The Language of Thieves: The Story of Rotwelsch and One Family's Secret History

by Martin Puchner

‘A book about history, language and culture wrapped up in a detective story […] Fascinating ’ - Guardian recommended by Michael Rosen "The story of the secret language of Central Europe and its legacy on the author's hidden family history, from the author of The Written World. Since the Middle Ages, vagrants and thieves in Central Europe have spoken Rotwelsch, a secret language influenced by Yiddish and written in rudimentary signs. When Martin Puchner inherited a family archive, it led him on a journey into this extraordinary language but also into his family's connections to the Party, for whom Rotwelsch held a particular significance. A riveting story of the mindset and milieu of Central Europe and of the way language can be used to evade oppression, The Language of Thieves is also a deeply moving reckoning with a family's buried past."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Language, Memoir, World War II, Linguistics, Biography

Hardcover

First published October 13, 2020

About the author

Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair at Columbia University, where he also served as co-chair of the Theater Ph.D. program. He now holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Jan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

HARK! HARK!
Hark, hark! the dogs do bark!
 Beggars are coming to town:
Some in jags, and some in rags,
 And some in velvet gown.
 ---The Real Mother Goose

What do I know about nomadic troops of beggars, impoverished people who don't belong anywhere or to anybody? What have I heard?

They are viewed with fear and suspicion since people who don't work or live anywhere aren't subject to community norms. I remember from White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America that, in colonial times, those for whom vagrancy was approved had to wear some sort of badge -- a carryover from Europe.

Then there were the hobos during the Depression. Those hobos, if they were from here, likely shared a common language. Maybe the same goes for the beggars in the English nursery rhyme. On the other hand, being thrown together and isolated from the mainstream may itself have given rise to linguistic changes.

I came across The Language of Thieves in a shortened New York Times list of books newly out in paperback. I was interested because of the subtitle but also because I remembered from another book, maybe The Pity of It All, that in medieval and early modern times, some Jews in the German-speaking countries had become a part of the vagrant underclass and had contributed to its argot -- small wonder, if all those who couldn't afford a ginormous ransom would be expelled from the walled cities and principalities when they became too numerous or prominent.

The author, born in 1970 in Nuremberg, came to find out as a small child that the strangely dressed people who stopped by the house for handouts left shorthand signs or markers (zinken, from Latin signum) to alert their fellow travelers as to what they could expect there. That language was called Rotwelsch, which he originally thought had to do with the color red and Wales, but came to find out meant "beggars' cant" or, as the title has it, "the language of thieves."

"Welsch" doesn't refer to Wales; it could mean Italian, but, more pointedly, meant what "Greek" means in English when we say "It's Greek to me." Or, maybe, what "barbar" meant to Rome. As with the Roman barbarians, Rotwelsch came to mean not only their language but also the people: inferior and uncouth. The author goes on to relate Martin Luther's war against corruption of the German language and the people by Yiddish and, eventually, Rotwelsch. For Luther, vagrants, beggars and Jews were one and the same, although, interestingly, he combated these languages by disseminating their vocabulary, presumably to educate people on what they should look out for.

Along the way, the author discovered his grandfather had been an enthusiastic Nazi who hoped to accomplish through language and his study of names what biology failed at: identify Jews. The author's father and uncle (the first generation post-Nazi) had to deal with that legacy, and all three --grandfather, father, uncle -- had been students of Rotwelsch, although the siblings from fascination rather than contempt. The book becomes a memoir of his family through the lens of this mixed heritage. The author, born in 1970 and second generation out, eventually emigrates and becomes a naturalized American. He uses his vantage point to share his views of that experience.

Although the author has made himself an expert -- the expert -- on Rotwelsch, there's not a huge amount there. From looking it up on Wikipedia, I think there may be more to be known about vagrancy, which historically led to fear and suspicion, than about the language of vagrants in Germany and elsewhere.

The author points out that although many Rotwelsch words are derived from Yiddish and Hebrew, the people speaking it during his childhood were largely Christian. But he does not remark on the possibility that in the '70s Germany had virtually no Jews left to be speaking it.

