Barbara Cassin’s essay on Hannah Arendt, entitled “Arendt: To Have One’s Language for a Homeland,” brought me back to thinking about assimilation, exile, and language and my own place in my new (but not so new) environment. It reminded me that over twenty years ago, I planned to write what I tentatively entitled “Language Acquisition and the Invention of a New Identity.” But life happened, and writing did not take place. I focused on exile but not necessarily on language and its effects on identity.
Cassin in When Are We Ever at Home? (2016) writes that the term hote in French designates both the one who welcomes and the one who is welcomed, and that is an immemorial discovery, civilization itself. She then states that in Greek, the word xenos, which means hote in these two senses, also means ‘stranger,’ the one who must above all be given hospitality, while in Latin hostis also designates ‘enemy’: trust-distrust. In exile, all of this applies to an exiled, including trust and distrust.
Does an exiled person need to assimilate? What does assimilation mean? The idea of assimilation is linked to other considerations - where do you belong? How do you express your thoughts? What is your “inner” language? First, as Hannah Arendt warns us, we cannot fully distance ourselves from who we are. If we attempt to do so, she writes: “It is the history of a hundred and fifty years of assimilated Jewry who performed an unprecedented feat: though proving all the time their non-Jewishness, they succeeded in remaining Jews all the same” (We Refugee, 273).
Next, a significant part of our identity is linked to language and how we express ourselves. We might struggle with pushing and pulling to and from the language we grew up in, struggling to hold on to the language that does not undermine our intelligence by seeking words to express ourselves. But what if the language we know is also the language of persecution? My mother never was able to give it up.
During his exile to Los Angeles, Adorno's commitment to the German language resulted in his refusal to learn English. He felt that he would never sound intelligent when speaking in a language that is not one’s own. One can argue that this is simply arrogance, but it can be countered by reminding that an exiled is the one who experiences trust and distrust.
But how does one define her identity? It might be ironic that it becomes defined from the outside. How do I know I am a Jew if no one treats me as a Jew? And what does it mean to be treated as a Jew? Arendt shared that as a little girl, she did not know she was a Jew. She learned about being a Jew from antisemitic remarks. She writes: “I believe, from personal experience, that being Jewish, like being a woman, requires at the very least that you are told this, that it be made known to you. It is not a direct identity but a mirroring relation, a different assignation.” My own identity was assigned to me when I was a little girl, and all of a sudden, I was made aware that I was not like other kids in the nursery school I attended. I was assigned to be a Jew because of the way I looked and the name that was given to me by my parents. From that moment on, I did not forget about being different.
But was it my only identity? No, it was not, and I learned to live with it as not my only identity and perhaps not even my main or central one. And yet, I never pretended to be a non-Jew. Arendt writes: “The truth is I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never even felt tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman… To be a Jew, to be a woman, belongs for me to the indisputable facts of my life.” That is how I feel as well. Interestingly, I was often called “more of a Jew than some religious Jews,” which is something I am still trying to understand. What exactly did they mean? Was it supposed to be offensive or complimentary? I did not dwell on the meaning of these words. I am a Jew; whether it was offensive or complimentary made no difference to me.
But if it was supposed to be offensive, how was I supposed to respond? Arendt writes: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.” What does it mean to defend oneself as a Jew? Her full quote: “A human being can defend himself only as the person he is attacked as. A Jew can preserve his human dignity only if he can be human as a Jew.” Despite being a child of Holocaust survivors, this was not the question I pondered over. Maybe I just learned to compartmentalize my many identities, and one of them is strongly Jewish. October 7th made me think of it in a different way. Does it mean that if a Jew is attacked as ‘not a human” - dragged through the streets, raped, humiliated, and treated as a subhuman, she cannot defend herself? So, the abused lose their human dignity and therefore cannot defend themselves? In the eyes of the world? I was not the one dragged like this, but I felt punched in my stomach.
Language defined the abused. Their identity was wrapped into it. I could have been one of the “dragged” ones. I could have been a “wandering” Jew who returned to where we came from.
