Mystery Ring

I inherited this ring. I know very little about its provenance.

It might have been my grandmother’s. She was Argentine, and if it was hers it probably comes from Argentina.

It might have been my grandfather’s mother’s. She was a Jew who emigrated to Argentina from Eastern Europe in the late 19th or early 20th century. If it was hers, I have no idea where it originally came from. (She was born in Bessarabia; my great-grandfather in Podolia.)

My great-grandmother was a Yiddish speaker, and though I can strain to construe a few of these characters as Hebrew letters, nothing very convincingly.

Can anybody help?

(There are more photos on flickr.)

November 24, 2008 · Genealogy, Language · 3 comments

Highlight from the first day of teaching

When I started teaching in 2005, in Sardis, Mississippi, I quickly wrote a few lines or a small paragraph during or after each class period, to keep a record of how things were going with each group. In the hectic pace of teaching, this writing became inconsistent, and eventually became a log of discipline issues. But it started out more like journaling.

Cleaning the office today I came across the oldest ones. This is the most amusing highlight from the first day of school, August 8, 2005:

This was my best class. A little chattiness from a few, but good overall. Female athlete (whose name I don’t remember) seemed studious and generally wonderful, and said early that, “this seems like it will be a fun class.” It was before the strictness of rules and consequences, but still. She also had to “think of a book” for the information sheet [which asked for favorite book], while no other student mentioned the question and almost all left it blank. She and another girl (special ed? kept spitting into container) wondered where I’m from, the other girl saying I looked like I’m not from this country, the athlete saying I looked like a magician, and a male student saying I look like “a straight P-I-M-P, pimp.” There was some agreement that I must be from Paris (strangely, just like somebody said at Lafayette High during summer school) and a suggestion of England. They were very good w/ row-by-row dismissal, several even staying after to write the homework assignment.

November 23, 2008 · Teachering, The South · 2 comments

The Brahmin’s wife and the mongoose

–Adapted from Pañcatantra; Hitopadeśa. (Killingley: Lesson 17, page 124)

(Killingley: “This story, like other Pañcatantra stories, became known in Europe through an eighth-century Arabic version. The well-known version about the Welsh prince Llewellyn and his dog dates from the end of the eighteenth century.”)

 

Once a Brahmin lived in a village. The Brahmin’s wife and son and mongoose* lived in the house. The Brahmin’s wife nurtured the mongoose like a son with food and milk. And the Brahmin was fond of the mongoose as of a son. Now once, the Brahmin’s wife said: “Āryaḥ,** in the morning I am going to the lake to bathe.” The Brahmin said: “Then I will stay in the house and watch our son.” So in the morning the wife went to the lake for a bath. Now, later on, the king’s messenger approached the house. And the messenger said to the Brahmin: “Āryaḥ, today the king offers gifts. So if Āryaḥ goes to the palace then the king will offer gifts to Āryaḥ.” So the Brahmin thought: “If I go, then who will watch the boy? But if I don’t go, then how will I get gifts? What do I do?” So he said to the mongoose: “If you stay here and watch the boy, then I will go to the palace.” The Brahmin thus left the boy in the house and from greed went with the messenger. And the mongoose stayed in the house and watched the boy.

Now, in the Brahmin’s house is a hole, and in the hole lives a snake. And when the brahmin left the house, the snake left the hole and approached the boy. But when the mongoose saw the snake, he thought: “If he touches the boy with his teeth, the snake will kill the boy.” And so for a long time the mongoose fought with the snake. Then the mongoose defeated the snake in the fight and killed it with his teeth. The mongoose thus protected*** the boy from the snake. Now, when the Brahmin’s wife again came from the lake, she saw the snake’s blood on the mongoose’s mouth****. So from folly she thought: “Surely the mongoose ate the boy.” So from anger she killed the mongoose with a stick.

 

* There is something of a translating frustration here, similar to the one I alluded to in a note to an earlier translation: this Sanskrit word refers to a specific animal, and we know that animal, and have an English name for it, but whether for the sound of the word itself or from cultural associations with the creature, it sounds stupid or comical or inelegant in English, and not in the original. The haṃsaḥ (हंसः) is a beautiful bird with mystical connotations in India; in English it’s a goose. The nakulaḥ (नकुलः) is an intelligent mammal that can be kept as a pet, taught tricks, and keeps away pests; in English it’s a mongoose (with no etymological link to goose, incidentally). A translator might just change them into swans and dogs, privileging cultural and emotional connotations over biology, but what can I say? It’s a mongoose. We’re all adults here.

