The Hannibal Lecter story maintains that he was born into an aristocratic family in Lithuania in 1933. He lived in Lecter Castle, which has been the family seat of the Lecters since the time of Hannibal the Grim (1365-1428). When the Nazis arrive, count Lecter instead of joining the Germans as Lithuanians did en masse, hides in a remote hunting lodge in the woods. The Nazis catch up with him and kill everybody except Hannibal, although we are led to believe that something in his soul, too, has perished, as a result of seeing Mischa killed and eaten. It remains possible, though unconfirmed, that he unwittingly drank hot soup made from her bones. Lecter´s mother, improbably, was an Italian contess, a Visconti. The Visconti shield, above, shows a legendary serpent devoring a man, supposed to be a Sarracen.
The story of Dr. Lecter´s identity is, transparently, a myth. There are no 800 years old aristocratic landowning families in Lituania, but Baltic German Junkers. They certainly welcomed the Nazis and the Nazis adored them as the highest representatives of the Teutonic race. Their children did not wander around unprotected in the forests. Most probably, the young Lecter, having found refuge in America, mythified his genetic origin and transformed his pennyless schreiber father into a Count, like many European refugees did. But blood is stronger than fiction. Lecter´s yiddische kopf reveals unmistakeably generations of Poylische yeschive-boychers, as does his attraction to the uneducated full corn blonde schikse Clarice Starling.
10 comments:
You ungarishe yidn have a lot to learn. There's a big difference between a Litvak, about whom one could believe anything, even cannibalism, and an emese Poilische yid. Lithuania sits on the other side of the dividing line between the good kind of Jews (those that season their gefilte fish with sugar as G-d intended) and the other kind.
Yes, this is a difference I never understood. But I am learning... Was Menachem Begin a Pollak, or a Litvak (from Brest-Litovsk)?
Following your comment, I was wondering if Dr. Hannibal Lecter´s culinary habits could shed light on his this conundrum. For example, what is the meaning of his seasoning with caper? Capers are a distinctive ingredient in Sicilian and southern Italian cooking, like in salsa puttanesca. They are also served with cold smoked salmon (especially lox and cream cheese). Capers have anti-oxidants so must be healthy. Is caper a Litvish condiment?
Another argument pro the good doctor being a Poilische yid is his assumed name: Lecter. As said, there are no Lituanian nobles of that name, nor it is a Lituanian name. The nearest association Goggle throws up is Lektor which is an academic title in Polish universities (associate professor). Polish, see? Polish Jews took up this kind of names after the war, like Provisor, Parasol, etc. And please dont tell me that Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character. Art is more real than reality.
Brest (or as it was known to Jews, Brisk) is a hard case because it sat right on the border. When Begin was growing up it was in Poland, but historically (and today) it belongs to Belarus, where they speak Litvish Yiddish. See this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lithuanian_state_in_13-15th_centuries.png
However, I'm sure that when he went to law school in Warsaw he would have been teased mercilessly if he had kept up his Litvish accent so he probably gave it up then.
Polish Yiddish has very distinct vowel shifts from Litvish - u becomes i, so "fun" (from) become "fin", etc.
Aside from his funny accent and the lack of taste in their food, the Litvak can be distinguished by his total lack of a sense of humor. Begin strikes me as a pretty humorless kind of guy.
Israel is such a small country. Are there any regional accents?
Lithuanian Jews had Jewish names (Siegel, Kovner,Shapiro, etc.) and not Lithuanian ones ( usually ending in -ius). Lecter sounds like either - maybe his name changed when they came to America - it was very common. Lechter is a common Jewish name. A lecht is a light or candle, so a lechter was either a candle maker or a lamp lighter - I don't know which. If you google "Lechter" you see that many people mistake Hannibal for a Lechter - maybe they new the original family name.
Capers must be a taste(unlike his heimische Lithuanian preference for human flesh (or flaysch as Litvaks call it) he acquired in America,like his taste for Chianti wine - one thing that all Yidn agree about it is the absence of all herbs in cuisine expect maybe dill and parsley, certainly nothing as exotic as capers.
Sure, Begin was a humorless, dead serious, very formal kind of person. May be there was little to laugh about in his generation.
Israel used to have local accents, such a the Jerusalem accent (like ex President Navon), the kibbutznik accent (Dayan, Rabin), etc. The creators of the new Hebrew culture (in theater, in literature) tried to develope specific accents, like big city accent as different from dumb-rural accent, but it was very artificial and did not take root. In my time, when kibbutznikim were the governing class in Israel, they affected a slow-motion "I am only a peasant" kind of acccent, but it only survives in (inauthentic) Israeli folklore. The only distinguishable accent is the cultured i.e. Ashkenazi (i.e. Sepharadi) accent vs. the Arabic sounding Oriental accent. This difference persists but it is very Politically Incorrect to notice it.
