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."

On The Road With Langston Hughes And Friend

I enjoy a good road-trip movie like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Thelma & Louise (1991). And for a long time I've seen the movie potential of a road trip by car that Langston Hughes and his traveling companion, Zell Ingram, a young artist, took in 1931. (Ingram is described by the biographer Arnold Rampersad in his The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986) as "a big, handsome, young black man, about twenty-one years old, who lived with his mother over a popular Cleveland hot-dog shop.")

The trip took them from Cleveland to Florida. And from there to Cuba and Haiti; then back to Florida, where they picked up the black civil rights activist and college president Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach. She became Hughes's second traveling companion all the way to New York City.

While Hughes and Ingram were in Cuba and Haiti, they encountered enough adventures and misadventures to make a feature-length movie a riveting cinematic experience.

Sometimes I think I should become a movie producer.

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.

A TV Program About Blacks In Latin America

In the fourth and final episode of historian Henry Louis Gates's PBS program, Black in Latin America, which dealt with the African diaspora in Mexico and Peru, Gates neglected to mention that the Mexican painter Diego Rivera had a black grandmother, per Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad.

Furthermore, it would be interesting to see if Gates does a  Black in Europe series on PBS. That would be an eye-opening program, revealing how much influence African descended individuals have had in various European countries throughout the centuries up to present times.

Note: Today is National French Fry Day!