Thinking about language, and identity, and community, and Jewish history, and of course When the Angels Left the Old Country...
And how, to me, the characters' relationships to language feel reflective of their relationships, identities, and experiences in the context of Jewish history.
Sit down. Have some tea.
Per the book:
[Little Ash] had come from Babylon and the angel, perhaps, from the Garden of Eden.
Uriel (under one name or another) has presumably been around since the beginning, or at least something like it.
And the angel's first — and, for a very long time, only — language is Hebrew. The original language, the Holy Tongue, the language of Torah, the language of Creation, the language of a people in their homeland.
That is the language the angel speaks; the only language whose words comes naturally to its tongue; and for most of its existence the angel has never felt either the need or the ability to try to pick up another.
The angel used a certain vague sense of superiority to excuse to itself its failure to communicate with humans. What did anyone need to speak of, it sometimes thought, that could not be said in holy words?
In times gone by, speaking only Hebrew might well have been sufficient. And maybe, the angel is not ready for those times to be gone. (Can you blame it? Who would be ready — to accept that you are no longer at home, and your people are no longer at home, and even the language from which the whole world was built is no longer enough to get by?)
So, somehow, it manages to spend centuries as the Angel of Shtetl, a place where everything is Yiddish... all without speaking a single word in that language.
...Well, no, that's not quite true. The angel speaks exactly one, single word in Yiddish, but it does speak that one quite frequently. If a name counts as a word, anyway.
Ashel.
The only thing the angel says in Yiddish is its chevrusa's name.
(Yiddish to call its chevrusa by name; Aramaic to study Talmud with its chevrusa; English, later, to come to its chevrusa's rescue. Talk about love languages, hm?)
~ ~ ~
Which, of course, brings us to Ashel. To recap, here's what we know about about the when and where of his birth:
The demon king Ashmedai, over the course of several centuries of the Babylonian Exile, had taken two hundred and fifty bird-footed babies from their mothers’ arms...
And it was also mentioned in the quote cited at the beginning of this post that he comes from Babylon.
So... in stark contrast to Uriel, Little Ash was born into exile. He was the last of his father's sons, which means that by the time he came along they must have been far, far into those several hundred years.
(And from the fact that the "Babylonian Exile" is described here in terms of centuries, it seems clear that the term is being used in a broader sense than the relatively narrow, maximum-seventy-year era to which it usually refers.
Maybe, even when the Second Temple was built and the people had a temporary respite from dispersion, Ashmedai and his family never went back home. Maybe, for them, that first exile — which, for all the people, would not be the last — never ended at all.)
In any case, Little Ash was born in exile, and so the Jewish world as he knows it has always been one of diaspora. And not only does he have a demon's gift for languages, by the time that we meet him he has very specifically claimed Yiddish as his primary language. And he's gone much further than can be explained by simply wanting to be able to communicate:
Little Ash, for reasons known only to himself, had adopted a Yiddish accent in all languages, around the time of the false messiah.
As the Jewish world struggles to recover in the wake of the devastating blow of Shabbetai Tzvi (the false messiah), as they grappled with crushed hopes and deep turmoil and sorely damaged community... what does Little Ash do?
I'm Yiddish, he says now, Yiddish meaning Jewish. And he makes sure to say it with every word he speaks, no matter what language he's using at any given moment.
Yiddish: the language of exile, the language of home. For Little Ash, as for so many of us also born in diaspora, these concepts are intertwined and hard to separate, in a way that someone of Uriel's background would find very difficult to understand.
Even so, Uriel calls him Ashel.
~ ~ ~
...Oops, I didn't make to turn this post into a half-formed essay. Hope your tea is still warm.
But, one last thought: together, in learning and conversation alike, Little Ash and Uriel both know Aramaic. Judeo-Aramaic, to be precise.
An ancient language of the Jews... but, more specifically, somewhat like Yiddish, an ancient diaspora language of Jews. And the language of the Talmud, which among many other things served as a sort of bridge; a way of holding some amount of continuity from the era of Temple Judaism to the Rabbinic Judaism of diaspora.
They speak Aramaic, they study Aramaic, and they share Aramaic.