Once or twice every summer when I was very young, an elderly man whom we called the Troubadour came to the hotel to spend an evening entertaining the guests with story and song. He was short in stature, wore a kippah, and dressed all in black. His face as I remember was wizened but kindly, with twinkly eyes and a long, curly gray beard.
The Troubadour performed in our “casino” , a small building with a raised stage, an upright piano, and a stack of folding chairs, where the hotel’s festivities were held. Our parents allowed us to stay up past our bedtime to see him, and we kids would sit cross-legged on the floor, all vying to get as close to the stage as we could.
And although he spoke and sang in Yiddish and Hebrew which neither I nor surely any of the other kids understood, the Troubadour had us all mesmerized.
And as we watched we’d hear our parents and the other adults call out to him, and sing along, and laugh, and to our puzzlement we’d sometimes even hear them cry.
I don’t know if our Troubadour lived in one of the religious Catskill communities, or came up from the city every summer to tour the Jewish hotels in the Borscht Belt. And I don’t know if my grandmother paid him or if he passed a hat.
And I was too young then and too blissfully colorblind to realize there was something a bit different about our wonderful Jewish Troubadour – he was Black!
On May 30, 2013 Arvind Mahankali beat out almost 300 other youngsters to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Arvind, a 13 year-old 8th grader from Bayside, Queens and son of Indian immigrants, was the first New York City winner in almost 20 years. Interested in words and languages since he was in elementary school, Arvind can speak the Indi tongue Telugu, Spanish and also some Hindi.
The word Arvind spelled to win the bee was KNAIDEL, although he admitted he’d never tasted the legendary matzo balls found in Jewish chicken soup.
That spelling – KNAIDEL – is found in Websters Third and thus was the one accepted by Scripps. But Yiddish mavens rose up to protest the spelling, and New York’s esteemed YIVO Institute for Jewish Research declared that KNEYDL is preferred, based on transliterated Yiddish which in turn is based on the Middle High German KNODEL.
Even the Second Ave Deli weighed in spelling it yet another way – KNEIDEL – on their menu and their take-out bags, and even on the walls of their restrooms.
Of course Arvind’s win and all the light-hearted linguistic arguments that ensued were reported in the New York Times.. The next day several letters-to-the-editor were published in response to the story including this one from Yours Truly.
”Knaidel or kneydl? My Jewish cookbook spells it kneidach. Yes, I know that’s the plural, but with matzo balls, who can eat just one?”
Okay, I admit it. I’ve always been a lousy speller. Though one might not expect this from a straight A student, it is true. I can’t account for it. Perhaps it has to do with lack of ability to visualize abstractions in my head. I don’t know; it just is true.
In fifth grade (the grade from the Featured photo), we had a class-wide spelling bee, some 30 students. Lisa LeVine and I were the last two standing. My final word was “hello”. Should have been a piece of cake, right? Slam-dunk, winner! But already a child of the media era, I spelled it like Jell-o, with a hyphen. Mr. Kolb, my wonderful teacher, couldn’t believe that I went down on that simple word. Lisa LeVine for the win!
In third grade, I tested at tenth grade reading level. Somehow, that didn’t translate into spelling accuracy. As I grew older and wrote longer papers, I always had my Merriam Webster at the ready. “Spell check” has saved me, or perhaps crippled me and hastened my dive into deplorable spelling. The fact that WordPress (the underlying writing platform for Retrospect) lets me know if I’ve misspelled something, but but doesn’t appear to offer any “Spell check” function (at least in the five years that I’ve been writing, I haven’t found it) means I always write with my iPhone handy and am constantly looking up words.
The older I get, the worse it becomes. It is as if I’ve lost the ability to sound out words. Truly embarrassing (one word that I actually DO know how to spell, along with accommodate…another one of those words with two double letters that I learned long ago, but is frequently misspelled; yes, that’s another one).
So spare me the distain, or clucking tongues. Everyone is entitled to be lousy at something.
