Big Apple, Bigger Heart
anslate
Fifteen years after the 9/11 terror attacks,
NYC is a favourite for locals and visitors alike. In fact, the world’s melting
pot is more vibrant than ever
AFEW WEEKS ago, my friend
Ross Perlin, described as a “master linguist” by The New York Times, took me
and ten others on a tour of the languages of Ridgewood, Queens. Ridgewood, one
of the most diverse neighbourhoods in a heterogeneous city, straddles Brooklyn
and Queens. To stroll its streets is to suffer a series of first-world and
third-world hallucinations: faces imported from Ecuador, Nepal, China, Poland,
India, Albania, Romania, or Mexico; delis with the haphazard internal
organisation of kirana shops; stores festooned with signs that lie outright
about products they no longer sell; hipsters pouring in from Bushwick for
cheaper coffee (this, by the way, is the sort of Whitmanian sentence that New
York automatically inspires). But Ross wanted us to look – or listen – deeper.
First we visited an old
Sicilian club, where 90-year-old ex-factory-workers proudly discoursed on the
Partanna dialect of Sicilian – which they preserve through their meetings – and
profusely offered us espresso. A dapper Argentine-Italian man who speaks the
regular Italian dialect served as our interpreter; later, when he learned I was
from India, he addressed me as aap and chatted with me in shudh Allahabadi
Hindi. I was shocked.
By this point we had
shifted location to a community centre and tavern known as the Gottscheer Hall,
after the Gottscheer people who use it as a gathering place. The Gottscheer are
a tiny community of Germanic people from what is now Slovenia. They speak a
13th century dialect of German. Many of them fled for New York at the end of
the First and Second World Wars; at one point, more than 10,000 lived in
Ridgewood, making it one of those neighbourhoods that, by historic accident,
contained an entire civilisation. Two older Gottscheer men with stately
postures and a lady with short blonde hair talked happily about the dances that
were held at the Hall for young Gottscheer boys and girls to mingle; then they
invited us to the inner sanctum to give us bratwurst, sauerkraut and beer. I
was famished and polished it all off.
We also passed, on this
tour, a Coptic Church as well as an Orthodox South Indian Church. Ross pointed
out an authentic Bosnian restaurant to the crowd in the crisscrossed shadow of
the overhead subway trains. His map of the neighbourhood listed upward of 10
languages including Malayalam, Syriac, Yiddish, Haitian Creole, Romanian,
German, Croatian, Romani, Sherpa and Kichwa.
The touring crowd itself
was diverse. Ross is an Ashkenazi Jew from New York who has lived in London and
has researched a dying language on the China-Burma border. He is the director
of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in Manhattan. Two of the linguists
were Iranian – and married. The male half of the couple is compiling
Encyclopaedia Iranica, a mad project that seeks to “cover all aspects of
Iranian history and culture as well as all Iranian languages and literatures.”
Later a Nepali consultant for the ELA, fluent in the Siklis dialect of Gurung,
joined us at Ross’s house for smoked fish and bagels. His wife spoke no
English.
I lived in Brooklyn from
2007 to 2012, but for the last few years have resided in Austin, Texas, where
my world – especially the world of downtown –is predominantly white. To be back
in such a crowd, which can only be found in New York, made me emotional, and
later, when I took the bus from Ridgewood to Fort Greene, tears came to my eyes
as I was cordoned in at the back by a succession of brown and black faces,
faces I had missed passionately in Austin, that I had been so starved for –
brown and black as a kind of normal, rather than a conspicuous exception.
New York City has no need
to move on from 9/11 – because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments
after. There is not one New York but thousands – mixedup conurbations and
microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and
juxtapositions, faces and tongues.
Each one holds the
future; each one is a vision of the future. To live in New York is to see the
world as it is to come. It simply cannot be put down.
HTBR11SEP16
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