Figure 1

I mentioned the Israelite camp at Elim, meaning "terebinths," and that name crops up in another character name that sounds more typical of Katchor's wacky nomenclature from Julius Knipl and his other weekly strips. Hershel Goulbat, an itinerant Hebrew teacher turned theatrical impresario, is the promoter of a show in which a Native American named Elim-min-Nopee recites psalms and liturgical poems in Hebrew [fig. 1]. The Indian's name is obviously a joke on the alphabet—L-M-N-O-P— but there's more to the name than that. What makes the name Elim-min-Nopee special is the way Katchor has divided up the sounds of the letter-names into words, and two of those words are in Hebrew. "Elim" could mean either "terebinths" or "the gods" or "the powerful ones," a plural of the familiar Hebrew el meaning God. "Min" simply means "from," so this Indian's Hebrew name could mean "the God(s) from Nopee." Nopee, as far as I can tell, doesn't mean anything in particular, but it doesn't have to mean anything: it may be suggestive of a placename, possibly of Native American origin (cf. Micanopy, Florida), but it need not suggest anything more than a couple of letters of the alphabet. Even recognizing "elim" and "min" as hidden Hebrew words doesn't really add a legible significance to the Indian's name. Mixing sense and nonsense, the name remains evocative without being meaningful, though I would argue that whatever meaning it may have lies in its evocative quality.

The name certainly evokes the contemporary idea, often expressed in the novel, that the Native Americans are long-lost Jews. Here, again, we see the power of language to shape identity, as Elim-min-Nopee's name makes him out to be at least two-thirds Jewish already. Of course, his name also encodes about a fifth of the English alphabet, and this may in turn suggest another of the novel's themes, namely that the assimilation of Jewish and American identities proceeds in part at a linguistic level.  continue...