missed (only by a single generation) being my uncle in the strict sense of the word. Of him I preserve a personal and thus articulated and complex memory. Not
figé dans une attitude,
like that of the mythical characters I have mentioned up until now. The comparison to inert gases with which these pages start fits Barbarico like a glove.

He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. That is, he liked men, and especially women, the meadows, the sky; but not hard work, the racket made by wagons, the intrigues for the sake of a career, the hustling for one’s daily bread, commitments, schedules, and due dates; nothing in short of all that characterized the feverish life of the town of Casale Monferrato in 1890. He would have liked to escape, but he was too lazy to do so. His friends and a woman who loved him, and whom he tolerated with distracted benevolence, persuaded him to take the test for the position of ship’s doctor aboard a transatlantic steamer. He won the competition easily, made a single voyage from Genoa to New York, and on his return to Genoa handed in his resignation because in America “there was too much noise.”

After that he settled in Turin. He had several women, all of whom wanted to redeem and marry him, but he regarded both matrimony and an equipped office and the regular exercise of his profession as too much of a commitment. Around about 1930 he was a timid little old man, shriveled and neglected, frightfully nearsighted; he lived with a big, vulgar
goyà,
from whom he tried at intervals and feebly to free himself, and whom he described from time to time as
’na sotià
(“a nut”),
’na hamortà
(“a donkey”), and
’na gran beemà
(“a great beast”), but without acrimony and indeed with a vein of inexplicable tenderness. This
goyà
even wanted to have him
samdà
“baptized” (literally, “destroyed”): a thing he had always refused to do, not out of religious conviction but out of indifference and a lack of initiative.

Barbaricô had no less than twelve brothers and sisters, who described his companion with the ironic and cruel name of Magna Morfina (Aunt Morphine): ironic because the woman, poor thing, being a
goyà
and childless could not be a
magna
except in an extremely limited sense, and indeed the term
magna
was to be understood as its exact opposite, a
non-magna,
someone excluded and cut off from the family; and cruel because it contained a probably false and at any rate pitiless allusion to a certain exploitation on her part of Barbaricô’s prescription blanks.

The two of them lived in a filthy and chaotic attic room on Borgo Vanchiglia. My uncle was a fine doctor, full of human wisdom and diagnostic intuition, but he spent the entire day stretched out on his cot reading books and old newspapers: he was an attentive reader, eclectic and untiring, with a long memory, although myopia forced him to hold the print three inches from his eyeglasses, which were as thick as the bottom of a beer glass. He only got up when a patient sent for him, which often happened because he almost never asked to be paid; his patients were the poor people on the outskirts of town, from whom he would accept as recompense a half-dozen eggs, or some lettuce from the garden, or even a pair of worn-out shoes. He visited his patients on foot because he did not have the money for the streetcar; when on the street he caught a dim view, through the mist of his myopia, of a girl, he went straight up to her and to her surprise examined her carefully, circling from a foot away. He ate almost nothing, and in a general way he had no needs; he died at over ninety, with discretion and dignity.

Like Barbarico in her rejection of the world was Grandmother Fina, one of the four sisters whom everyone called Fina: this first name singularity was owed to the fact that the four girls had been sent successively to the same wet nurse in Bra whose name was Delfina and who called all her “nurslings” by that name. Grandmother Fina lived at Carmagnola, in an apartment on the second floor, and did splendid crochet work. At eighty-six she had a slight indisposition, a
caodana,
as ladies used to have in those days and today mysteriously no longer do: from then on, for twenty years—that is, until her death—she never left her room; on the Sabbath, from her little terrace overflowing with geraniums, fragile and pale, she waved her hand to the people who came out of the
scola
(“synagogue”). But she must have been quite different in her youth, if what is told about her is true: namely, that her husband having brought to the house as a guest the Rabbi of Moncalvo, an erudite and illustrious man, she had served him, without his knowing, a pork cutlet, since there was nothing else in the pantry. Her brother Barbaraflín (Raphael), who before his promotion to Barba was known as
I fieul d’ Moise ’d Celin
(“the son of the Moses of Celin”), now at a mature age and very rich because of the money earned from army supplies had fallen in love with the very beautiful Dolce Valabrega from Gassino; he did not dare declare himself, wrote her love letters that he never mailed, and then wrote impassioned replies to himself.