Ralph Ellison And The Yiddish Language

Sometimes the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" Q & A feature will ask interviewees to name "the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently."

For me, it was learning that the African-American author Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) spoke fluent Yiddish. That was a total surprise!

In Arnold Rampersad's 2007 Ellison biography, Harriet Davidson, an Ellison friend, related to Rampersad that Ellison told her "he had picked up a lot of it when he was young, in Oklahoma City and," she continued, "his mother had worked for Jews." During visits "he and my husband would sit on the porch and converse very easily in Yiddish. Ralph had no trouble speaking or understanding it. It brought him even closer to us."

The Other Side Of Ralph Ellison

I own two review copies of Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Knopf, 2007). And strange as it may be, I never got around to reading either copy.

Then recently I got the urge to read the book when I learned of the not-so-nice side of Ellison (1913-1994), whose novel Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction in 1953. Two black writers--Eddie Glaude, Jr. and Victor LaValle--mentioned their reaction to Rampersad's depiction of Ellison in the New York Times Book Review's Q & A feature, "By the Book."

Glaude, a professor at Princeton, after reading how Ellison treated his own mother and his longtime friend Albert Murray, the African-American writer and social critic, went from admiring him to despising him. Glaude said Ellison was "monstrous." (New York Times Book Review, July 25, 2021.)

The novelist LaValle admits he "love[s] reading about artists and their terrible childish ways." And that "Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison, while much less salacious than Kitty Kelley's [biography of Frank Sinatra], scratched that itch, too."  (New York Times Book Review, March 26, 2023.)

So now reading the Ellison biography is a MUST so I can see what all the fuss is about.

Writer Ralph Ellison, Monstrous?

I learned a couple of startling things about the African-American author Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) in a "By the Book" Q & A interview in the New York Times Book Review (July 25, 2021).

The interviewee, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a professor at Princeton and the author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, 2020), had this to say about Ellison: "I loved Ralph Ellison....But after reading Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ellison, I despised the man. The way he treated his mother, his betrayal of [writer] Albert Murray--monstrous."

I own two review copies of Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad (Knopf, 2007). I never got around to reading the book. After seeing that quote from Glaude, I intend to start reading it soon.

Mrs. Ralph Ellison's Gay Blind Spot

In Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (The Modern Library, 2000), I came across this startling passage in a memo from Fanny McConnell, Ralph Ellison's wife, to Albert Murray*, dated June 9, 1952:

"We caught a glimpse of [filmmaker/anthropologist Maya] Deren Friday evening strolling along a [Greenwich] Village street with five men. I use the word 'men' euphemistically."

No doubt the five men she referred to were gay and probably effeminate. In 1950s America such homophobic statements could be uttered without the fear of censure or ostracism. Today, in our more enlightened (we hope) times, such language would be frowned at.

Ellison's wife was probably a very nice person but in this one area she had a blind spot.


*NOTE: Albert Murray, an essayist and a novelist, died in his Manhattan home on August 18, 2013, at the age of 97. Ralph Ellison, also an essayist and a novelist, died in 1994.