The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph, is silent. According to Laurie Anderson, my authority on all things (though I think she’s quoting tradition), when you see an aleph you open your mouth to begin making a sound and then stop. Then you just think about the letter. The sound of aleph is all in the mind …
Bio:
Gary Barwin is a writer, performer, and multimedia artist. He is the author of 31 books, including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His latest book is Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity, from which this essay is excerpted. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
[IMAGE CAPTION: Artwork by Gary Barwin from Broken Light, a series based on the patterned repetition of Hebrew letters.]