I appreciated the memoir aspect. The book was lighter on the language than I had expected, likely because not a lot is known. The author's surmise makes sense to me, that is, that Rotwelsch and other lingo of its kind did not originate in order to be secretive and deceptive, as those who feared it and harbored suspicion of its speakers believed. Instead it was just a language and the native tongue of those born into it.

Outcasts and their speech could represent a sort of societal return of the repressed.

[Tahmineh Baradaran]

كتاب تازه‌اي از شما با عنوان «زبان دزدها» منتشر شده است كه به دست مخاطب ايراني نرسيده است. خيلي خوشحال مي‌شوم كمي درباره اين كتاب براي ما بگوييد.

پوكنر: از بسياري جهات، اين كتاب نوع كاملا متفاوت از كتاب است. در واقع دو داستان است كه به‌ هم بافته شده‌اند. يك داستان در مورد زبان باستاني جاده است كه از قرون وسطي در اروپاي مركزي تكلم مي‌شد، يك زبان مخفي كه تركيبي از آلماني، ييديش و ساير زبان‌ها بود. يك زبان كاملا گفتاري، بدون خاستگاه ثابت كه به مردم حاضر در جاده‌ها خدمت‌رساني مي‌كرد. اين زبان دريچه‌اي به جهان زيرزميني اروپا و زندگي ساكنان دربه‌در آنجا ارايه مي‌دهد. (از برخي جهات، شبيه Lotera’I، زبان مشتق‌شده از عبري كه توسط بازرگانان يهودي ايراني تكلم مي‌شد.) داستان ديگر، داستان شخصي است؛ من در آلمان با اين زبان آشنا شدم. عموي من علاقه زيادي به اين زبان داشت. در نوشتن‌هايش از آن استفاده مي‌كرد (عمويم شاعر بود) و همچنين بخش‌هايي از ادبيات جهان را به اين زبان ترجمه كرد (كه فقط خودش مي‌توانست بخواند) . من آرشيو شخصي عمويم را به ارث بردم، گنجينه‌اي بي‌نظير است. بعدا فهميدم كه پدرش، پدربزرگ من نيز به اين زبان علاقه داشته و البته به روشي كاملا متفاوت. فهميدم پدربزرگم يكي از اعضاي اوليه نازي بود كه عليه اين زبان مي‌نوشت. بنابراين تلاش كردم بفهمم چرا پدربزرگم از اين زبان متنفر است و پسرش، عموي من، براي حفظ و احياي آن هرچه در توان داشت در طبق اخلاص گذاشت؛ پروژه‌اي كه اكنون من ادامه‌اش مي‌دهم.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Language of Thieves, Martin Puchner delves into Rotwelsch, as a sociolect and linguistic concept, but too as a reflection of his family, national, and personal history with the subject. The result is an investigative and thoughtful account of the origins of Rotwelsch in migratory groups in Middle Ages Europe, its changes over time and in different cultural contexts--from Martin Luther's Germany, to the United States in the early twentieth century, and Europe, from World War II to the present--and, ultimately, a consideration of whether or not the "language of thieves" should or can be truly understood academically, or at the very least, by those who are not involved in the underground exchange of words and symbols.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in linguistics, the cultural implications and legacy of the Nazi regime in World War II, or for those researching the role of language and communication in migrant and itinerant communities who would like to know more about a particular without reading just a case study (this is so much more, and better for it).

Hardcover from my place of work, Oxford Exchange Bookstore, in Tampa, Florida.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found out about Rotwelsch because Klezmer musicians were among the itinerant social groups that used it, so I started off excited. Super job explaining the history and social context necessary for understanding the various aspects of the language. The personal and family history made the whole book feel like an episode of Finding your Roots, which made the whole thing very engaging and relatable.

