"Who Put the Shma in Shmattas?": Multilingual Jewish American Writing

"Who put the shma in shmattas?"¹ This flippant question runs through the guilt-ridden mind of young Ira Stigman in Henry Roth's novel A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995) as he leaves the room of a prostitute in Harlem (135). Author of the classic modernist novel Call It Sleep (1934), about the deracination and cultural rupture of immigration as experienced through the eyes of a child, Roth wrote a four-volume sequel, Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994-1998), an autobiographical fiction of which Diving Rock is the second in the series. The first volume picks up where Call It Sleep leaves off, as the protagonist, renamed Ira Stigman, is eight years old when his family moves to Harlem from the Lower East Side. His surname marks him with a "stigma," and his given name, when read as I Ra, is equally damning, a bilingual English-Hebrew pun that marks him as an evil person. The theft of a fountain pen resulting in his expulsion from high school acts as prelude to the two deeds that haunt the older narrator whose italicized comments addressed to his computer, Ecclesias, are spliced into the narrative of his younger self. The two taboos around which the book revolves are diametrically opposed: sex with a black prostitute in Harlem, extreme exogamy from the perspective of Jewish communal life, and incest with his younger sister, extreme endogamy. In this volume of Mercy, he also ventures outside of his close-knit community in other ways. As a college student, he encounters affluent Americanized Jews generations removed from immigration, and he moves in with a gentile professor, Edith Welles, a thinly disguised portrait of Eda Lou Walton, the professor of anthropology and literature at New York University who became Roth's lover and muse.

"Who put the shma in shmattas?" is a caustic humorous one-liner that requires readers to go beyond the Harlem setting and racial theme to the linguistic dimension of the work, to the way that languages inform the writing and reading of Jewish American literature. Ira has just surveyed the wall hangings in the prostitute's room as if through his mother's eyes, concluding that she would have called them shmattas, the word for rags in Yiddish that has entered Jewish American discourse as a denigrating term for any fabric, from clothing to curtains. The sound of the first syllable of shmattas brings him from Yiddish to Hebrew, in this case from the quotidian to the sacred. Although the word play is between Yiddish and Hebrew, drawing on a repertoire of terms that would be rudimentary to any Jewish American reader, the rhythm is borrowed from American popular culture, as it parodies what is already a parody of nonsense doowop of the 1950s and early 1960s: "Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)" (written and performed by Barry Mann with backing from the Haloes), except that these are not nonsense words. The Yiddish shmattas partakes of a discourse of comedy or mockery associated with Yiddish affect, as the sound of sh or shm sometimes serves as a stand-in for Yiddish itself, as in shmooze, shlemiehl, shlimazl, shmendrick, shmaltz, and shmear, or as a prefix ridiculing what follows, as in money, shmoney, or medicine, shmedicine. The sound has a long history in Yiddish writing, too, with buffoons often characterized by a speech defect or lisp that fails to distinguish between sh and s (the Hebrew letters shin and sin, whose pronunciation is distinguished by a diacritical mark), which has an even longer history going back to the Ephraimites in the book of Judges, whose lives depended on being able to pronounce shibboleth. In one of the earliest Yiddish plays, Shloyme Ettinger's Serkele from the 1830s, the country bumpkin is marked by this speech impediment, subsequently echoed in America by the coarse and simple-minded Yekl in Abraham Cahan's late nineteenth-century novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896).

"Who put the shma in shmattas?" imports words from two languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, into that of...