Subject
Re: LO's birthplace query. (fwd)
Date
Body
I say she was born in Pisky. My proof comes first on p. 46 of the
Appel-annotated paperback, in this parenthetical phrase:
" ... (Pisky was the Haze home town in the Middle West. The Ramsdale house
was her late mother-in-law's. They had moved to Ramsdale less than two years
ago)."
This is further backed up by the sonorous passage on p. 154, the breathless
summation of HH and Lo's first cross-country jaunt as requested by H's lawyer
("this is not too clear, I know, Clarence ... ") which includes the following
phrase:
" .. across good lands and bad lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale,
avoiding, despite little Lo's strident remonstrations, little Lo's
birthplace, in a corn, coal and hog producing area;"
Sounds like the midwest to me -- except for the coal, and I think that can be
found in Michigan and/or Ohio.
I pick pesky Pisky. Incidentally, "pisk" in Yiddish is a derogatory term for
face - not to be confused with the grandmotherly "punim" ("Shaine punim!" =
beautiful face!, a form of address to small children, etc.). "Shut up your
_pisk_" needs no translation. A "pisk" is never beautiful, but always
contorted by greed, lust, nastiness, small-mindedness and other venal flaws.
I have no idea if Vera Slonim Nabokov spoke Yiddish; it is not at all
impossible that she did not, given her family's level of cultural
assimilation. On the other hand, in the early years of this century Yiddish
was the native language of millions of Jews in Russia and Poland, and it
seems unlikely that Vera would know none at all.I have often wondered what
idiomatic treasures may have filtered through in the course of a marriage so
long and so famously intimate.
Now, prove me wrong!
Sylvia Weiser Wendel
p. 46
p. 154