[Karyl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I am fascinated by not only languages but also by the Holocaust. I wanted to know about this language I’d never heard of, Rotwelsch, a sociolect spoken by itinerants, beggars, and thieves, that shared some commonalities with Yiddish. Rotwelsch had been seen as defiling German by the Nazis, so they wanted to stamp it out and render it extinct. But language doesn’t always work that way, and it has survived in pockets of Europe and even in the hobos’ pictographs here in the US.

However, this book is less about Rotwelsch and more about the author’s connection to it. He never spoke it himself in his family, but his family was fascinated by it. His uncle studied it and even translated a lot of works (including parts of the Bible) into Rotwelsch. His father taught him some of the pictographs, which led him to recognizing the Depression-era hobos’ version here in the States. But Puchner’s grandfather was a card-carrying Nazi, one who wanted to purify and Aryanize all of German society. He studied languages and names, and attempted to root out those with Jewish names that were defiling the purity of German names. Martin Puchner wanted to come to terms with his family’s Nazi past, especially as his mother’s grandfather spent time in a concentration camp as a political prisoner. As such, most of the book is more of a reflection on his family’s complicated past and less about Rotwelsch as a whole.

One thing that really bothered me, however, is Puchner’s use of g*psy multiple times when he was explaining what Rotwelsch is. Instead, he should have used the term Roma. He’s a person who studies languages and words; he should have known that the former term is a racial slur and avoided using it.

Puchner also used “anti-Semitic” as a hyphenated word. Granted, this is something I’ve just learned recently, but according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called ‘Semitism’, which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews” (source here). Again, many may think it’s a small thing, but a linguist and professor should have known better.

I would really have preferred this book to have been more about the language, with the musings about his family and their role in the Holocaust kept to small tangents. Nonetheless, it was an interesting introduction to a language I’d never realized existed.

[Jon B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great piece of work. Start with a study on the linguists of a sociolect that doesn't want to be studied, add in World War 2 history and its aftermath for a prominent German family, stir in the effects of said history on the grandson of this family, and spice it up with the idea of what it means to become an American in the world of today and you've got the recipe for a great, great story, and while the narrowness of the focus will not make many people's top non-fiction reading list, it should. Language, the very tool that holds us together, keeps us moving forward, binds us to our history, and cements us, or launches us, to our place in this world is so worthy of study. Mr. Puchner turns a family obsession with Rotwelsch, the cant language of migrants and vagrants in Europe, into a memoir of a man coming to terms with his grandfather's work as a mid-level operative in the Nazi party, that ultimately launches himself from his German home to taking the oath of citizenship in America, all the way musing on the realities of his family history, and the elements that tie one to a place, a time.

[Brannigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good story that is 95% biography and family history and 5% history of the hidden language. I wish it had been flipped.

[Daniel Farabaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book surprised me. I thought it was going to be a book about a Jewish man exploring the loss of language in Nazi Germany. In reality it is a very interesting study of an underground language by a man who discovers his family's hidden Nazi past. It was much more engaging than I thought it would be.

[Megan Daane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting book which delves into the study of the sociolect Rotwelch. Though the author edits The Norton Anthology of English Literature, his writing rings clear and understandable. My favorite paragraph is a reflective analysis of the NSA’s poorly punctuated National Anthem, given to new citizens during their citizenship ceremony. Great read.

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poetic rumination on memory, culture, the uses of language, and how history pervades everything.

The thread that holds this book together is the problem of the Rotwelsch language; what it was, who used it, how it has been documented, how it is remembered, but most of all why three generations of Puchner's family dedicated themselves to it. Each chapter introduces a new angle to Puchner's understanding of this hidden language, describing how profoundly unaware he was of how deeply this secret language entangled his family, and while exploring these connections he is regularly revealing unsettling truths about people he thought he knew well, and forcing him to reconsider what he thought he knew about language.
When in the closing chapters the book arrives in the present-day Puchner uncovers the most personally unsettling revelations of all. At one point believing himself to be perhaps 'the last speaker of Rotwelsch', he discovers that instead that his vocabulary in that language, always fragmentary, certainly out of date, and is very likely profoundly incorrect because of how it was recorded. Even more unsettling is that there remains a thriving community of speakers of Rotwelsch descended languages that he can't access, and this persistence of the language points to Rotwelsch not being particularly unique as a language, neither has he been thinking of it correctly. Rotwelsch is not the endangered language trapped in the amber of pre-WWII Europe of his imagination, driven to the brink by the Nazi campaign to purify Germania. Instead, the language has been kept alive by changing with the needs of the speakers while hiding in plain sight.

