New Archive:
July 2001 Issue
Self-Evident
By Judith Bolton-Fasman
We hold these truths to be self-evident that we are a nation of immigrants. A people from refugees. Our immigration doesn't end with a single act of relocation; it has been vivid and ongoing for generations. Anna, my seven-year-old daughter, hears my mother's accent and she wants to know when we are going to Cuba, when will we make that return journey to a place we have never been.
Through Anna I realize that hearing the accent of someone close to you skips a generation. When I was Anna's age, I never actually heard my mother's accent. But everyone else heard it, convincing me that she was one of the few people in town (or maybe in the world) who had one. She was also the only suburban mother on earth who didn't drive. No one I knew went anywhere on Connecticut Transit. But everything my sister, brother and I did was on the bus line--doctors, shopping, music lessons. We took the bus twice a week at 3:20 for allergy shots downtown. At that time of day the bus stopped at every corner to pick up the Portuguese women who cleaned those suburban houses. These ladies looked as if they had just stepped out of the sepia photographs in my house--pictures of austere Sephardic Jewish faces--Jews of Spanish ancestry--people who had been wandering the earth since the Inquisition.
But for me, riding the 3:20 was like crossing the border into another country--immigration within immigration--the internal journey of a second generation American. My own frame of reference for perpetual exile goes back to my grandparents, one from Turkey and the other from Greece, who embarked on a boat that was pointed west. So much the better that it docked in Cuba. They already spoke Ladino, a fifteenth century version of Spanish leavened with some Hebrew.
Ladino was precious baggage--lugged from country to country, century to century. This was the language of my ancient crowd: grandmothers and aunts who cut each other off in the kitchen. They're not angry, my mother tried to convince me, that's how they talk. It was also the language of secrets, still whispered like Kol Nidre--the prayer said on the eve of Yom Kippur. Ladino, once the very language of our Jewish survival, is almost extinct.
But to be Cuban and Sephardic in Connecticut is a lot like unrequited love. My mother conjured Havana in her food, for her parties during the holidays. Next year in Havana. Then she met the Portuguese ladies and heard strains of her precious Ladino in their talk. Like my mother, Ladino has survived in surprising ways, in unlikely places. She made the not so big leap from Ladino to Portuguese by studying a book called 501 Portuguese Verbs. She drilled herself vigorously. The 3:20 was her language lab and the ladies flashed gold-toothed smiles at her progress.
Like Ladino, Portuguese was strange yet familiar to me. The syllables were wide enough to fall through and miss entire phrases. The "ue's" of Spanish as in bueno were flattened into Portuguese "o's" as in bon. All of this came so naturally to my mother that soon she was fluent enough to help the cleaning ladies find jobs with the women from our Temple Sisterhood.
Adelina was my mother's first job candidate. On Thursdays she was ours, but the rest of the week she went to other houses. She cleaned houses by color: Windex blue, Mr. Clean yellow, Comet green. When pantomime failed, my mother was called on to translate. X marked the spot for Adelina's signature when she applied for Social Security. The typewriter I was learning to use mystified her. She would stand behind me, watching, uncomprehending as I typed her name over and over.
Adelina also brought humongous pork sandwiches to our house for lunch. "Somos Judeus--We are Jews," my mother said, hoping that her panic sounded more like sternness. "It's good for Jews too," Adelina said. She ate slabs of the marbled meat between two boards of Portuguese bread. Somos Judeus," my mother repeated, hoping that nothing more needed to be said. That was the way it was. That was how we separated ourselves from Christendom. Ah Dio Patron de la Sedakades! Oh God and Lord of Mercy. God evoked in the singular Dioinstead of the plural sounding Dios.
My people were forced to disperse for rejecting that kind of multiplicity. This is why we never had a geographical center. Landscapes on the 3:20 went by in the same blurry way they did for my ancestors in other places, other times. Over the centuries we acquired so many languages that they began to blend together. But here in America the accents are identifiable. Here in America we feel safe enough to get off the bus and claim a piece of the landscape. These are the precious truths that I blessedly hold as self-evident.
Judith Bolton-Fasman is editor of JBooks.com where she writes a monthly
column, "On the Shelf."
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