Words

I’ve always loved words. Never being a physically strong child, I preferred reading to running and contemplating the power of verbs, nouns, and adjectives to frolicking with my schoolmates. Words could encourage or scare, engage or estrange, make one feel loved or miserable. Words could heal, and words could hurt. Words could empower, and words could destroy. Words could make me live lives I would have never been able to experience otherwise.

Words made me curious. I liked playing with them, stringing them into sentences and rhyming them into poems. Even as a child, I realized Russian was made for poetry, much like Italian. The sounds rhymed effortlessly and fell into an easy cadence. Sometimes when I came across an especially beautifully sentence or a flawless verse, I’d stare at it and re-read it over and over, trying to decipher its mystery. Often I couldn’t quite tell what its secret was – but I could instinctively feel it.

While Russian was the primary language of my childhood, I was also exposed to Tatar, which is very similar to Turkish, and Yiddish which is akin to German. My two best childhood friends spoke Tatar and I picked up bits and pieces of it while we played together. My parents used Yiddish as their code lingo when they didn’t want my brother and me to know something, so I inevitably had to learn what they were hiding. While I never became fluent and can’t converse in either language, the linguistic enlightening periodically dawns on me when I visit foreign lands. In Istanbul, having spotted a store sign “Kitaplar,” I immediately knew it was a bookstore: kitap means book and the suffix —lar made it plural. In a Vienna bistro, I heard a familiar word a young mom admonished her boy with – Essen! It brought back childhood memories. Nicht essen my grandmother used to complain to my parents about my fastidious eating habits. “She doesn’t eat!”

While I love to travel, so can words. Words wander from one language to another and from one dialect to the next, sometimes changing the spelling or shifting their meaning. The German butterbrot (butterbread, or bread with butter) transformed into the Russian – “бутерброд” – a sandwich that could be made with any ingredient such as bologna or cheese. While looking for an air tram on Montmartre, I knew I was heading in the right direction once I saw the sign that read “Funikuler,” which is фуникулёр in Russian. (Interestingly enough, my husband knew the English word funicular, but the different spelling totally threw him off!) The Turkish kaftan – which originated from the Persian خفتان for the cloak buttoned down the front, with full sleeves, reaching to the ankles –  came to describe a loose Russian cardigan worn by men at the beginning of the last century. And on my trip to Jordan, I was absolutely surprised to find out that the name of Petra’s treasury, Al Khazne, was homophonic to the Russian казна – which translates as a tsar’s assets. 

But perhaps the most interesting transformation happened to the German word blatt when it found its way to the Soviet Union. Literally, blatt means paper, a piece of paper, or an official document one needs to produce to prove or receive something. During hard economic times in Russia, food and goods were rationed so that in order to get extras, people needed official papers given either for exceptional achievements or due to personal connections, often improper. Eventually, the word blatt took on the meaning of those special personal connections that got one more than an average citizen could hope for: better food, fancier clothes, access to special stores, and even trips abroad. “They have blatt,” would be said of a family that managed to get a vacation in a fashionable Black Sea resort. If someone suddenly popped up on the top of an apartment waiting list, people would gossip, “He’s got blatt in the Building Department.” At sixteen, I spoke to my parents about a potential medical degree to hear them say, “You can’t get into medical school without blatt.”

The most intense and expansive linguistic effort I ever made was my two-month study for the GRE. I had to learn close to 3,000 words, many of which I’d never heard before or didn’t know their less common meanings. I went through the list diligently, typing the words, definitions, and examples onto index cards. I memorized 50 to 100 words a day, adding them to the collection. Twice a week, I went through the entire stack, shuffling and dealing it like a croupier (a French word that originated from “croupe” or “croup,” means “rider on the croup of a horse”). Some words got burnt into my gray matter, some vanished as if I forgot to press the “save” button, but I vowed to deal my linguistic pack once a month, to keep it as current as I could. The writing power it gave me was too indulging to lose. Words can be addictive. Did you know that?

Heart Away from Home

A few days ago, my husband and I had a hankering for pizza, so we headed for our favorite pizza joint in Sunnyvale, which happens to be owned by an Iranian. And the owner just happened to be hanging about that day. The men were soon deep in conversation working out the connections they had to various mutual Iranian acquaintances: the guy who used to manage the Croatian restaurant down the street and the friend who owned a café nearby then sold it and moved to Australia.

Versions of this scenario repeat almost every time we go out together. Maybe it’s just coincidence, certainly not because the Iranian community here is small. With over 200,000 people in the entire Bay Area, the Persian population is more than twice the size of the city where I live. I think the answer lies in the nature of immigrant communities everywhere. New immigrants tend to gravitate toward compatriots who’ve arrived before them, seeking assistance from people who share a common language and culture and can help them navigate the new and sometimes confusing customs of their new country.

When I’ve lived abroad, assimilation has always been my goal. I’ve avoided hanging out with other Americans or even other English speakers, preferring to immerse myself in the local culture, gain fluency in the language, bone up on the history of a place, and make new friends whose world view might be different than mine. But then, travel for me has always been about discovering the world and all its diversity.

In the Iranian diaspora, priorities are quite different, at least on the surface. Persians are proud of their culture and history, if not of the current regime ruling their homeland, and it comes as no surprise that, in their new country, they want to recreate the world they left behind.

When I go to parties at Iranian friends’ homes, it’s like stepping through a space-shrinking portal and emerging in Tehran, halfway across the world. The language spoken is Farsi. Dinner is a multicourse feast with Persian rice dishes, khoresh (meat and vegetable stews), and kebabs, and the food is served late, rarely before nine p.m. While tea flows pretty much all evening long. The only differences from similar parties in Iran are the fact that the women arrive without hejab and wine is served with dinner. But like in Tehran, I’m usually the only “foreigner” present.

Yet this focus on recreating the familiar is only half the equation. Iranian expats put down deep roots in their new country. Most arrive with the requisite skills and drive to establish a successful career or start a new enterprise. They may speak Farsi at home and with friends, but they learn English well enough to function in the larger society. Like back in the old country, Iranian expats put on a public face and a private one. The private one is pure Persian.

Diasporas make life a whole lot more interesting for the rest of us. The Iranian one gives me the chance to learn more about a culture that fascinates me without having to go to Iran. I can practice Farsi, not only on my husband and during phone calls to relatives “back home,” but also at parties or by watching old movies on Persian TV. With Middle Eastern markets nearby, I have no trouble finding specialty ingredients for the Persian dishes I like to prepare. And occasionally, even when we go out for pizza, I can catch up on gossip passing along the Persian grapevine.