On Grass Widows

I want to write a bit about the controversy surrounding the term ‘grass widow.’ I also want to address what I found to be be the very painful suggestion that only some people ought to speak Yiddish. I became emotional several times in the course of researching and writing this essay, and reflecting on my own history with language. My first semester course at Cal (University of California, Berkeley) was a freshman seminar reflecting on the concept of the mother tongue.  I was separated from the main source of my Spanish competency early on, intermittently at 5, then permanently at 13, due to US green card policy as applied to an infant. I have long found comfort in etymology. Sometimes when you are separated from the originator of words, you go looking for that person in other places. You will take any scrap. And I will not be separated from her again by being told I cannot comfort myself with the words she gave me, because some stranger does not like how her words came to be in my mouth. The Jewish and now also Christian concept of the Holy Spirit is often depicted as the fire of a facile tongue for a reason. Mirror neurons connect us all.

This dispute also connects to the concept of who can reasonably claim a Jewish identity, and, if someone is perceived as UNreasonably claiming to be Jewish, what should be done about it. We ought to recognize the existence of antisemitism, and the fact that an antisemitic government may weaponize factionalism to legitimize suppression of the activities and practices, and support the marginalization, of members of whatever sect professing Judaism happens to be most common in the area, or otherwise is targeted. There is a reason Yiddish is a fusion language, and it is not a happy history to pursue.

I, as a non-Jewish person, am certainly in no position to be judging who should be permitted to use this branding “Jewish” without arousing suspicion, condemnation, or discouragement. And that is the ultimate concern I have, that we may be legitimizing suspicion of people for the fact that they practice Jewish rites, and not because of any individual circumstance that would arouse suspicion if seen in a non-Jewish person. As an American, I support religious freedom, pluralism, and tolerance. Everyone is welcome to a share of my polite bemusement and condescension, as your friendly neighborhood pan-heretic.

In expressing the nuances of Jewish ethnoreligious identity, which I do not claim to understand, one party may have crossed the rhetorical line by likening the other to Rachel Dolezal, as the immediate criticism I had is that Rachel Dolezal could not convert to Black under any circumstances. It is a similar, not congruent, circumstance, one which has also given rise to a fusion dialect, African American Vernacular English (AAVE). AAVE has its own regular grammar and its own pattern of regional accent variations.  It is an equally valid dialect, not a series of errors from someone attempting to speak a different dialect. People have strong feelings in my country about who should speak AAVE and whether it should ever be spoken or taught. I rely on native speaker intuitions of my own at times to determine whether an AAVE-dominant child is making a speech error or simply has an accent, which requires verbally code-switching.

For instance, once, when I was still an intern, I wanted to determine whether word-final cluster reduction sounded “right” to me as a passive native speaker of AAVE, so I code switched and said, “he da laes’ one” (he’s the last one). I wanted to see whether I dropped the ‘t’ and if so, what else changed to preserve the information that there was a ‘t’ there at one point. The consonant cluster is the “st” on “last” which is word-final because it is at the end of the word. Sometimes, if a child is simplifying “st” to “s,” this is an error pattern that represents a disorder. Other times, it is not an error pattern and does not represent a disorder. I do not want to treat a non-error as an error, which means doing drills with the child to ‘correct’ the speech, if everyone in this child’s family and community pronounces it that way, as an accent or dialectical difference. I treat disorders not differences. That would pathologize people on the basis of membership in a marginalized community.

And so having done this, I realized that it sounded correct to me. I found that I automatically lengthened the vowel to compensate for reducing the cluster, to preserve for the listener that a cluster was still present. I automatically did this, because I had heard it done, because of the competence that I had acquired as a young child. This is a common way that accents diverge without losing the critical information that would allow a listener to distinguish “last” from “lass” following the accentual loss of the “t.”

This mimicry concerned my white supervisor, who worried I may be overheard and it may be inferred that I were mocking an AAVE speaker. Obviously, we were both speech therapists, and had a good reason to be imitating a student’s speech patterns, but that can give you a sense of how delicate these politics are. I remember being young enough that there were simply different ways you talked to different people in your world, but not having a concept of language or dialect yet. In addition to hearing AAVE, I also grew up hearing Latino Spanish alongside English, spoken to and around me by a caregiver since infancy, and my brain did its best to learn to process it. Latino Spanish is another fusion language with significant contributions from indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl, the language that gives us the words “Mexico” and “avocado.”

