The Language Of Thieves
Martin Puchner Granta £16.99
If you’ve ever wondered where that curious idiom ‘in a pickle’ comes from, Martin Puchner has the answer: Rotwelsch, a secret language spoken since the Middle Ages by Central European tramps, tinkers and thieves.
Puchner, a Harvard academic, has been obsessed with this itinerant tongue since his dyslexic boyhood in 1970s Germany, when he was introduced to it by an uncle, himself a Rotwelsch buff. In its written form, it consists largely of ‘zinken’ or pictograms, left on houses and by roadsides – a cat signifies an old woman living alone, a parrot is the mark of a polyglot pilferer. Its clarity delighted him, but as he’s since discovered, nothing about this supposed rogues’ tongue is straightforward, least of all its role in his own family history.
When his uncle died, Puchner inherited a cache of research into Rotwelsch, and it set him on a decades-long journey, unearthing linguistic puzzles as well as shocking personal truths. Rotwelsch is intertwined with Yiddish, from which a portion of its vocabulary derives, and the two tongues made similar enemies – among them Adolf Hitler and Puchner’s grandfather. Because as well as being an archivist and expert on family names, good-humoured Karl Puchner turns out to have been a Nazi, and to the Nazis, Rotwelsch, which borrows plenty from German, was a threat to their fanatical pursuit of racial purity. As Puchner notes, over time Rotwelsch has become a screen on to which different people have projected different things – conspiracies, hidden worlds, Kabbalistic symbols. For himself, it prompts candid reflections on everything from his nation’s reckoning with its past and his own inherited shame to Guantanamo Bay. It’s a vivid, compelling blend of memoir and academic sleuthing, and if his claims for the lingo sometimes seem inflated, its worldly-wise lexicon nonetheless conveys irresistible resilience and ‘chuzpe’ (chutzpah). Next time you find yourself in a pickle, know that there’s a Rotwelsch solution: ‘an hasn machn’, which translates as ‘making a rabbit’, or a hasty escape.