CYNTHIA OZICK
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airplane and found, on the opposite shore, almost exactly what I left be–
hind: the same congeries of concerns. The same writers were being talked
about, the same world news (starvation, feuding , bombing) was being
deplored ; only the language was different. So there really is a "West" -
something we mostly forget as we live our mostly Main Street lives.
Suppose, then, the language were not different but the same?
And if "coml11onality" requires more persuas ive evidence than a
transoceanic flight , there is, after all, the question (the answer, rather) of
English - setting aside Shaw's quip about Ameri ca and Britain being sepa–
rated by a coml11on language. The mother tongue, as the sweet phrase has
it, is a poet's first and most lasting home , his ineradicable patriotism .* In
my teens I read Katherine Mansfield: what did a New York-born Jewi sh
girl
whose £1mily had fled th e boot of the Russian Czar have in common
with a woman born in New Zealand forty years earlier? And what did
this woman of the farthest rea ches of the South Pacific have in common
with an island off the continent o f Europe? How rapidly the riddle is un–
done: Keats and Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth,
to
begin with .
The great tree-trunk of English literature ... no, that grand image ought
to give way to something homelier. Call it the drawstring of English let–
ters, which packs us all into the sam e sack, at th e bottom of which - as
we tumbl e around all mixed up down there, North Americans,
Australians, Nigeri ans, South Africans, Jamaicans, numbers of Indians, and
on and on - lies a hillock of gold.
The gold is the idea (old-fas hioned , even archaic, perhaps extinct) of
belles-lettres . Some will name it false gold, since English, as language and
as literature, came to the Caribbean, and to New York, and to all those
other places, as the spoor of empire. (Spooky thought: if not for the Czar
of All the Russias , and if not for mad King George
III,
and if not for their
anachronistic confluence, I would not now be , as I am, on my knees be–
fore the English poets. Also: no native cadences of Hawthorne , Melville,
Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Cather!) The
*1 know a European writer of genius, in love with his lan guage, w hose bad luck it was to
have been born Just in time to sufrt:r two consecutive tyrannies. It is a wonder that this
writer lived past childh ood. At the age of five, under Hitler, he was torn from his home
and shipped to a concentration camp. H av in g survived that, he was sp iritually and
intellectually crushed by the extremes of Comll1unist rule, including a mindless and vicious
censorship. Currently, after the
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of the dictator, and ha vi ng emigrated to America, he is
being vilified in the press of his native land for having exposed o ne of its nationa l heroes as
a programmatic anti-Semite. Aftt:r so much brutalization by the country of his birth, it
would be difficult to expect him to identify himself as a patriot. But that is what he is. H e
is a patriot of his mother tongue, and daily feels the estra ngement of exile.
Pro patria dlllee
mori!
