As an English teacher and a First Amendment professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about words. In my role as a high school English teacher, I am constantly pushing my students to experiment with language – to show rather than tell, to describe rather than state and to be specific instead of writing in generalities. I often begin the school year by sharing with them my all-time favorite quote from a short story called “Wants” by Grace Paley. When describing her ex-husband, the unnamed protagonist says, “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.” I remember reading that passage for the first time and feeling my throat start to close. In that moment. reading that description, I understood the protagonist’s relationship with her ex-husband with complete clarity. I describe this all to my students to illustrate the power of words in making connections, in helping us understand one another, and to ensure that we all are seen and understood.
I thought about this lesson a lot today as I reviewed the writings in The Emanuel Ringelbaum Jewish Historical Institute. The foresight to understand that “everything must be documented” was so prescient – especially when one considers the fact that the recorders were struggling just to survive. But as written by one of the historians, “how does one describe things that are virtually impossible to describe in human language?” It feels like too much to ask, and yet it is essential that it be done.
I connected this to the story Avi told us about Ludwik Zamehof, who was buried in the Jewish Cemetery we visited in the morning. Zamenhof tried to create a universal language for the world – a language called Esperanto. I love the idea of a universal language because it could connect the world and allow us to all hear each other’s stories. It would cut through the noise and distractions and be a gigantic step toward us considering each other “the same” rather than as “the other”. This universal language would make it easier for use to tell our stories, and just as importantly, each other’s stories. I found myself wondering whether if there was this universal language, from the beginning, the story of the Holocaust would be better understood and better remembered. Would there be words in this universal language that would make it possible to describe the “indescribable”? Finally, I wondered if this universal language really existed, if from the beginning we were able to communicate and to understand, if these words to describe the indescribable would even be necessary.