Deeply informed and carefully written throughout, Puchner is an author who thinks about words and their weight, how word choice inflects meaning. An absolute wonder of a book, the kind that only rarely appears. Highly recommended.

[Ferrel Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love languages as much as the author, so I am predisposed to like this book, but it is really outstanding. I will recommend it highly to anyone interested in German history, Germans and Jews, languages, sociolects, American immigration, or nomadic lifestyles. Puchner is a great narrator and strikes the perfect balance between (auto)biography and language themes. The only thing I missed was an alphabetized glossary at the end so that you can easily locate a Rotwelsch term. Terms would be translated the first time, but this reader couldn't easily remember all of them when they recurred. From the point of the view of Rotwelsch speakers, such an index might have made the project more suspect, but it would have satisfied my linguistic curiosity.

[Catfish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent book is in part an exploration of the sociolect Rotwelsch (vagrants’ cant). It’s also a complicated and expository family biography that relies heavily on archives and the archivists. It’s sprinkled with language theory and history, insight pulled from otherness, how the language survived centuries of persecution, the intrinsic dissimilarity to conlangs like Esperanto, how it is and will very likely remain an endangered language, etc etc. I never give books five stars but this one moved me.

[Elke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book.
Written by an academic, but very accessible.
Love how much the writer loves languages, and how he sees languages.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book pulls off the difficult feat of combining narrative non-fiction and family memoir. The German-born author was vaguely aware of Rotwelsh, the German-Yiddish-Hebrew-and-more based language of vagrants, beggars and rogues of the German-speaking world, but becomes gradually more interested in it, like his uncle Gunter before him. As he starts to dig into the fascinating history of both the language and its speakers, he also becomes aware of unsettling facts about his family history. More specifically, that his beloved grandpa was an early member of the Nazi party and even joined the SA, proudly proclaiming his affiliation as a way to progress in his career as archivist and historian of place and family names. Another grandfather died in the war and a great-grandfather was imprisoned for having uttered, towards the end of WWII, the hope that the Allies would soon win the war. A generation later, the author's father and uncle Gunter, as well as their wives, formed part of a small commune in the 1960s before drifting into more conventional occupations. So a little bit of German history encapsulated in a single family.

At the same time, the author tells us about his research into Rotwelsh and its Zinken , secret signs or pictograms that vagrants, hobos and other people of the road used to communicate with each other. Who knew that Martin Luther had complained about this language, considering it a bastardization of the German language that he had just tried to elevate as a language suitable for reading the Bible in? Unsurprisingly, the Nazi ideology also had no place for either the language or its speakers, similar to their position vis-a-vis Yiddish.

This is not a book about linguistics- the author refers several times to the two-way street between German and Rotwelsh, and the borrowings from Hebrew, Czech and other languages, but it stays rather superficial and descriptive. That doesn't spoil the fun, though, as we follow the author through the archives kept by his family, the towns where his grandfather and great-uncle worked, and even the bowels of the Widener library at Harvard.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rotwelsch was an underground language/dialect used by vagabonds, hobos, thieves and homeless travelers in middle Europe from the 1500s up until at least the 1970s. It was a mélange of Hebrew, German, Romani and several other languages. There was a graphic code used to leave messages about things like which homes would give handouts or which towns arrested vagrants.

Puchner's father and uncle, who were middle class Germans, taught him the language. This memoir is his exploration of the language and his discovery of his family's very complicated relationship with Rotwelsch.

