Unpublished manuscripts from the estate of Hans Natonek (Source: Arts in exile)

On International Women’s Day I explored why female academics publish less than their male peers. Academic journal submissions by female economics researchers face greater scrutiny and take longer to get published, as a study by Erin Hengel has found. Successful women learn to anticipate greater scrutiny than their male peers and eventually write better; a quality improvement that comes at the expense of quantity.

The data for Hengel’s study come from published journal articles and that constitutes a limitation because publication is the exception rather than the rule: the majority of submissions – both for academic and non-academic publication – are rejected.

Systematic knowledge of rejected authorship is extremely scarce. Rejection is ostensibly based on the quality of a manuscript; but it is reasonable to assume that the identity of the author also plays a role and that female, non-white or working-class authors are more likely to have their manuscripts rejected.

A study of the archives of the US trade publisher Houghton Mifflin sheds light on this question. The researcher, Yuliya Komska, examines the relationship between indicators of foreignness and manuscript rejection during the period of World War II. The period lends itself to this kind of examination as many of the European refugees arriving in the USA during that time were intellectuals and had been writers back home. Most of them failed miserably in their attempts to reestablish their careers in a new country and through a new language, as I previously showed with reference to the Bavarian exile Oskar Maria Graf.

Komska presents some stark figures: during the period under examination Houghton Mifflin received anywhere between 150 and 300 manuscript submissions per month but signed up only one or two of these. In other words, the rejection rate was above 99%. Rejection was for the same reasons that manuscripts get rejected today: they were poorly written, they were dull, they were not timely or they did not fit with the publisher’s list.

However, as the researcher shows, quality had an accent. What does that mean? Komska defines “accented writing” as narrative themes and writing styles that were perceived as unmarketable.

First and foremost among accented writing were indicators of foreignness. A whole body of work that never saw publication were accounts of the anti-Jewish pogroms of the early 20^th century in the Russian empire and of the migration experiences of the refugees these produced. Editors and reviewers routinely denigrated such migration stories as “painfully Jewish, dull, not our book,” “monotonously tragic and so completely unrelieved by anything humorous or un-Jewish” or “a screwball book by a screwball Russian” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 285f.).

Writing with a foreign accent was not only the product of the author’s migration experience but also their class background, as Komska shows by comparing the reception of the refugees from Russia in the early 20th century to that of the refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. This new cohort of displaced authors, mostly German-speaking Jews, were more likely to come from bourgeois backgrounds than their Yiddish- and Russian-speaking predecessors of a generation earlier. In response to the submissions of this new group of migrant authors “racist remarks receded” (Komska, 2017, p. 287).

Hans Natonek, for instance, had been one of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and head of the feuilleton of Neue Leipziger Zeitung, a major national newspaper, when he arrived in the USA in 1941 after an almost decade-long odyssey from one European refuge to another. He submitted a memoir of his refugee experience and was described by reviewers as a “nice human being with a good clear intelligence” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288). Even so, he was still rejected by Houghton Mifflin but received a contract for his autobiography In search of myself from another publisher.

In search of myself describes the author’s struggles with reestablishing himself through the medium of the English language in a language that shows no traces of that struggle. The reason for that is that the book is a translation of Natonek’s German original. When migrant manuscripts were favorably considered, translations seem to have been preferred over English-language publications with an accent, i.e. manuscripts that showed traces of late language learning. Describing an author as “not yet at home in the English language” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288) meant rejection.

Refugees’ “broken English” could cancel out even the most extensive cultural capital, as was the case with the Mann family. While Houghton Mifflin did sign on a number of books by Erika and Klaus Mann, they rejected a manuscript by Golo Mann because of its “German overtone” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 289).

Incidentally, concerns with accented writing were not restricted to migrant writing but also extended to the presence of dialects and other non-standard forms of English, which were also viewed negatively.

The researcher concludes that “it was accents – wide-ranging, all-pervasive, far-reaching – more than language or languages per se that worried Houghton Mifflin the most” (Komska, 2017, p. 292). This trade press did not so much enforce monolingualism – manuscripts in languages other than English could be translated after all – as it homogenized linguistic, ethnic and class differences into one single “native” white middle-class idiom.

