I haven't scanned my thesis into a digital format; that's a good idea so I can send you a copy via email. Your knowledge of Italian grammar is impressive; I get along in Russian without even being able often to distinguish dative from accusative, let alone recognizing different shades of the subjunctive. I just try to guess the meaning of the sentence by context (not always successfully). I regard my reading of some difficult languages as an active, interactive process -- the author supplying some of the meaning, and me the rest! It frees up the imagination, while losing much of the author's original intent. For example, in the biography I just read of Pushkin's wife Natalie, the author referred to her ancestral home which welcomed Pushkin as the "Cotton Factory." A sly name, I thought, referring to the many children Pushkin sired there amidst the sheets, but a few sentences later the author explained that Natalie's grandfather had built a factory there that made the sails for Peter the Great's fleet. I got to enjoy my own pun in a way I wouldn't have had I been reading in English.
I keep on meaning to review Russian grammar, but it doesn't hold my interest compared to the long list of fascinating books waiting to be read. I've just started a biography of Potemkin, an amazing character in Russian history.
I read some of Lolita in English a long time ago; I remember being just in awe of the language, which I found to be the most gorgeous English I had ever read, but not being so impressed by the story itself or the ideas. I think he's an author I have to read in English; the Russian would be just too hard.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Article about me in Novaya Zhizn, the JCCSF Russian newspaper
Here is my translation of an article on me that appeared in the May, 2011 edition of the Russian language monthly newspaper of the JCCSF, where I work, called 'Novaya Zhizn."
-------Sidney Keith – Librarian and Polyglot
A graduate of Yale University, holder of a doctorate from the University of Toronto and a doctor of law from the University of Chicago. He has been a schoolteacher and a university lecturer, worked as a lawyer; he has lived in different countries; he reads in a dozen languages. You can imagine how surprised the workers at the Jewish library were when they received his resume. Sidney Keith considers the position of a librarian to be ideal – here he can read himself and help others who love to read. You certainly have seen Sidney Keith at the JCC. He sits next to a modest cart of books, sometimes in the JCCSF Atrium, sometimes in the “Beit Midrash” on the second floor, and if there are no readers, he reads. Curious people are interested what is in Sidney's hands this time, and now there is a surprise – for the last few months Sidney has been reading in Russian. Hearing from Russian clients how antisemitic Gogol was, Sidney decided to find out for himself, and he mastered volumes of Gogol. Now he is one of his favorite authors. In just the same way he decided to find out how another well-known Russian writer – Solzhenitsyn, would fare in this matter when he wrote his “Two Hundred Years Together” (a history of Russian-Jewish relations). Sidney again marshaled his imposing Russian-English dictionary, and read through the Solzhenitsyn. Lately, what can be discovered on Sidney's table – “Yevgeny Onegin” (by Pushkin). With this very “Yevgeny Onegin” he appears in the photograph. True, sometimes Sidney looks at a translation, made by Nabokov. And he has also read Nabokov's lengthy commentary on the work.
How can one not ask Sidney Keith, how and why he began to study the Russian language? Sometimes he refers to his Russian grandmother, sometimes to his interest in foreign languages in general. Today Sidney will answer a few questions about himself, his family, and how he came to become a polyglot. However, you can pose Sidney Keith your own questions. Just go up to him and greet him in Russian. He will adjust his glasses, smile and somewhat ceremoniously interest himself in you – “What can I do for you?” (in Russian).
Russian Grandmother from Kishinev and other Forebears
Sidney's Russian grandmother was named Rivka. She was born in Jewish Kishinev family at the end o the 19th century. Thus her sharpest memories of her childhood were linked with one of the Kishinev pogroms. She remembered, how the streets in Kishinev ran red with blood. A friend of her father's was killed. They were waiting for the worst … Her father put the family in a wagon and they left the city. When they had gone as far as the suburbs, it became evident that Cossacks were pursuing them. The horses pulled as strongly as they could, but the Cossacks overtook them. “Turn around! We are here to escort you to town; you will be safe there. We have received orders to take the Jews under protection,” boomed the voice of the Cossack elder. The wagon turned back, back to Kishinev.
