Mapping the Ghetto

One of the fun things I had to do was visit Prague to get a feel for the city and answer some basic questions such as: How high is the castle?  How wide is the river?  Which way does it flow?  How tall is the Old Town Hall?  That sort of thing.

But since most of the streets I was writing about don’t exist anymore (they were razed as part of a slum clearance project at the end of the 19th century), I also had another mission--visiting museums and archives to dig up materials so I could adequately reconstruct the original ghetto using old maps and photos.

So I took the best available map of the ghetto (based on Langweil’s model of Prague, completed in 1834) and added details from earlier maps, resorting to a magnifying glass when needed to decode the street names on bad photocopies of barely legible 18th-century German script (Oy, vey iz mir).  Once I had all the streets labeled, I correlated that information with photos of known locations to get a sense of the layout of the old Jewish Town.  For example, I was able to place a photo of the crumbling butcher shops and other structures at the corner of Fleischbanksgasse and Rabinergasse (Butcher’s Block and Rabbi Street).

I kept this map next to my writing desk at all times until the locations were clear in my head.  After that, I only had to check it once in a while.

Mapping the Language

The novel of course is written in modern American English, with bits of Czech, German, Hebrew and Yiddish thrown in to give a sense of the cosmopolitan flavor of late 16th-century Prague.  But the standard pronunciation of Hebrew nowadays is Israeli (Sephardic) Hebrew, whereas most of my characters would be using the traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation.

Under this system, “Shabbat” (Sephardic) becomes “Shabbes” (Ashkenazic).  OK, that was an easy one.  But what about less familiar terms?  I knew enough to change the Sephardic pronunciation of the Book of Exodus from “Shemot” to “Shemos”, but a linguistic expert checked over the manuscript and told me to change it even further to “Shmoys.”  Similarly, the word for a marriage contract went from “ketubah” to “ksubeh.”  But that wasn’t enough, because the main character, Benyamin Ben-Akiva, comes from Eastern Poland, where the pronunciation of Yiddish and Hebrew includes several vowel shifts. 

Polish Yiddish vowel shifts:

neyn → nayn (no)
tog  → tug  (day)
kum  → kim  (come)

And so “ksubeh” ended up as “ksibeh” in Benyamin’s mouth.  (Have I said “Vey iz mir” yet?) Fortunately, the book comes with a 6-page glossary of foreign words and expressions.

Even the main character’s name presented a problem: the name Benjamin should be “Binyomin” in true Askenazic pronunciation, but I felt that would be a little too foreign for modern American readers, and compromised with “Benyamin.”

© 2010 Kenneth Wishnia