Reference

Komska, Y. (2017). Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism? Race, Language, and Rejected Refugee Manuscripts in the Age of Total War. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53(3), 275-296.

Front of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

Remember library stacks? Browsing among books? Serendipitously finding on a nearby shelf what you didn’t know you needed? There are still stacks, though nowadays you might be crushed if someone turned the crank. Public libraries have stacks. But where do we do most of our research?

On the internet, of course. Does serendipity exist in cyberspace?

It does. At the 2016 annual Institute for Historical Study meeting, Charles Sullivan described finding a document that had seemed non-existent, simply by using the right search terms. Advised to pursue primary sources, he worried about traveling to archives hither and yon. Did he travel? Not at all: the documents had been digitized.

I am now working with primary sources in my possession: ninety-nine postcards that my mother-in-law, Matylda Sicherman, brought with her from Poland when she emigrated in 1928. Out of them, and with the aid of other primary sources, I’ve teased the stories of a mostly Hasidic community in the first quarter of the twentieth century. I’m hoping that the owners of the cards will donate them to the Center for Jewish History in New York, which is digitizing its entire archive. In the future, these cards could be read in the countries from which they were sent—Poland, Romania, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia—and by anyone anywhere with access to the internet.

But for me, physically handling these battered cards is essential to understanding them. Each one was written by a particular person in a particular place, stamped by a post office or military postal service, read by someone in a different place and circumstance. One card depicts four generals shaking hands in 1915 to signify Bulgaria’s joining the Central Powers—“der neue Waffenbruder” (“the new brother-in-arms;” in addition to German, the phrase is also given in Hungarian, Czech and Polish). The sender, Private Jacob Isak Sicherman, wrote each “brother’s” nation above his head: “BULG. TURKEI, OS-UNG [Austro-Hungary], DEUT[SCH].” He wrote on 1 June 1916 while convalescing in a Cracow military hospital. The card is stamped by the hospital and by the military postal service (there’s no postage stamp). Like most of the cards, it went to his wife, then living in a small town in Hungary because her home in Poland wasn’t yet safe. His words overflowed the space. He writes intimately, yet anyone who read his crabbed handwriting would find no secrets:

I am going to note for you who each of these high and mighty gentlemen is. You’ll also know by yourself. Let me know whether you received it. I kiss you and the dear children heartily–[also] the dear parents. Your faithful J. Isaak

Holding this card contributes an ineffable sense of connection. Years ago, in the Public Records Office in London, I pored over scraps that a colonial official had scribbled in the course of his duties. I felt his presence.

Back of postcard sent by Private Jacob Isak Sicherman on 1 June 1916

This tactile connection is only part of the pleasure of my often-serendipitous research preparing an edition of the postcards. Early on, an Institute member told me about a genealogy site, JewishGen.org, loaded with an astonishing wealth of ever-growing databases and a large and friendly community of scholars and translators offering their skills for free. The main translator of the German cards, Isabel Rincon, teaches German literature and languages at a Munich Gymnasium. There was more than her training in German philology that prepared her for the task. Her personal history impelled her to volunteer: her grandfather and his best friend (Jewish) had both been in love with a young Jewish woman. She left Germany in the 1930s for America. Tempted to emigrate with her but not sharing her danger, the grandfather remained regretfully in Germany. The other two emigrated and married; all three friends remained in touch throughout their lives. Isabel knew them all.

Besides Isabel, I have had many pen pals met through JewishGen online discussion groups. Valerie Schatzker, author of the monograph Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia—a wonderfully readable book—sent a source in a 1917 Austrian newspaper, explained Polish words, and offered to read the manuscript. A professional translator in Israel grappled with the intolerably messy Yiddish script. Institute member Bogna Lorance-Kot translated Polish cards. A man in Ohio eagerly offered to make a genealogical chart for the book. Rabbi Avrohom Marmorstein figured out the most likely way that Jacob Isak learned to read and write German—from his fellow pupils in one of the yeshivas that he attended. Like many Hasidim, his family ignored the imperial law that required all children to go to school. Jacob and his parents preferred that he sleep on straw and go hungry, as long as he could absorb rabbinic learning.