The grandmother's father couldn't adapt to the constant surprises of his life. His grandmother's stories about her father's life were like frightening legends to Sidney. One night, when his great-grandfather was returning to Kishinev, bandits stopped him. They didn't give him the choice “Your money or your life,” so that he understood, that he should prepare himself for the worst. “Let me get ready for death,” the unhappy one pleaded. They conferred, vacillated, and agreed. The great-grandfather put on his Tallis and pronounced the first words of the prayer “Shma Yisroel.” “He is calling the devil on us” the leader cried. There was commotion and clattering – and suddenly the poor victim alone on the road all by himself, finding his miraculous salvation hard to believe.
The grandmother came to America in 1910. She was then 16 years old.
It can be said that Sidney's maternal grandfather was also “Russian.” He was born in Palestine, in the little village of Rosh Pina not far from Sfad. His father had come there with other young Eastern European enthusiasts with the intention of living in the land of their ancestors. He married a Sephardic girl, and they had children. But after a series of terrible epidemics of malaria the family decided to move to the New World. The journey was long and indirect – through Brazil. “So now I have relatives in Brazil. They former cultural attache from Brazil was a relative,” smiled Sidney. Now the fact that Sidney has taken up the Portugese language seems completely natural.
My grandmother and grandfather met in Colorado, got married, started a family. Pueblo was quite a prosperous little town, when it suffered one of the most catastrophic floods of the 20th century. In this flood the entire lower part of the town was washed away. My grandmother was saved then by a miracle. On that Friday she was sitting in the reception area of her dentist, whose office was destined to disappear within an hour. The doctor could not finish with the previous patient, and my grandmother realized that if she waited any longer, she would miss the right time to light the Sabbath candles. She asked to postpone the appointment to Monday and left for home. A pain in her tooth was not sufficient reason, to violate the Sabbath …
My daughter is named Rivka – in honor of my grandmother, her great-grandmother, my mother's mother.
Sidney's Russian grandmother from Kishinev spoke Yiddish. When she spoke English, she would introduce Yiddish words and expressions. She used isolated Russian words as well, of course.
Jews in the “Wild” and civilized West
“My father,” explained Sidney Keith, is an offspring of the “western” Jews.
People don't realize that at the era of the Frontier and the time of the “Gold Fever, the Jews here in the West were quite numerous. When you watch Westerns, they show the lively little towns of the “Wild West,” and without fail an attribute of such towns are the stores which sell everything to everyone. The owners of these stores, not even speaking of the peddlers on the streets, were in large part Jews – recent immigrants. Eastern European Jews were especially suited to trade as peddlers. In these circumstances this was a valuable skill. The occupation with trading did not prevent my father's predecessors from studying Talmud diligently. My great-grandfather was a serious and honored student of Talmud. He was from a family of Lithuanian-Latvian rabbis.
My grandfather firmly did not want to be a Talmudist. And he didn't want to be a “Litvak” at all. Sidney knows precisely how the offspring of an honored rabbinic family got such an unjewish last name:
One fine day my grandfather Moishe Shoichet became Jimmy Keith. He took the name ”Jimmy” as a real American one, and the last name shone out from the name of one of the movie studios – Radio Keith Orpheum. That sounded chic in American English.
Sidney explains his interest in foreign languages as due to the fact that he grew up in California, where there are so many languages, which are so tempting to try out and taste, although one of them has proved resistant:
I also am a “Western” Jew. I grew up in San Francisco. I went to the same school as my father. Now my children also study there. It is called Claire Lilienthal Elementary School. The school is not far from the Korean consulate. I then adored everything Japanese, and Korean is a very closely related language. I decided that I had to study.Korean. I graduated George Washington High School, where I began French …
Languages in which I have been interested
In Soviet life we rarely came across polyglots. In the USSR an interest in foreign languages was a completely dubious merit. Only the phrase “knowing German with a dictionary” did not particularly raise suspicion. But look – Sidney has mastered with a dictionary a good dozen languages, and he is entirely capable of becoming acquainted with the texts of ideological opponents.
