BABEL IN REVERSE
by Ross Perlin

New York has long been a center of survival, a place for decimated communities to regroup and rebuild. Survivors of colonization, genocide, and enslavement and their descendants still form a substantial portion of the population — whether from the late Ottoman empire (speakers of Western Armenian and Pontic Greek), the Soviet Union (speakers of Circassian, Kalmyk, Crimean Tatar, and other Caucasian languages), the Nazi Holocaust (speakers of Yiddish, Judeo-Greek, Ladino, and Romani languages), or the American South (speakers of African-American English and Gullah).

At the same time, these are specific tragedies suffered by specific peoples, processed in very different ways even by those from the same arc of atrocities in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. One group of victims and their descendants, living in one part of the metropolitan area, rarely knows much about any of the other groups. More groups have continued coming in recent decades, in flight from complex conflicts: Darfuris, Cambodians, Sri Lankan Tamils, Liberians, Kosovars. What would bring together the Nepali-speaking Lhotsampa driven out of Bhutan and now living in the Bronx with the Brooklyn Mayans whose families were terrorized under Rios-Montt?

Take a survivor like Baruir Nercessian, the coffee merchant of Queens Boulevard — who was just 11 when his hometown of Shabin Karahisar in what is now eastern Turkey became one of the few places where Armenian villagers, for almost a month in 1915, were able to resist the unfolding genocide.

Baruir remembered a village priest burned alive in his home and an Ottoman gendarme throwing a newborn baby from its mother’s arms into a river. Sold into servitude by his desperate mother to a Turkish butcher, he became the servant boy Oemer (a Turkish name) in a town 200 miles to the west, blowing into sheep holes and sucking out the breast milk of the butcher’s wife, among other humiliating tasks. He encountered other Armenian servant boys, but they were too afraid to speak to each other in the language. Turkish terms, glossed in the book, are a reminder that the perpetrators’ language can never be fully excised from the memory of what happened.

Eventually Baruir escaped and took shelter for years in an Istanbul orphanage, until the coalition of British, French, and Italian forces pulled out of the city. Evacuated and on his own in Greece, he was near starvation when he heard from his father, who had miraculously survived. For decades they made a life and a living selling coffee among other Armenian refugees in Bucharest, until the mass migration of the 1960s from there to Sunnyside, Queens (where, as it happened, a Turkish community would also form a few decades later).

All this is the subtext of Baruir’s tidy little emporium of freshly roasted coffee beans, glistening sweets, and dull nuts, with free copies by the register of I Walked Through the Valley of Death, the memoir he self-published in Armenian, Romanian, and English at the age of 99, before he passed away. The book ends by listing all of Baruir’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the people they’ve married — proof positive of survival and continuity.

While Baruir was a later arrival, many survivors of the Armenian genocide had already started arriving in the 1920s, settling in the East 20s and 30s, today still home to three Armenian churches of different denominations. Close by, on 8th Avenue in Chelsea, someo of them performed and recorded alongside Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Balkan, and Middle Eastern musicians — speakers of every language of the vanished Ottoman empire. For several decades, the cosmpolitan musical world of Istanbul and Izmir the late Ottoman genocides had shattered was revived at dozens of nightclubs like The Egyptian Gardens and Club Istanbul.

That core community of survivors from Turkey eventually moved out to Washington Heights, Queens, or the suburbs. Soon joining them were Bulgarian- and Romanian-Armenians (escaping Communist rule), Lebanese-Armenians (fleeing civil war), and Iranian-Armenians (threatned by the 1979 Revolution).

Most of these migrants spoke Western Armenian, a term for a whole range of distinct, endangered varieties like Dikranagerdtsi from eastern Turkey, whose surviving speakers reunited in Union City, New Jersey. More speakers of Eastern Armenian, including the national language of independent Armenia, arrived after the end of the Soviet Union.

A neighborhood over from Baruir’s in Sunnyside, Astoria by the 1960s was becoming the largest Greek community outside of Greece and Cyprus. It also soon featured virtually every variety of Greek, as made by clear by the tremendous range of clubs and societies based on people’s hometowns and home islands, from the Amorgos (for an island in the Cyclades) to the Thessalonikian (the largest northern city). Thousands of speakers of Pontic Greek were among them, coming from the eastern shore of the Black Sea, mostly in today’s Turkey, with memories of the Ottoman genocide against them.

In the mid-20th century, a neighboring group of survivor peoples from the North Caucasus, speaking entirely different languages, were also arriving in the metropolitan area. Many were Circassians, already exiled to Jordan, Syria, and Turkey since the 19th century and speaking a cluster of languages including Kabardian, Adyghe, and Shapsug but under massive pressure to shift to Russian, Turkish, or Arabic.

In the 1940s, an additional seven different ethnolinguistic groups of the region had faced death, disease, and deportation first under the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union: Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Karachays, and Balkars (all speaking related Turkic languages); Kalmyks (speaking a Mongolic language), as well as Chechens and Ingush (speaking Northeast Caucasian languages).