What has been most rewarding about this research has been the human element: coming to know the people of the cards and the people of the scholarly community–discovering and being offered knowledge that illuminates the stories of these long-gone people.

This post was first published in the Summer 2016 issue of the newsletter of the Institute for Historical Study.

Yasemin Yildiz (2012) Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press.

This book review was originally published in Language in Society 42 (4), 463-466. [Copyright: Cambridge University Press; Language in Society]

Access pdf version of this review here.

Yasemin Yildiz , Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 306. Hb. $50.05.

In their position paper “Superdiversity and language,” Blommaert & Rampton (2011) assert that “named languages have now been denaturalised.” In it they sum up the emergent consensus in sociolinguistics—and, indeed, the obvious fact—that the contemporary global linguistic landscape is characterised by multilingual superdiversity. Exploring this linguistic superdiversity, multilingual practices—or “metrolingualism” in Otsuji & Pennycook’s (2011) striking term—has become an immensely productive research agenda. Ideologically, however, monolingualism remains predominant. The resulting tensions continue to undermine the educational success of minorities (e.g. Clyne 2005; Menken 2008) and their access to socioeconomic opportunities more broadly (e.g. Piller 2011; Lippi-Green 2012). In that sense the research frontier in sociolinguistics is not in linguistic diversity per se but at the fault zones where multilingual practices meet monolingual ideologies.

Beyond the mother tongue is one of the most concerted and lucid efforts to date to explore precisely that fault zone. The author, Yasemin Yildiz, identifies monolingualism as “a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (2). For about three centuries, the monolingual paradigm has provided the lens through which we see multilingualism. The new visibility of linguistic diversity that contemporary scholarship so amply documents is not only the result of an increase in its frequency—multilingualism has existed all along—but also a result of the loosening of the monolingual paradigm due to the ongoing renegotiation of the status of the nation state vis-à-vis the local and the global. Albeit undergoing change, the force of monolingualism as a structuring principle remains and thus creates a range of tensions between multilingual linguistic realities and monolingual ideologies. It is this condition that Yildiz identifies as “postmonolingual.” To view language in society through a postmonolingual paradigm means to engage with the significance of multilingualism and monolingualism and, even more crucially, their intersection. Beyond the mother tonguedoes exactly that in a tour de force enquiry into German-language writing of the twentieth century in its historical and sociocultural context.

The introduction presents a highly readable overview of the German language-philosophical tradition, which has played an important role in establishing the monolingual paradigm. Yildiz shows how the “mother tongue” came to be “the affective knot at the center of the monolingual paradigm” (10). Even if “mother tongue” is rarely used as an analytic concept in contemporary sociolinguistics any more, the intertwined conceptions of language competence on the one hand, and national and/or ethnic origin, belonging, and identity on the other are rarely unravelled consistently, and thus continue to remain in effect today. Therefore Yildiz is interested in the work of those authors who address precisely those effects. Writing “beyond the mother tongue” does not simply mean to write in a “nonnative” language or to write in multiple languages. Rather, “it means writing beyond the concept of the mother tongue” (14).

Ch. 1 explores the postmonolingual condition in Franz Kafka’s work. Kafka only ever wrote in his mother tongue, German. Yet he did so from the context of early twentieth century multilingual Prague and its well-documented tensions between Czech and German. Yildiz goes beyond specific language conflicts to show that the city was also the site of tensions between an older multilingual paradigm—where language did not follow an exclusively identitarian logic—and the emergent monolingual paradigm, which postulates a homologous relationship between language and identity. Prague’s German-speaking Jews constituted a particular challenge for this postulate as they did not fit into the equation of language and ethnicity. Kafka explored the impossibility of his linguistic situation “from within”—by writing in German about other languages, particularly Yiddish, which might have offered linguistic “normalcy,” that is, a match between language and identity. In the process, the mother tongue became unheimlich ‘uncanny’ (lit. ‘unhomely’). Alienation from the “unhomely mother tongue” is thus one distinct post-monolingual response. The chapter also provides a brilliant overview of the relationship between Yiddish and German, the linguistic division between Eastern and Western Jewry, and multilingualism in the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires.

