עוד רחוב ירושלמי

אפרופו או שלא אפרופו הדיון על שמות השכונות בירושלים, רשימה נאה על ממציא שפת האספרנטו, הלא הוא לודוויג לזרוס זמנהוף, או אליעזר זמנהוף.

הקשר לעברית:

For Zamenhof, the answer to this conundrum lay squarely in the arena of language. Wearing the mantle of Johann Gottfried Herder, who argued that language is the essence of the volk, Zamenhof identified language as the sine qua non of peoplehood. The fragility of Jewish identity, he argued, lay chiefly in the fact that the Jews lacked their own language. He noted that he’d at one time backed the Hebrew revival piloted by his contemporary, Eliezer Ben Yehuda (though I haven’t found evidence for this); he had also spent three years developing a modern, rationalized Yiddish using Latin characters. But by 1901, he had changed his mind on both counts. Hebrew, he felt, was “cadaverous,” and Yiddish, a “jargon.” Only with a neutral, artificial language—an Esperanto that Hillelist Jews would remake, eventually, in their own image—could the Jewish people justify their peoplehood to themselves and the modern world.

חברים וחברות

בספרו המעניין והעשיר של שאול פרידלנדר על השואה (The Years of Extermination) נתקלתי בקטע הבא המתאר כיצד העברית, שהונחלה על ידי מדריכי נוער ציונים, שימשה "בית" לילדים בטרזינשטט.

לאור ריבוי השפות בחרתי להביא את הקטע באנגלית ולא לתרגמו לעברית.

It was in one of the September transports from Vienna, the "hospital transport," that Ruth Kluger... and her mother arrived in Theresienstadt. Ruth was sent to one of the youth barracks that were under Redlich and Hirsch's supervision. There, as she writes, see became a Jew: The lectures, the all-pervading Zionist atmosphere, the sense of belonging to a community of haverim and haveroth... where you didn't say gute Nacht but Laila tov... gave the young girl a new feeling of belonging...
And yet... "The Czechs in L410 [the children's barracks] looked down on us because we spoke the enemy's language... So even here we were disdained for something that wasn't in our power to change: our mother tongue." (p. 354)