I can read it and appreciate a certain kind of journey a lot, yet I know I'm going to have to do something different.
"He dug deeper into the history of Yiddish and was particularly interested in its enemies, inspired no doubt by his experience with Rotwelsch and its plentiful detractors, including his own father. In the case of Yiddish, however, there weren't just anti-semitic enemies to contend with but also groups within the Jewish community. Many rabbis and Bible scholars dismissed Yiddish as the language of everyday life and unfit for higher uses, like literature. Equally opposed to Yiddish, but for different reasons, were some of those advocating a return to Palestine. While a number of early Zionists imagined a Jewish state with German as its official language, others believed that in Palestine Jews would refer to Hebrew as the language of everyday life...Despite these external and internal enemies Yiddish expanded over the course of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and as Günter discovered, one weapon proved particularly important for its defense: literature."
Page 137 of "The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate" by Martin Puchner
"After the Bible and Shakespeare, there was no stopping him. He ranged widely in literary history, both high and low, translating an eighteenth century conduct manual instructing young gentlemen on how to address ladies, a Sicilian fairy tale, a lullaby, numerous short stories, and journalistic articles as well as a short text on Marxism and Christianity...All of these texts Günter painstakingly translated into Rotwelsh, a language only he could read. The absurdity of his undertaking haunted me. What could have been the purpose of this doomed translation exercise?"
Page 139, Martin Puchner
"Perhaps Günter's plunge into Rotwelsch was atonement or something closer to revenge. He mentioned several times that Yiddish and Rotwelsch speakers had been sent to concentration camps. The accusatory tone is palpable. The fact that he put his father's copy of Mein Kampf along his Rotwelsch books points in the same direction. My father had said that no one in the family knew about my grandfather's anti-Semitic articles, including the ones that talk about Rotwelsch. My cousins believe their father was drawn to the language solely because of its lightness and wit, but I can't shake the hunch that somehow my uncle must have known about his father's opposition to the language. The alternative seemed even stranger that he would have almost instinctively stumbled on the topic his father hated most. Even if Günter didn't know that his father objected to Rotwelsch and that this objection was connected with his father's compromised past, Günter's dedication to Rotwelsch would have served a more general, historical atonement, atonement for a regime that tried to eliminate the language and its speakers."
Page 142, Martin Puchner
"I now had before me the arc of Günter's work. It began with the literary journal, took a turn to Rotwelsch with his massive research and translation project, and ended with his attempted fusion of Rotwelsch and Yiddish into German. What looked to me like an eccentric hobby, then an obsession, turned out to be a serious undertaking with a purpose."
Page 147, Martin Puchner
The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate by Martin Puchner | Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50489374-the-language-of-thieves
I'm glad to have the opportunity to read about things like this sometimes. Playing the male scholar / academic was not for me in this life, though. The body lets me know all the time that we will be doing something different in this life. Who knows what being successful could mean in the future?
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