Ch. 2 is devoted to another modernist Jewish writer, the philosopher Theodor Adorno. By the time of Adorno’s late writing, the German language had changed forever, as it had become the “tainted” language of the Holocaust. Adorno, who was frequently criticized on linguistic grounds for the seemingly unrelated reasons that he continued to write in German after the Holocaust and that his German was too elitist, brings the internal multilingualism of the supposedly monolingual language to the fore through his excessive use of loanwords. The chapter also takes the reader through the history of German linguistic purism.

With Yoko Tawada, Ch. 3 moves to contemporary writers. Tawada has produced two distinct literary oeuvres in German and Japanese and has received literary awards for both. In contrast to Kafka and Adorno, her perspective on the monolingual paradigm is not informed by exclusion from the mother tongue, but by the inclusions it enforces. Moving from Japanese to German was a way for her to escape from limiting gender identities associated with Japanese. Indeed, language learning has become a conventional way for Japanese women to escape patriarchal Japan, as also documented by Takahashi (2013). German, however, does not provide a new home for Tawada, nor does she join in celebratory discourses of multilingualism as enabling hybridity and multiple sites of belonging. Instead, for her, bilingualism is a detachment strategy from either language. The chapter can also be read as an introduction to the emotional journeys of adult bilinguals.

The focus of Ch. 4 is on another refugee from her mother tongue, Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Moving to Germany from Turkey as a young adult, Özdamar is one of the most established literary figures in contemporary Germany. In contrast to Tawada, Özdamar writes exclusively in German, with her particular literary style characterized by the frequent use of literal translations from Turkish. Literal translation serves as a strategy to overcome the violence of the “mother tongue” and specifically the trauma resulting from the state violence experienced by young leftists in Turkey in the 1970s. The chapter also serves as an introduction to the monolingualization of Turkish since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 as well as the emergence of Turkish as a German language.

Ch. 5 continues the German-Turkish theme by exploring multilingualism in Feridun Zaimoğlu’s work. In contrast to Özdamar, Zaimoğlu is not a migrant but a “native,” albeit the son of migrants. Yildiz calls the second generation—the children of migrants who have not actually ever migrated themselves—“postmigrants.” Similarly to Kafka and Adorno a century earlier, this particular group of “native speakers” is widely seen as illegitimate. Being ascribed racialized illegitimacy deforms the speaker, and Zaimoğlu inscribes this deformation into the German language by writing in a confronting and jarring mix of genres and registers. Yildiz’ analysis draws mostly on Kanak Sprak, which became an instant sensation when it was published in 1995. In a defiant appropriation of German, Kanak Sprak combines the racist slur Kanake with a dialect version of Sprache ‘language.’ The chapter can also be read as an overview of postmigrant writing in contemporary Germany, the debates around German identity since reunification and the role of global hip hop in the cultural expression of postmigrants.

The conclusion sums up the complex tensions inherent in the postmonolingual condition where monolingualism continues to inform multilingualism. Kafka, Adorno, Tawada, Özdamar, and Zaimoğlu all chart points on the way towards an emergent multilingual paradigm. At the same time, reading them makes clear the challenges ahead before a full delinking between language and ethnicity will be achieved. Germany—as most other “Western” societies—currently finds itself in the grip of an attempted reassertion of homogeneity. Whether these are the death throes of the monolingual paradigm or whether it is gaining a new lease on life remains to be seen. The emergent multilingual paradigm, too, is fraught with contradictions, as Germany’s embrace of bilingual German-English education and its simultaneous disavowal of bilingual German-Turkish education vividly demonstrates.

Beyond the mother tongue is a rare book that combines wide-ranging interdisciplinary inquiries in language, literature, history, and cultural studies. I hope postmonolingualism will become foundational for a new research agenda in language in society: multilingualism cannot be understood without monolingualism and vice versa.

 References 

Piller, Ingrid (2013). Book review of Yasemin Yildiz , Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. xi, 306. Hb. $50.05. Language in Society, 42 (4), 463-466 [Copyright: Cambridge University Press; Language in Society]