American Pastoral: Dialect 1 key example

The novel's first paragraphs establish that Jewish identity will play a prominent role in the novel. When the fictional narrator refers to "our preponderantly Jewish public high school," the reader understands that the narrator is Jewish. This impression is confirmed and strengthened over the course of the first chapter, not only in the brief instances in which Nathan Zuckerman literally touches on his own background but also through his diction. For example, as he runs through the Swede's backstory and reaches his marriage, he shares the following commentary on his wife Dawn: "From Elizabeth. A shiksa. Dawn Dwyer. He'd done it." In Yiddish, the word "shiksa" refers to a gentile girl or woman. These short sentences make it seem as though the Swede's marriage to a non-Jewish woman is a significant event in the community they grew up in.

In the rest of the novel, the narrator's Jewish background is reinforced by the Yiddish terms and Jewish references that appear in his descriptions. When he describes the golf course where his high school reunion is held, for example, he jokes that he and his former peers would formerly have thought that "a niblick (which was what they in those days called the nine iron) was a hunk of schmaltz herring." Shortly after, he describes the hours they spend "hugging, kissing, kibitzing, laughing" and more. In Yiddish, to "kibitz" is to chat.

However, it isn't only the narrator who has a Jewish-American dialect. At the reunion, for instance, his friend Mendy Gurlik refers to a tall woman as a "langer loksh," which literally means "long noodle" in Yiddish.

The character whose dialogue contains the most Yiddish words is Lou Levov. In one of Lou's tirades about how the Swede needs to "get out" of Newark, he repeatedly uses the word "schvartzes" to refer to Black people. This is a racial slur in Yiddish. In the same tirade, when discussing the warnings he got when he first hired Black people to work at the factory, he quotes people telling him that he "won't get gloves" but "dreck." In Yiddish, "dreck" is used to describe something of very low quality.

Chapter 9 contains a fair bit of Yiddish, as it features a lot of dialogue involving Lou and his wife Sylvia. In one instance, Sylvia tells the Swede that Lou can't sleep because of Nixon—"that mamzer." This is the Hebrew and Yiddish equivalent of the derogatory word "bastard." Later in the same chapter, as Lou talks to Jessie Orcutt, he's shocked to learn that he was sent away to boarding school as a girl and thinks to himself "a pisherke, and you waved good-bye to the family? [...] No wonder you're shicker now." In Yiddish, "pisherke" refers to a young and inexperienced person and "shicker" means "drunk." Recalling the first time he met Jessie, he remembers that she tried to interest him in skeet shooting, "yet another one of those diversions that had long defied Lou Levov's Jewish comprehensions." To him, the idea of pulling a trigger for "fun" is proof that Gentiles are "meshugeh"—crazy.