Languages have always attracted me. From my grandmother's Yiddish I took a delight in the ability to express the same thing in different ways, in different languages. On Sundays I went to synagogue Beth Sholom. Part of Jewish education there was the study of Hebrew. It seemed as though I was the only student who was genuinely interested in Hebrew. The rest of the kids couldn't abide it. I threw myself into the study of new languages. I could never stop. Afterward came Italian, Portuguese, German, Latin. For my Ph.D. A the University of Toronto I specialized in “ancient political philosophy,” so I had to know Greek reasonably well in order to read Herodotus...
I graduated from the law school of the University of Chicago, but the language of the law didn't seem so interesting to me. I sat in an office of a law firm, read tax law and thought how interesting it would be to use my time studying Slavic languages, Russian for example. In 1991 I received an offer to teach law in Eastern Europe, in Prague. I spent two years there. It was a marvelous time, although the Russian language wasn't of much use there. But I came back to it after my trip.
Sidney Keith maintains that learning new languages is not complicated at all. To the question, how he goes about studying them, he enthusiastically described his simple method.
To start I get a self-study book and try to understand the grammatical structure of the language. Then I get a simple children's book and a dictionary. The most important thing is that the little book be interesting.. I don't like to be bored. I can guess at the meaning of some words, and for others I look at the dictionary. After I have looked up a word twelve times in the dictionary, finally I know it. In particular I never memorize words.
I can't say that I know all these languages, but I read them. To speak – that is an entirely different matter. You see I speak Russian with great difficulty. My spoken Russian is completely childish. It is unbelievably complicated – all the time to be thinking what form to use, and which not. All this merely in order to come up with the necessary form of the prolific genitive case.
I am far from being able to speak all the languages I know. Korean and Japanese I only read. But I speak German passably. And French as well, since I used to live in France. I can express myself in several languages, of course.
It is fine that such a person works at the Jewish Library. If you need a book on the “Russian” shelf, if you want a consultation on matters of language, Sidney's help will be priceless. How did Sidney become a librarian after all?
It all began with Hebrew, which my children studied at their kindergarten. I took this as a chance for me to involve myself with Hebrew seriously. I went to the Jewish Library, took out a simple grammar book and borrowed children's books. I went there more and more frequently, and the books which I took out grew more and more complicated. So they took me on as a library worker. Now it has been several years since I started this work.
Sidney Keith in discussion with Barbara Litt and Svetlana Kristal.
Sidney Keith – Librarian and Polyglot (summary in English)
Sidney is the erudite and friendly librarian from the Jewish Community Library who works on-site at the JCCSF. We often see him reading a Russian book or novel, his Russian-English dictionary at his side. His book choices have included Dead Souls, the Life of Paganini and most recently Eugene Onegin. New Life thought it would be interesting to interview him. It turns out that we have in our midst at the JCCSF a scholar who truly loves to learn. Sidney went to Yale University where he majored in Ancient Greek. He also has a Ph.D. In Political Science and a law degree. Along with his degrees, he learned by himself to read in other languages, one of them being Russian. He has never studied Russian in the classroom. Molodets! (A fine fellow!)
-------Sidney Keith – Librarian and Polyglot
A graduate of Yale University, holder of a doctorate from the University of Toronto and a doctor of law from the University of Chicago. He has been a schoolteacher and a university lecturer, worked as a lawyer; he has lived in different countries; he reads in a dozen languages. You can imagine how surprised the workers at the Jewish library were when they received his resume. Sidney Keith considers the position of a librarian to be ideal – here he can read himself and help others who love to read. You certainly have seen Sidney Keith at the JCC. He sits next to a modest cart of books, sometimes in the JCCSF Atrium, sometimes in the “Beit Midrash” on the second floor, and if there are no readers, he reads. Curious people are interested what is in Sidney's hands this time, and now there is a surprise – for the last few months Sidney has been reading in Russian. Hearing from Russian clients how antisemitic Gogol was, Sidney decided to find out for himself, and he mastered volumes of Gogol. Now he is one of his favorite authors. In just the same way he decided to find out how another well-known Russian writer – Solzhenitsyn, would fare in this matter when he wrote his “Two Hundred Years Together” (a history of Russian-Jewish relations). Sidney again marshaled his imposing Russian-English dictionary, and read through the Solzhenitsyn. Lately, what can be discovered on Sidney's table – “Yevgeny Onegin” (by Pushkin). With this very “Yevgeny Onegin” he appears in the photograph. True, sometimes Sidney looks at a translation, made by Nabokov. And he has also read Nabokov's lengthy commentary on the work.