Puchner's uncle was a bohemian. He dedicated the last part of his life to preserving and studying the language. He handwrote a Rotwelsch dictionary. Puchner, an English professor at Harvard, recovers his uncle's archives from his aunt. The archives become the starting place for his research into the subject.

Puchner's grandfather, Karl, was a professor of linguistics in Germany. One day Puchner searches the Widener Library at Harvard to see if his grandfather ever studied the language. He discovers an explicitly antisemitic article written by Karl in a Nazi scientific journal. The article includes an argument that Rotwelsch is a Jewish secret criminal language.

His maternal grandfather, Joseph, was jailed for anti-Nazi comments after being informed on by a neighbor. Puchner tracks that story down through the German archives and discovers that it is a complicated story which was simplified after the war.

The second theme of the book is Puchner researching and trying to understand his family's relationship with the Nazi regime. He gets access to the Nazi government archives and interviews anyone he can find who is still alive. It is a fascinating story. There is denial and a willful desire not to know.

Puchner has two intriguing stories, a mysterious underground language that survived for hundreds of years, and a complicated and morally complex family history. The stories are intertwined. He manages to tell both stories together in a way that magnifies the impact of both of them.

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puchner's story of the "jargon" of Rotswelsch, takes us into German and Central European history through the lens of a peculiar Yiddish and Roma inflected language of the underworld of vagabonds and marginal people. He discovers that his own Nazi grandfather studied the language (which he saw as an enemy of German purity) in pursuit of his Hitlerian dream of linguistic purification, alongside his effort to identify Jewish names and distinguish them from pure German names, all pursuant to Hitler's genocidal agenda.

The author's father and uncle continued their father's engagement with the Rotswelsch language in the post-war era with a different goal - to preserve and resurrect it, and to celebrate it with translations and poetry and academic research.

While little aware of his father and uncle's work as a child, when Puchner inherited his uncle's archive, Rotswelsch became his obsession too. In this book we watch him peel back the hidden secrets of his family's past, as he becomes a leading (and perhaps the only) expert on a disappearing "jargon", a quasi-language, a tool of survival for wandering people on the Central European margins. In the process, we are treated to a fascinating personal memoir, and a sophisticated discourse on the role of language in creating communities and solving practical problems.

If you love languages, and are interested in the role they play in defining communities, and if you are interested in 20th century German and Central European history, and what it means for 21st century America, this book is well worth your time. It's also a fine personal and intellectual memoir.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first came across references to Rotwelsch while living in Northern Germany and knew that it was a language of nomads across Europe. I now know much more about it, including that it is a "recycled" language - words taken from languages spoken across the continent and transformed into other meanings. From Luther to the Nazis, both the language and its speakers have been scorned. For Martin Puchner it was part of his life from his childhood but it was only as an adult academic that he started delving into the history of the language and, in parallel, the sometimes shocking history of his family. This book is full of information - I discovered that some of what I hitherto thought of as Hamburg slang is actually Rotwelsch - it is engagingly written, and includes short lessons at the end of each chapter, ranging from a paragraph translated from "Don Quixote" to phrases which would be useful should you need to engage aliens in a Rotwelsch conversation.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard about "Rot-Welsh" – the language of vagabonds & thieves, primarily in Germany & central Europe – from our friend in Germany, a woman with whom we often stayed & with whom we had numerous conversations about language (as well as many other topics). Professor Puchner tells an engaging story of this language & its history, going back to Martin Luther's attacks on it in the 16th century CE. It's also a personal story of his family's involvement in the language & of the extremely upsetting things he found out about his own grandfather's involvement with the Nazis. The author includes a few sample vocabulary words at the end of each chapter, indicating their German, Hebrew, Yiddish, &c. roots, along with examples of the "Zinken" (signs) that hoboes & vagabonds used. Very readable.

[Nate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though the author spends a decent amount of the book talking about the language of thieves, Rotwelsch, I never felt any sense of compulsion to learn about it. I never got why this specific language was of such interest, compared with the many other developed purely for intercultural/subcultural communication. Puchner’s connection to the language is pretty tangential, not particularly deep history, just a family interest. I might just not be artistic enough to understand it. The book ended up darting between the detailed family history, the history of the language and its users, and the author’s discovery process. Although the writing was fairly good, I was still bored.

