Thursday, September 5, 2019

Why Don't Europeans Just Speak European?

Ladies and Gentlemen, and other honored genders: I kid you not. That was a real question. My husband's graduate student, a German of Turkish ethnicity, was traveling in the USA and found, as he worked his way through California, that the further from the coast he got, the more he was asked questions like that. 
He was also asked why Germans had such a low opinion of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party). 
I can imagine the poor guy sweating, fingering his collar, gearing up for the question so many young Germans are still asked by Americans: "What was it like to live under Hitler?" 
Once upon a time in Jersey City, I taught students who had been educated in the local public school system and never strayed beyond the borders of their hometown. They could see the proud towers of the World Trade Center--which were still there--but despite the PATH train to lower Manhattan which they knew I, their teacher, took every single day, they were afraid to go there. 
"But my mom," they would say, or "my aunt," or "my dad" or even "my teachers" say it's really dangerous there, "especially the subway!"
"I'm still standing," I would say. "I take the PATH train every teaching day, and on the subway I read or grade papers."
Their eyes bugged. Awe.
I didn't inform them that occasionally I'd seen trouble: a subway car opened, a loud sound boomed, the car filled with dark smoke, and we all ran out. Only to run back in for our briefcases a minute later when smoke dissipated. Or the time, in a car so packed my knees hurt from the weigh of bodies leaning against them, when a voice yelled, "I got a blade!" But the police resolved that one too, almost before I had time to feel scared.
The point is, the kids in Jersey City dealt with worse most of the time. The car that hit a large, ugly student and then sued her for damages. The student health care center that offered no contraceptives or information about AIDS, when Jersey City had a rate of infection second only to New York. The priests who seduced their charges or fellow teachers, or children, but who stopped a student standing at the bus shelter to warn her of hellfire: she was "living in sin" with her boyfriend, the priest had discovered. The college president who was said to have fallen down the stairs dead drunk, breaking his neck. These kids told me that all those people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire spoke the same language. 
"Yeah, they did!" my brightest student informed me. "They're all European."
"The Germans spoke so many dialects they could barely understand each other. The Czechs. The Hungarians. The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Slavs . . . "
"But," insisted my student, "I thought . . . I mean, they're all white people."
Europeans. They're all Europeans, right?

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