How can one not ask Sidney Keith, how and why he began to study the Russian language? Sometimes he refers to his Russian grandmother, sometimes to his interest in foreign languages in general. Today Sidney will answer a few questions about himself, his family, and how he came to become a polyglot. However, you can pose Sidney Keith your own questions. Just go up to him and greet him in Russian. He will adjust his glasses, smile and somewhat ceremoniously interest himself in you – “What can I do for you?” (in Russian).
Russian Grandmother from Kishinev and other Forebears
Sidney's Russian grandmother was named Rivka. She was born in Jewish Kishinev family at the end o the 19th century. Thus her sharpest memories of her childhood were linked with one of the Kishinev pogroms. She remembered, how the streets in Kishinev ran red with blood. A friend of her father's was killed. They were waiting for the worst … Her father put the family in a wagon and they left the city. When they had gone as far as the suburbs, it became evident that Cossacks were pursuing them. The horses pulled as strongly as they could, but the Cossacks overtook them. “Turn around! We are here to escort you to town; you will be safe there. We have received orders to take the Jews under protection,” boomed the voice of the Cossack elder. The wagon turned back, back to Kishinev.
The grandmother's father couldn't adapt to the constant surprises of his life. His grandmother's stories about her father's life were like frightening legends to Sidney. One night, when his great-grandfather was returning to Kishinev, bandits stopped him. They didn't give him the choice “Your money or your life,” so that he understood, that he should prepare himself for the worst. “Let me get ready for death,” the unhappy one pleaded. They conferred, vacillated, and agreed. The great-grandfather put on his Tallis and pronounced the first words of the prayer “Shma Yisroel.” “He is calling the devil on us” the leader cried. There was commotion and clattering – and suddenly the poor victim alone on the road all by himself, finding his miraculous salvation hard to believe.
The grandmother came to America in 1910. She was then 16 years old.
It can be said that Sidney's maternal grandfather was also “Russian.” He was born in Palestine, in the little village of Rosh Pina not far from Sfad. His father had come there with other young Eastern European enthusiasts with the intention of living in the land of their ancestors. He married a Sephardic girl, and they had children. But after a series of terrible epidemics of malaria the family decided to move to the New World. The journey was long and indirect – through Brazil. “So now I have relatives in Brazil. They former cultural attache from Brazil was a relative,” smiled Sidney. Now the fact that Sidney has taken up the Portugese language seems completely natural.
My grandmother and grandfather met in Colorado, got married, started a family. Pueblo was quite a prosperous little town, when it suffered one of the most catastrophic floods of the 20th century. In this flood the entire lower part of the town was washed away. My grandmother was saved then by a miracle. On that Friday she was sitting in the reception area of her dentist, whose office was destined to disappear within an hour. The doctor could not finish with the previous patient, and my grandmother realized that if she waited any longer, she would miss the right time to light the Sabbath candles. She asked to postpone the appointment to Monday and left for home. A pain in her tooth was not sufficient reason, to violate the Sabbath …
My daughter is named Rivka – in honor of my grandmother, her great-grandmother, my mother's mother.
Sidney's Russian grandmother from Kishinev spoke Yiddish. When she spoke English, she would introduce Yiddish words and expressions. She used isolated Russian words as well, of course.
Jews in the “Wild” and civilized West
“My father,” explained Sidney Keith, is an offspring of the “western” Jews.
People don't realize that at the era of the Frontier and the time of the “Gold Fever, the Jews here in the West were quite numerous. When you watch Westerns, they show the lively little towns of the “Wild West,” and without fail an attribute of such towns are the stores which sell everything to everyone. The owners of these stores, not even speaking of the peddlers on the streets, were in large part Jews – recent immigrants. Eastern European Jews were especially suited to trade as peddlers. In these circumstances this was a valuable skill. The occupation with trading did not prevent my father's predecessors from studying Talmud diligently. My great-grandfather was a serious and honored student of Talmud. He was from a family of Lithuanian-Latvian rabbis.