It is so different from Spain’s variety of español that Disney puts out two Spanish dubbed versions of movies, europeo and latino, only one of which I can readily understand. They are as different as modern and old English - “Oh, this one is using the words I know,” I remember thinking when I discovered the second dub. Like most bilingual people, my competence is non-identical across my languages, and I am much stronger listening than formulating sentences. However, I can read and recognize non-grammatical sentences similar to another native speaker.  So I am primarily a receptive bilingual who has become increasingly expressively fluent as an adult using it on a regular basis at work. I must still rely on interpreters, but I am able to monitor them.

I carried shame with me about being what is known in the bilingualism literature as a ‘passive speaker,’ until I learned about the concept. I was separated from the source of my Spanish exposure around age 5, after which point my world was in English. My pronunciation is typical of the accent she spoke, however it is clear I did not grow up - speaking - it, and that English is my dominant language. Speaking and comprehending are literally different areas of the brain, and it is very possible for one to develop and function independent of the other. To become aware of the racial politics of code-switching is a slow and painful process. To learn what you are permitted to say, when, and to whom, and who will say what to you, is a dynamic and unpredictable transformative series of experiences. No one wants a blank stare. No child controls what words they hear. They just seek to.

I will also discuss the term “grass widow.” The term appears to originally derive from the term “straw widow,” which then relates to terms like “straw poll,” “straw vote,” “straw ballot,” "and “straw man” i.e. “scarecrow,” which all appeared around the same time and all have the meaning of “straw [X] = false [X].” Just like trans women are fake women. They’re scarecrows of women. Grass widows are called that because they are not real widows. They are not real widows because their male consorts are still alive. They have been abandoned or otherwise separated from their partner. Their emotional experience may be similar, and they may appear to others to be widows due to the lack of a partner.

I am also not a real widow. In my case, it is because we were not yet married when he died. You could further argue that it is because he is still alive. He is both dead and alive. Schrodinger’s fiance. How is this possible? Because of how he died, he was able to donate his heart, liver, and kidney. In that way, he is alive to keep other people alive. Therefore, I have a tattoo on my wrist over my pulse - a small circle, with a raised edge, to guide my fingertip in times of grief. He never meant to leave; he cannot return; he is definitely gone; he is not fully dead. We only had the best laid plans. What does that make me? Not a widow. Not a grass widow. Yet I grieve a lost partner. I am a straw grass widow.  Sometimes you take what you can get when what you had has been taken. I often return to the story of Jonah and the vine in contemplation of this loss. The gift was the present, and the present is now past. Do I have a right to be angry? Yet I am grateful.

5

Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.

6

Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine.

7

But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered.

8

When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live."

9

But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?" "I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."

10

But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight.

11

But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" 

So I turn my attention to the people of Ninevah.

I wanted to know what if any connection the term ‘grass widow’ had with the word ‘agunah.’ I immediately recognized it as unlikely to be a literal translation of the word “agunah,” for several reasons. One, “agunah” is a participle (“chained” or “anchored”) and a single word. “Grass widow” is two nouns. I don’t speak Hebrew, but I don’t not speak it that much. There has to be some correspondence in a translation. I rely on interpreters to rapidly translate technical information into Spanish, and I monitor their interpretations in real-time, because “How long have you had this symptom?” is not as specific as what I said, interpreter. And what I said mattered. 

Second, the image evoked is very different. I suppose grass is anchored to the ground, but is the widow somehow anchored to the grass? It did not make intuitive sense. In researching, I learned that there is some version of “grass” or “straw” widow in several languages surrounding Germany, where it seems to have arisen as a member of the set “straw X = fake X.” Sometimes, in languages, you have what’s called an “isogloss,” which is a line on a map where to one side, a word will be pronounced one way, and on the other, it is pronounced a different way. In England, they say, “they,” but in Denmark, they say, “de.” This seems to be a word-level version of that phenomenon.

