Say It In Yiddish, означающее без означаемого

Американский писатель Майкл Шабон пишет:

http://www.michaelchabon.com/yiddish.html

Probably the saddest book that I own is a copy of Say It In Yiddish, edited by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, and published by Dover. I got it new, in 1993, but the book was originally brought out in 1958. It's part of a series, according to the back cover, with which I'm otherwise unfamiliar, the Dover "Say It" books.

. . .

What were they thinking, the Weinreichs? Was the original 1958 Dover edition simply the reprint of some earlier, less heartbreakingly implausible book? At what time in the history of the world was there a place of the kind that the Weinreichs imply, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees? A place where you could rent a summer home from Yiddish speakers, go to a Yiddish movie, get a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairstylist, a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shineboy, and then have your dental bridge repaired by a Yiddish-speaking dentist? If, as seems likelier, the book first saw light in 1958, a full ten years after the founding of the country that turned its back once and for all on the Yiddish language, condemning it to watch the last of its native speakers die one by one in a headlong race for extinction with the twentieth century itself, then the tragic dimension of the joke looms larger.

Действительно, это какой-то мрачный семиотический розыгрыш -- означающее без означаемого. Нет такого государства. Гебраистская фракция возобладала при основании Израиля; таким образом, был начат грандиозный эксперимент по возрождению, казалось бы, погибшего древнееврейского языка, но, с другой стороны, языку евреев диаспоры был вынесен суровый приговор. Обретя жизнь вне диаспоры, евреи отказались от идиш, променяв его на "иврит, это наречие нарда и миндаля" (Шабон, см. ниже), многие отказались даже от ашкеназических имён и фамилий.

Далее Шабон предлагает эскиз, проект гипотетического государства, где официальным языком мог быть идиш:

I can imagine ... Yisroel, the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I once read, Franklin Roosevelt was nearly sold on such a plan.) Perhaps after the war, in this Yisroel, the millions of immigrant Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Austrian, Czech and German Jews held a referendum, and chose independence over proferred statehood in the U.S. The resulting country is obviously a far different place than Israel. It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer. The portraits on those postage stamps we buy are of Walter Benjamin, Simon Dubnow, Janusz Korczak, and of a hundred Jews unknown to us, whose greatness was allowed to flower only here, in this world. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and almonds, in such a place.

Крайне интересен выбор ашкеназических архетипов для изображения на почтовых марках: Беньямин (философ, один из основателей франкфуртской школы), Дубнов (историк и теоретик еврейства в диаспоре), Корчак (педагог, детский психолог), прямая противоположность бескомпромиссному сионизму Герцля и Жаботинского.

Шабон (писатель, к сожалению, довольно посредственный) также пишет о том, что в его творческие планы входит написание романа, действие которого происходит в вышеописанном гипотетическом государстве:

http://www.michaelchabon.com/current.html

In the meantime, I'm exploring the world of my new novel, Hotzeplotz. It's set in the Alaskan panhandle, in the present day, in the territory that was opened to the Jewish refugees of Europe, after Congress passed the King-Havenner Bill of 1940. The precarious balancing act of this Yiddish-speaking nation-within-a-nation is imperiled by the discovery of a mysterious skull in a construction site, and the novel unfolds as its protagonist, a homicide detective named Meyer Landsman, investigates. "Hotzeplotz" is the name of a real town in the Ukraine or someplace, but it's used in the Yiddish expression "from here to Hotzeplotz," meaning more or less the back of nowhere, Podunk, Iowa, the ends of the earth.