I HAVE a confession to make. I am totally and utterly devoted to sagas
-- anything from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to Winston Graham's Poldark
to Olivia Manning's trilogies, the saga's for me. Mind you I prefer my
sagas in book form; I don't like television destroying my impression of
what the characters are like.
Of the modern examples I enjoy most the back-to-the-roots genre,
especially those that indicate the mysteries of a different culture. The
nostalgia boom which has brought us a plethora of war movies has also
brought us a feast of sagas based on other people's first view of
Britain and their early experiences here.
The Jewish sagas are particularly interesting because they involve the
reader not only in their culture and traditions but in their language.
To the uninitiated the same is probably true of Scottish and Irish
sagas, but if you are one of the many Scots who have an Irish background
these do not have the same kind of appeal. Undeniably gripping they may
be but they lack the lure of the unknown.
For me the lure is heightened when there is another language involved.
Of course I don't mean that the whole saga should be couched in a
foreign language -- that would be too much like hard work. But a book
liberally sprinkled with unusual words supplies an additional
attraction.
This is one of the reasons why I am a devotee of the Maisie Mosco
trilogy about Jewish refugees landing in England to escape the
persecution in Eastern Europe at the start of the century. To suggest
that the saga, which begins with Almonds and Raisins and ends with
Children's Children, is only of interest from a linguistic and cultural
point of view is to insult it, but these aspects certainly add another
dimension.
The author/publishers have thoughtfully provided a glossary of words
which can be resorted to by the reader when linguistic intuition fails.
As a long-term word addict I regard this as cheating. I actually enjoy
trying to work out the meaning of words from their context, but then not
everyone shares my obsession with words.
Some of the words in these glossaries have already infil
trated general English usage. Even those of us who have never been to
New York, new home of the bagel, know that it is a hard, ring-shaped
bread roll occasionally filled with lox, Jewish-style smoked salmon.
But there is a wealth of other words in this saga -- landsleit, a
fellow townsman or townswoman, shiksah, a non-Jewish female, tsorus,
heartache or troubles, shule, a synagogue, and shpiel, to play. Other
words include terms relating to clothes, such as yamulke, a skull cap,
tallith, a prayer shawl and those relating to Jewish customs such as
shivah, the ritual Jewish mourning, chupah, the marriage canopy, and
Chanukah, the festival of light celebrated in December.
With the addition of food terms, such as chalah, traditional Jewish
bread, feinkochen, an omelette, and tsinnes, a carrot stew, the picture
is almost complete. At least it is enough to tempt my appetite. But then
I have added glossaries to my saga-addiction.
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