The author dealing with his nazi roots, while interesting to read about, felt intensely awkward (maybe that was the point).

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book that functions as a history of a secret language, a family history, and a memoir. There's something truly shocking about having an author describe how they discovered their grandfather was part of the Nazi party. And that happens right at the start!

The book deals with this discovery, his family's preoccupation with Rotwelsch, and then details a history of Rotwelsch. Or at least as much of a history as can be pieced together by an outsider writing about it after it went extinct.

It really is a fascinating book about language and the many ways it intersects with everything from family to geopolitics to science and religion.

There's so much I could say about this book, but I think I'll just leave it simply:

If you're interested in language, this is a great book.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The true story of a type of language known as Rotwelsch, which was used by vagabonds throughout history as a code language and did borrow a lot of words from Yiddish, and Roma. The author's family were involved in the Holocaust, both Nazi and not. The author was horrified to realize the extent his grandfather documented the language of Rotwelsch for the Reich, to discriminate against mainly against the Jews, as he thought the language was a code used by the Jews. Very interesting. I highly recommend it.

[Micebyliz]

I love books like this. I learned a lot; i only wish i could remember with a younger brain. Some of it i felt was what we usually say is "preaching to the choir"--that is, if you agree already you don't need to be told that everyone is human and that love is love, etc. but it's still good to see it in print.
I love languages and this is an affirmation that language is incredibly important. a must-read.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of 2020 by far. I love obscure historical topics, especially having to do with language and sociology. The author delved straight into his genealogy and family history, much like what I help others do at my job with the library, and he uncovered quite a discovery for each of his two grandfathers. His research also led him to concrete proof of a rather vague language shared by many on the European continent who tend to stay to the shadows, whether by choice of due to societal influence. Overall, one of my favorite books for sure.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at a German family's connection to Rotwelsch, a language used by thieves and nomadic people in Europe. This also involves the author's discovery that his grandfather was a Nazi and is an insight into a generation of Germans who had to deal with the history of Aryanism and holocaust. There is not much that is cut and dried in this book, it shares the messiness of a hidden language and of family dynamics.

[Sebastian Rehm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this in the library and was intrigued by the mention of a language called Rotwelsch, which I had never heard anything about before. The book probably gives as good an overview of the language's fascinating history as any outsider could give.
By blending his own family's history with the history of the language, the author creates an engaging read but also opens up a lot of questions he never manages to answer.

[Marian Merritt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to learn about these secret languages used not only in Germany but the world over. Fascinating how this archivist and linguist discovers his family’s connection and uncovers so much (in plain sight) about his grandfather’s Nazi past. Shout out to Harvard’s Widener Library and the NYC Library for co-starring roles.

[Patty Kluding · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was part memoir part documentary about an almost-lost obscure language. I was back and forth between 3-4 stars, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would especially the reckoning of a modern day German with family history of maybe - nazi sympathizers. I had some issues with the relevance of thinking deeply about this language of vagrants and the book seemed like a deeply personal project.

[NellyBells · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 This was a combination biography of the Puchner family and a history of Rotwelsch. It's true that grandfather, father and son were obsessed. The author, the son, did serious research and uncovered lost archives. I did not care for the biographical aspects nearly as much as I liked the linguistics and the histories of vagabonds and displaced groups.

[Alaina Sloo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting account of a language used by itinerant people in Germany and other parts of central Europe: similar to the hobo code used in the Depression-era US, but broader and also verbal. It's also an account of one family's history from Nazi Germany to the present day, and also other ways in which the Nazis targeted language to advance their agenda against Jews and others.

[Emma Morin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and quick read centred around the author’s family history and its connection to an underground language. Focuses more on the family’s history than the history of the language but ties in political and philosophical perspectives towards language and makes for a compelling introduction into Rotwelsch.