An example of an morphemic isogloss in the US:

Originally, there was the claim that the term comes from Yiddish and has to do with agunah. However, agunah are women who are stuck in a religious marriage, i.e., they want to abandon the marriage and are not being permitted to do so. This is contrasted with grass widows, who have been abandoned by their partners, possibly after marriage or possibly after becoming impregnated, which would chain them to the partner via the umbilical cord/child. They are pseudo-widows whose partners are alive. Being agunah does not imply that the husband has abandoned the marriage, or the wife, but rather means the husband will not allow the wife to leave the marriage. It does not preclude nor imply a missing husband.

When I asked the originator of this claim how the terms related related, she cited a Yiddish-speaking author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, as her source of this claimed connection between ‘grass widow’ and ‘agunah.’  A note about language development. A child that is making sense of the world and learning language at the same time may make connections between words without knowing the history of how both words came to be side by side in the same language. We have a concept of native speaker intuition about how the language works, but a native speaker can be wrong. As a simultaneous bilingual, exposed to English and Latino Spanish on a regular basis from infancy, I made lots of inferences. One inference I made was between avocado and abogado, because it seemed like words that sounded so similar should have some connection. I’ll explain my theory in a bit.

I believe that some developmental confusion may have happened here, and I genuinely, as a linguist, doubt that a non-native Yiddish speaker came up with this idea herself. I concluded that it likely did originate from a native Yiddish speaker, because a Yiddish speaker would have been exposed to the phrase "straw widow” from German, and the word “agunah” from Hebrew, and then may have formulated that kind of unsubstantiated theory because it just sounded right. The vibe checked out. Maybe he even a parent who had even made the inference and then explicitly taught it as fact - an “old wives’ tale.” A Yiddish urban legend. So I inferred that she may have accepted and perpetuated someone else’s flawed analysis of the origin of the term “grass widow.” In my opinion, it is very unlikely this term derives from Judaism. Further, it appears to fully cover trans widows. Grass, in this case, means pseudo, or false, or imitation, or mimic. Fool’s widows.

I went and researched this source, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born author who wrote in Yiddish. Yiddish, remember, would include both “agunah” and “grass widow.” This author’ may not have been the only person in his community to think there must be some common ancestor there. Here’s an excerpt from one of his published works I found online:

  “Even if I’m a fool, I won’t swallow this.”

  “Do you want me to show you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll get undressed.”

  Avigdor’s eyes widened. It occurred to him that Anshel might want to practice pederasty. Anshel took off the gaberdine and the fringed garment, and threw off her underclothes. Avigdor took one look and turned first white, then fiery red. Anshel covered herself hastily.

  “I’ve done this only so that you can testify at the courthouse. Otherwise, Hadass will have to stay a grass widow.”

  Avigdor had lost his tongue. He was seized by a fit of trembling. He wanted to speak, but his lips moved and nothing came out. He sat down quickly, for his legs would not support him.

  Finally he murmured: “How is it possible? I don’t believe it!”

  “Should I get undressed again?”

  “No!”
https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/isaac-bashevis-singer/page,23,57012-the_collected_stories_of_isaac_bashevis_singer.html

‘Grass widow’ was never a legal term, unless someone has something very surprising to tell me about Polish law, so it appears I was right to suspect that a person exposed to both terms as a child had perhaps inferred in good faith a whole narrative that was not there. Just like I had, with avocados. My theory was that it had something to do with another questionable factoid I had acquired somehow, which was that stealing them in any amount was grand theft in California.* Therefore, 9 year old me concluded, they call them avocados because, “if you take an avocado, you’ll need an abogado.” 15 years later, I learned the truth: the Nahuatl word for avocado, āhuacatl (which means "testicle"), had been Spain-washed. I had been a weird, highly verbal kid, attempting to reverse engineer life, and I had made an incorrect inference in pursuit of that. It was a predictable flavor of mistake.

My favorite definition for ‘grass widow’ is still the first one, which I learned at Berkeley: a grass widow is a person who has just finished the last of their cannabis.

*You actually need to take $250 worth of them. I was safe due to small arms.