Monday, September 12, 2016

TRAVEL SPECIAL. .....Big Apple, Bigger Heart

Big Apple, Bigger Heart
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Fifteen years after the 9/11 terror attacks, NYC is a favourite for locals and visitors alike. In fact, the world’s melting pot is more vibrant than ever
AFEW WEEKS ago, my friend Ross Perlin, described as a “master linguist” by The New York Times, took me and ten others on a tour of the languages of Ridgewood, Queens. Ridgewood, one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in a heterogeneous city, straddles Brooklyn and Queens. To stroll its streets is to suffer a series of first-world and third-world hallucinations: faces imported from Ecuador, Nepal, China, Poland, India, Albania, Romania, or Mexico; delis with the haphazard internal organisation of kirana shops; stores festooned with signs that lie outright about products they no longer sell; hipsters pouring in from Bushwick for cheaper coffee (this, by the way, is the sort of Whitmanian sentence that New York automatically inspires). But Ross wanted us to look – or listen – deeper.
First we visited an old Sicilian club, where 90-year-old ex-factory-workers proudly discoursed on the Partanna dialect of Sicilian – which they preserve through their meetings – and profusely offered us espresso. A dapper Argentine-Italian man who speaks the regular Italian dialect served as our interpreter; later, when he learned I was from India, he addressed me as aap and chatted with me in shudh Allahabadi Hindi. I was shocked.

By this point we had shifted location to a community centre and tavern known as the Gottscheer Hall, after the Gottscheer people who use it as a gathering place. The Gottscheer are a tiny community of Germanic people from what is now Slovenia. They speak a 13th century dialect of German. Many of them fled for New York at the end of the First and Second World Wars; at one point, more than 10,000 lived in Ridgewood, making it one of those neighbourhoods that, by historic accident, contained an entire civilisation. Two older Gottscheer men with stately postures and a lady with short blonde hair talked happily about the dances that were held at the Hall for young Gottscheer boys and girls to mingle; then they invited us to the inner sanctum to give us bratwurst, sauerkraut and beer. I was famished and polished it all off.
We also passed, on this tour, a Coptic Church as well as an Orthodox South Indian Church. Ross pointed out an authentic Bosnian restaurant to the crowd in the crisscrossed shadow of the overhead subway trains. His map of the neighbourhood listed upward of 10 languages including Malayalam, Syriac, Yiddish, Haitian Creole, Romanian, German, Croatian, Romani, Sherpa and Kichwa.
The touring crowd itself was diverse. Ross is an Ashkenazi Jew from New York who has lived in London and has researched a dying language on the China-Burma border. He is the director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in Manhattan. Two of the linguists were Iranian – and married. The male half of the couple is compiling Encyclopaedia Iranica, a mad project that seeks to “cover all aspects of Iranian history and culture as well as all Iranian languages and literatures.” Later a Nepali consultant for the ELA, fluent in the Siklis dialect of Gurung, joined us at Ross’s house for smoked fish and bagels. His wife spoke no English.
I lived in Brooklyn from 2007 to 2012, but for the last few years have resided in Austin, Texas, where my world – especially the world of downtown –is predominantly white. To be back in such a crowd, which can only be found in New York, made me emotional, and later, when I took the bus from Ridgewood to Fort Greene, tears came to my eyes as I was cordoned in at the back by a succession of brown and black faces, faces I had missed passionately in Austin, that I had been so starved for – brown and black as a kind of normal, rather than a conspicuous exception.
New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 – because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after. There is not one New York but thousands – mixedup conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.
    Each one holds the future; each one is a vision of the future. To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come. It simply cannot be put down.
HTBR11SEP16

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