As for there being nothing to laugh about, this is not true - growing up my parents and their Poilish friends and relatives, who were mostly alumni of the most horrible KZ lagers (this one was in Auschwitz, that one was in Bergen-Belsen, etc.) and Soviet gulags had a most ironic and biting sense of humor and even told funny stories about their camp experiences, where you would think that there would REALLY be nothing to laugh about. Humor is what makes life bearable - if you could not laugh, you would have to cry. The humorlessness inherent in Litvaks has nothing to do with their physical situation.
I read somewhere that the made up "Sephardi" accent that the European Jews invented for modern Hebrew, just by "coincidence" uses the same sounds as found in Russian. Of course they could not do the glottal stops and other sounds found in the real Sephardic (i.e. Arabic influenced) Hebrew. No one knows what ancient Hebrew really sounded like (and in any event Hebrew was no longer spoken - it had been replaced by Aramaic as early as 500BC) but I'm guessing it sounded more like "Oriental" Hebrew than the Ashkenazi invented "Sephardic" Hebrew.
Personally, I think that founders of Israel made a big mistake when they rejected Yiddish, which was a language that carried (despite its Germanic vocabulary) the essence of a whole culture in its soul, in favor of what was essentially a made-up language that might as well have been Esperanto. Yiddish was more full of "Jewish" and biblical allusions than Hebrew, supposedly the language of the Bible itself.
And Yiddish was full of all sorts of wonderful "inside" jokes (back to the subject of humor - the language itself was full of ironic humor) - even if Goyim originally (back when the Jews were still in Germany) could understand its vocabulary, they still didn't know what the Jews were really talking about in front of their faces - it was like Cockney slang where even if you know the words you don't know what they are talking about (use your loaf - loaf = head - loaf of bread, rhymes with head). For example, if someone tells you a story and you don't believe that it is true, you say to him "nisht geshtoygen nisht gefloygen", which means " [he] Didn't climb, didn't fly", which refers to the ultimate tall tale that no Jew (by definition) believes - that Jesus climbed out of his grave and flew up to heaven.
I also miss the (real) Ashkenazic Hebrew that my father used to recite the prayers - bawruch ataw, etc. Growing up and going to religious school in America a couple of hours each week to learn the prayers in Hebrew (which I saw as a waste of time anyway) was doubly alienating because it was disconnected from my father's Hebrew and the Hebrew of the (immediate) ancestors of 99% of the kids there who were all Ashkenazic - it was as if they were TRYING to alienate us by disconnecting us from the authentic and organic tradition in favor of something totally made up and irrelevant to our lives.
I guess Modern Hebrew has been around long enough that it has BECOME a real language, with real idioms and slang and curses and jokes, etc. but to me it is like those modern tract houses that they put up - no matter how much they try to make them look "old" they look like Disney castles and not the real thing.
I realize that Israel was supposed to be a "fresh start" and the Jews were supposed to get away from their supposed ghetto mentality, but this is a myth - the Jews of Europe who I knew were tough and smart and adaptable to any environment from a Siberian steppe to a Judean desert to American suburbia thanks to their great big Ashkenazi brains and not in need of de-ghetto-izing at all.
Some people in Meah Shoyrim thinks like you and speaks Galitzianer Yiddisch in life and pray in Ashkenazi style as our ancestors did. However, the younger generation finds it easier to talk in street Hebrew as we all do, and their Yiddisch is becoming poorer and shows gradual loss of words and expressions. I am against elevating Yiddisch into a sacred language because when alive, it was never considered more than a jargon without grammar. As a Zionist, I agree with the founders of this movement (who all emerged from the schtetl) that it was a language unfit for the dignified ceremonials required to run an Army and a State.
About losing the Ashkenazi accent, many Ashkenazi synagogues in Israel are coming back to it or mixing the official Hebrew with the old country´s style. The Yemenites never gave up their original style. Most people will say this is not an issue.
The idea that Yiddish is a "jargon" or dialect without a grammar is complete nonsense once you understand modern scientific principles of linguistics - it's totally impossible for a language not to be a language. Or, sometimes it is said "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". (actually this was said by Max Weinreich who was both a linguist and a Yiddishist).
Here is a 5 minute essay on this subject:
http://www.cofc.edu/linguist/archives/2005/08/whats_the_diffe.html
I am a native Yiddish speaker (I learned it before I learned English) and trust me when I tell you it has rules of grammar the same as every other human language. The people who made these ignorant slanders against Yiddish (and it's amazing that they are still being repeated 100 years later) knew ZERO about linguistics.
I had a Yiddish professor in college, a woman and a thoroughly secular non-religious person. She said that Yiddish was too good to be left to the ultra-religious, that they had no appreciation for the literature and poetry of Yiddish.
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