My grandfather firmly did not want to be a Talmudist. And he didn't want to be a “Litvak” at all. Sidney knows precisely how the offspring of an honored rabbinic family got such an unjewish last name:
One fine day my grandfather Moishe Shoichet became Jimmy Keith. He took the name ”Jimmy” as a real American one, and the last name shone out from the name of one of the movie studios – Radio Keith Orpheum. That sounded chic in American English.
Sidney explains his interest in foreign languages as due to the fact that he grew up in California, where there are so many languages, which are so tempting to try out and taste, although one of them has proved resistant:
I also am a “Western” Jew. I grew up in San Francisco. I went to the same school as my father. Now my children also study there. It is called Claire Lilienthal Elementary School. The school is not far from the Korean consulate. I then adored everything Japanese, and Korean is a very closely related language. I decided that I had to study.Korean. I graduated George Washington High School, where I began French …
Languages in which I have been interested
In Soviet life we rarely came across polyglots. In the USSR an interest in foreign languages was a completely dubious merit. Only the phrase “knowing German with a dictionary” did not particularly raise suspicion. But look – Sidney has mastered with a dictionary a good dozen languages, and he is entirely capable of becoming acquainted with the texts of ideological opponents.
Languages have always attracted me. From my grandmother's Yiddish I took a delight in the ability to express the same thing in different ways, in different languages. On Sundays I went to synagogue Beth Sholom. Part of Jewish education there was the study of Hebrew. It seemed as though I was the only student who was genuinely interested in Hebrew. The rest of the kids couldn't abide it. I threw myself into the study of new languages. I could never stop. Afterward came Italian, Portuguese, German, Latin. For my Ph.D. A the University of Toronto I specialized in “ancient political philosophy,” so I had to know Greek reasonably well in order to read Herodotus...
I graduated from the law school of the University of Chicago, but the language of the law didn't seem so interesting to me. I sat in an office of a law firm, read tax law and thought how interesting it would be to use my time studying Slavic languages, Russian for example. In 1991 I received an offer to teach law in Eastern Europe, in Prague. I spent two years there. It was a marvelous time, although the Russian language wasn't of much use there. But I came back to it after my trip.
Sidney Keith maintains that learning new languages is not complicated at all. To the question, how he goes about studying them, he enthusiastically described his simple method.
To start I get a self-study book and try to understand the grammatical structure of the language. Then I get a simple children's book and a dictionary. The most important thing is that the little book be interesting.. I don't like to be bored. I can guess at the meaning of some words, and for others I look at the dictionary. After I have looked up a word twelve times in the dictionary, finally I know it. In particular I never memorize words.
I can't say that I know all these languages, but I read them. To speak – that is an entirely different matter. You see I speak Russian with great difficulty. My spoken Russian is completely childish. It is unbelievably complicated – all the time to be thinking what form to use, and which not. All this merely in order to come up with the necessary form of the prolific genitive case.
I am far from being able to speak all the languages I know. Korean and Japanese I only read. But I speak German passably. And French as well, since I used to live in France. I can express myself in several languages, of course.
It is fine that such a person works at the Jewish Library. If you need a book on the “Russian” shelf, if you want a consultation on matters of language, Sidney's help will be priceless. How did Sidney become a librarian after all?
It all began with Hebrew, which my children studied at their kindergarten. I took this as a chance for me to involve myself with Hebrew seriously. I went to the Jewish Library, took out a simple grammar book and borrowed children's books. I went there more and more frequently, and the books which I took out grew more and more complicated. So they took me on as a library worker. Now it has been several years since I started this work.
Sidney Keith in discussion with Barbara Litt and Svetlana Kristal.
Sidney Keith – Librarian and Polyglot (summary in English)
Sidney is the erudite and friendly librarian from the Jewish Community Library who works on-site at the JCCSF. We often see him reading a Russian book or novel, his Russian-English dictionary at his side. His book choices have included Dead Souls, the Life of Paganini and most recently Eugene Onegin. New Life thought it would be interesting to interview him. It turns out that we have in our midst at the JCCSF a scholar who truly loves to learn. Sidney went to Yale University where he majored in Ancient Greek. He also has a Ph.D. In Political Science and a law degree. Along with his degrees, he learned by himself to read in other languages, one of them being Russian. He has never studied Russian in the classroom. Molodets! (A fine fellow!)
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