But what does any of this have to do with exile? And with one’s language? Maybe not the case mentioned above, but still quite a bit. It brings us back to “trust and distrust.” It made me remember that I am in exile from the country that no longer exists and the language that I no longer know because, like any language, it continues to change without me being in it. Arendt writes that when refugees lose things, they lose everything but their language. The language I still have fossilized. It is the language of the past, not the living language. So, why, then, do I call my home the place I am from, not the place I am now? And what language do I speak now? I know the words, but their meaning is often not entirely clear. Together, they form meaning that is not entirely meaningful to me. Arendt writes: “We refugees have lost our home, which means familiarity of our daily life.” The language that was meaningful became replaced (or was it?) by the language we need to ask for the meaning.
But how do you deal with your “mother tongue”? Understandably, you are encouraged to learn the language of your host country and, at least indirectly, are encouraged to forget your native language. Our native language cannot be forgotten but becomes pidginized, making us sound “slightly” less intelligent and less eloquent. We often mix and match and sometimes are unaware of it. This pidginization affects one’s self-identity. But before this pidginization, we are still under the impression of remaking ourselves, as Arendt writes: “After four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans.” However, our Frenhmenness or Americanness exhibits itself in our, as Gunther Anders terms it, “stammering existence.” He wrote: “many of us became real stammerers - even in both languages.”
Perhaps it is this “stammering” existence that led Hannah Arendt to stick to her mother tongue as “the only tongue that could not be taken away.” However, as I came to recognize, language taken outside of its environment becomes fossilized and fails to be the living language. Holding on to the mother tongue is holding on to the identity “before the change.” Cassin writes that emigres hold on to their mother tongue because of “a deep fear.” In Anders’ words, "we become the way we speak,” But what are we fearful of? Losing ourselves?
If my language is stammering, my identity is also stammering. Or fractured. When I speak my mother tongue (of the past), I represent a different part of myself. Cassin writes: “the mother tongue is unlike any other tongue not simply because it is the language or the tongue of the mother - and one has only one mother - but because it constitutes one’s very being through a complete imbrication of nature and culture” (49). And she asks, “Aren’t we taught language by our country, our culture, our tradition - in short, by a whole people?” (49). Yet, isn’t a “wandering” Jew devoid of these parameters? Where exactly is her home? What exactly is her mother tongue? Isn’t it why Hebrew needed to be brought to life as a living language?
For Arendt, “home” was Germany, and the mother tongue was the German language. When she tried to learn Hebrew, perhaps plagued by the same questions (and we need to give her some credit for trying), she declared: “Hebrew… is not a language but a national disaster.” And to justify her affinity for the German language, she insisted on its purity and temporary pollution: “It wasn’t the German language after all that became mad.” The German language became infected by Nazism, and as Klemperer argued, some of its words should be committed “to a mass grave for a long time, some forever” (Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich).
But how do we deal with the truncated language? Arendt argues that language preserved itself by going into exile. As Cassin explains, with the exiled people, language became “denaturalized.” In her words, “Denaturalizing the mother tongue … is always what saves it” (55). But what happens when one returns? Anders writes that the country he has returned to “is not the country where [he] ever lived.” And he adds: “We all know that our mother is mortal. But none of us knew that our home is mortal,” In some cases, we wish to deny the mortality of our mothers, but we certainly do not think of the mortality of our country.
So where does it leave us, and how does it affect our identity? And what does it have to do with assimilation? Cassin poignantly concludes, “When are we ever at home? When we are welcomed, we ourselves along with those who are close to us, together with our language, our languages” (63). [Italics mine.] Maybe then our identity does not have to undergo assimilation. We can be who we are. Both assimilated and not. Speaking our many languages. As long as we recognize our stammering and fragmentation and see it as a gift rather than a handicap.
And what does it have to do with October 7th? It painfully brought us back to recognition of who we are. But maybe we kept pushing it away. Maybe it was overdue.
But let me think some more in my stammering language of my fragmented identity. Interesting that I am turning to other “confused” Jews. Though we all know that we are Jews, if not, we will be reminded.