The Language of Thieves
My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Tracking an underground language and the outcasts who depended on it for their survival becomes "a deeply personal project, one that probes the meaning of language and family, inheritance and debt" (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times Book Review).
Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were "wiz" (in the know). This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight—whether escaping persecution or just down on their luck. It was a language of the road associated with vagabonds, travelers, Jews, and thieves that blended words from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Romani, Czech, and other European languages and was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as "being in a pickle." This renegade language unsettled those in power, who responded by trying to stamp it out, none more vehemently than the Nazis.
As a boy, Martin Puchner learned this secret language from his father and uncle. Only as an adult did he discover, through a poisonous 1930s tract on Jewish names buried in the archives of Harvard’s Widener Library, that his own grandfather had been a committed Nazi who despised this "language of thieves." Interweaving family memoir with an adventurous foray into the mysteries of language, Puchner crafts an entirely original narrative. In a language born of migration and survival, he discovers a witty and resourceful spirit of tolerance that remains essential in our volatile present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Puchner (The Written World), a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard, brilliantly integrates the personal and the professional in this intriguing account of his quest to learn as much as possible about Rotwelsch, a mash-up of German, Yiddish, and Hebrew spoken by itinerant people in Europe since the Middle Ages. Puchner's interest in the subject goes back to his childhood in Nuremberg, Germany, in the 1970s, where his uncle G nter was an authority on Rotwelsch and the Puchner family adopted it as a secret code. Following Gunter's death, the family stopped using Rotwelsch, but the practice influenced Puchner's decision to study linguistics. In his dogged research into the history of Rotwelsch and his family's connection to it, Puchner discovered that 16th-century Protestant theologian Martin Luther viewed the language as a link between three groups he despised (Jews, foreigner beggars, and vagrants), and that Puchner's paternal grandfather, a historian of names, had sought to advise the Nazis on how to distinguish between Jews with German-sounding names and Germans whose names sounded Jewish. Puchner concludes that the persistence of Rotwelsch, despite centuries of determined opposition, is a testament "to the endurance of generations of ultimate outcasts." Rich with insight and vivid character sketches, this moving and well-informed cultural history deserves a wide readership.
