Vipers and Vulgarians

(a brief tribute to my mother)

I think about my late mother almost every day. She taught me early without knowing it that identity can be fungible. She was supposed to be named Maia because she was due in May in St. Petersburg, but her parents switched to Lia-Helena in Poland when they fled the Bolsheviks. That morphed into Hélène in Belgium after WWII and then finally plain Helen in New York, though she was anything but plain.

She carried herself with the quiet glamour of a retired stage actress and her wide reading and deep intellectual curiosity inspired me to become a writer. Though English was not my mother’s native language, she spoke it with panache. She learned English in post-WWII Belgium after already speaking Russian, Yiddish, Polish, German and French.

Her deft use of the language may have owed something to the fact that her tutor was English himself. And in the U.S. she polished it assiduously doing the daily and Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles.

When she noted someone in public behaving badly, whether a friend or stranger, the person was forever after referred to as “that creature” when their name came up. It always made me laugh because she gave the first “r” a resounding French roll. The insult reminded me of how Brits call (or maybe used to call) someone “that person” as if the neutral noun was a brand of shame.

A step up from the designation of “creature” for an awful human being was the disdainful label “viper” which she would pronounce with the weight and finality of a judge pounding a gavel. Viper struck me as wonderfully exotic and it made me laugh, even though she meant it seriously. I didn’t know any friends’ parents who used such a term—they were more likely to employ “jerk” or “SOB.”

The Russian version of that latter insult was my father’s favorite: Сукин сын (pronounced sukin syn). It would roll off his tongue with just the right amount of contempt, an emotion he was a master of. Russian was the secret language my parents spoke when they didn’t want me or my brother to know what they were saying, but we did know that идиот [idiot], pronounced idyote, had the same meaning as in English, though hitting the second syllable hard made it sound far more dismissive.

It was easy in New York City to come across various lowlifes and for those folks my mother saved the word “vulgarian.” Elegant in sound, it was always accompanied with a sad shake of the head. How in the world could such people exist? And why did they have to enter her orbit? But then how could they not cross her path in some way because when she labeled someone or something as “vulgar” it often meant quintessentially and ineluctably “American.” She loved New York and Loved her new home, but she saw it clearly.

My mother also excelled in labels for politicians she didn’t respect. After listening once to Vice President Agnew’s blather on TV, she narrowed her vigilant eyes and said, “He sounds like Stalin on a bad day.”

Lev Raphael has written extensively about his mother in many essays, and his favorite is on published in Tablet Magazine: “My Mother’s Secret Memoirs.” He speaks solid French and German when he’s relaxed (or had some wine), plus travel Dutch and has been studying Swedish on Duolingo for over 600 days. His favorite sentence there is one you’re unlikely to find in a phrase book: Jag kan inte hitta mina byxor (“I cannot find my pants”).

Photo Credit: Robin Higgins from Pixabay