An unusual combination of Cold War politics and cross-cultural connections led New York and especially a small corner of northern New Jersey to become an unlikely haven for these peoples. Crimean Tatars formed a large community in Brooklyn, where they work to maintain the Crimean Tatar language, though many shifted to Istanbul Turkish during intermediate years in Turkey. Their central mosque is in Borough Park, almost completely surrounded by Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews, many of them descendants of Holocaust survivors. It’s not clear whether they had much contact with the small number of Crimean Jews who spoke the closely related, now lost Turkic language Krymchak. A few hundred people of them had organized the First Brotherhood of Crimean Jews of America in 1920 on Saratoga Avenue in East New York.

A likewise unique Jewish community, with now nearly vanished speechways, is represented at the corner of Broome and Allen on the Lower East Side — the only Greek Jewish (Romaniote) synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. It was formed from two existing congregations in 1927 and named Kehila Kedosha Yanina, after the town of Ioannina in western Greece, which then had the largest Romaniote community in the world — a center for the distinctive spoken Judeo-Greek. But by then most of the town’s 7,000 Jews had moved to New York, while those did not were killed at Auschwitz in 1944. Several thousand Romaniote Jews and their descendants still live in the tri-state area, as well as others in Greece and Israel.

Closely connected to the Romaniote community are some speakers of Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish that Jews fleeing Spain after 1492 brought to the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of Ladino speakers migrated to New York in the early 20th century from Ottoman cities like Salonica (Thessaloniki), Istanbul, and Izmir. After initially settling on the Lower East Side among other, primarily Yiddish-speaking Jews, they later formed Ladino-speaking clusters in Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens — usually next to but distinct from other Jewish communities where Yiddish, forms of Judeo-Arabic, or other Jewish languages were spoken. Even today there are still a few Ladino-speakinng survivors, like the indomitable 93-year-old Stella Levi of Rhodes, who made it through Dachau and Auschwitz to Florence, then Rome, and finally Manhattan.

Since at least the mid-late 19th century, there has been an important Roma presence in New York, initially consisting of many formerly enslaved and chronically persecuted Kalderash and Machvaya peoples, who were. were followed by Ludar, Lovari, Romanichal and probably other Roma groups. Each was fleeing a different part of Europe and spoke a somewhat different dialect. Some camped on empty land and tried to maintain Roma lifeways, setting up tents in Williamsburg in 1867 or even a whole village in Maspeth from 1925 to 1939.

An important community of Roma people settled in the East Village in the early 20th century, likely for the proximity to other immigrant communities from southern and eastern Europe speaking languages they knew. Some used the city as a winter base while doing circus work across the country during the rest of the year; others became fortune-tellers. New Roma communities emerged over the course of the century following the Holocaust, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Survivors of very different historical traumas arrived en masse from the American South fleeing lynchings and Jim Crow in the first half of the 20th century, increasing the Black population of Manhattan from 25,000 in 1890 to 90,000 in 1910. “New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America,” wrote James Weldon Johnson. “She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments — constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther.”

Published anonymously in 1912, when the city’s face was still mostly white, Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man may have been mostly fiction, but there are volumes of social history in its portrayal of a mixed-race piano prodigy who gambles and plays ragtime at the Chinese-run “Club” in Manhattan’s Tenderloin, the red-light district which was then the center of Black life in New York. In the end, he resolves to pass as white after witnessing a lynching in the South.

Born to an African-American father and a Bahamian mother in Florida, Johnson himself, like his wife the activist Grace Nails, was part of New York’s new Black elite of diverse origins, a “Talented Tenth” composed of both those “from far within” and those “from across the seas” — a unique convergence of culturally and linguistically diverse African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and ultimately African communities, which characterizes New York down to the present.

By 1930, when Johnson published his study Black Manhattan, the number had jumped to 325,000. Formerly a mix of mostly European immigrants, Harlem was now the black metropolis, wrote Johnson, with “more Negroes to the square mile than any other city on earth.” Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay, another pivotal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was one of many who saw it as the capital of the Black world.

The African-American English forged in southern slavery was fast becoming the primary language of Johnson’s black Manhattan, as the Great Migration of the 1920s and 30s brought people from Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Florida in particular, thanks to the falling cost of train and boat travel.

These specific patterns of settlement had both linguistic causes and consequences—thus the major community of Gullah (also called Geechee) speakers in Harlem and later Bed-Stuy, when central Brooklyn become the focus of Black settlement after the 1940s. One estimate in the 1970s reported anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 speakers in the city — the single biggest urban community next to Charleston.

Gullah is an English-based creole with African elements which evolved on the southeast Atlantic coast, especially the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina before speakers were forced off their land from the late 19th century on. Like speakers of African-American English, Gullah speakers faced a significant stigma from white society, leading to the attitude that Gullah was not a proper language and continual erosion.

The loss of creole languages has also been a theme in the history of Afro-Caribbean New York. Fundamental links between New York and the Caribbean, forged through slavery and migration, reach back to the 17th century, but it was in the 20th that the city became an unparalleled epicenter of Caribbean peoples from every island, speaking every Caribbean creole.

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©2022 Text by Ross Perlin