** Āryaḥ is a term of respect, especially for a Brahmin, sometimes translated as sir or your honor. Its root has a wide range of meanings, mostly having to do with goodness or nobility. It or a related form is (strangely) the origin of the English word aryan, and is probably related etymologically to the Greek aristos, arete, ortho-, etc.

*** The verb, literally to guard or to protect (rakṣati / रक्षति), is the same one translated several times above as watch (as in, to watch the boy). Here he is thus performing exactly the duty he was given.

**** Or face. (mukham / मुखम्)

November 22, 2008 · Literature, Quotations, Sanskrit · (No comments)

These deck chairs, those deck chairs

A fairly popular (and apt) metaphor in public education is to be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. (Incidentally, if you type “rearranging” into Google with suggestions on, as of tonight, this precise phrase pops up as the 6th suggestion, with nearly 70,000 results.) There is usually no sympathy in it; it is just to say, This ship is sinking, and look at what the idiots are doing. But I think there is a more sympathetic understanding, too: here there is a desperation, or a sense that problems are severe, even dire, and that something must be done; but it is not at all clear what can be done; maybe the problems are in fact so profound and so fundamental that as individuals we are impotent against them. So we pick something, maybe somewhat arbitrarily, and we project importance onto it out of proportion with its real significance. It becomes a superstition. We say, This ship is sinking goddammit! For chrissake will nobody help me move this lounger? It might not always be about idiocy so much as impotent, foolish heroics.

 

As a school teacher in Mississippi, I heard in every room, in every hallway, a hundred times every day: Shirt-tails, shirt-tails, tuck in your shirt-tails, we will send you home, we will suspend you, shirt-tails. 

Now that I’m a student most of the time, and a part-time tutor in a public high school in Santa Fe, every day it’s: IDs, ID badges, IDs out, get your IDs out, we will send you home, get your IDs out.

If they were lyrics, they’d be sung to the same tune.

November 19, 2008 · Teachering · (No comments)

At Last

In 2005 — and several times again over the next years — I wrote Barack Obama’s name on the board in my classroom, first in Sardis, Mississippi, and later in Jackson, when one or another of my students declared that there would never be a black president. In the three years I lived in Mississippi I had something like 500 students (just one of them was not black) and many expressed something like this sentiment at some time or other — at least one in almost every class, probably.

The first time I saw Barack Obama — the first time I heard his name, I think — was when he addressed the Democratic National Convention in 2004. And I liked Kerry more than a lot of Democrats did, but I wished then that Obama was running in his place, and I believed then that he would one day be the President of the United States.

I have followed his career these last four years. I was excited for my students when, in June of last year, we got word that he was quietly coming to Jackson for a fundraising event, and several of them got to shake his hand. I spent hours in line last March waiting for his appearance at Jackson State University. I have have been excited about his candidacy since it was first announced, and since it was called unlikely.

During the 2004 election I lived in Buenos Aires, and everywhere I went, whenever anyone heard I was an American, I was attentively cast as a representative of my country; and after that election, everyone, it seemed, was upset at the result, and everyone was asking me to explain it. As I struggled in awkward Spanish to explain American politics to late-night taxi drivers, and as I read the baffled and the angry editorials, I felt alienated from my country and I wished I knew it better. (And I decided, then, to go teach in Mississippi rather than following other opportunities.)

In 2005 I thought he probably wouldn’t run in 2008, that he would defer to our collective expectations of a Hillary Clinton candidacy, that he would finish a term in the Senate. I put his name on the board and I told my students not to forget it; I told them that, if Clinton wins in 2008, she will be up for re-election in 2012 and Obama will run in 2016; that if she loses in 2008, he will run in 2012; and that in either case, there will be a black president, and soon.

Tonight I am happy to have been partially wrong, and I am proud, and I am excited for my country, and I wish our new President-elect good luck in the very difficult tasks he has before him.

November 5, 2008 · Changes, History, Politics · 3 comments