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."
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