At a climactic moment in the novel, rehearsal for the play The Jew of New York is disrupted by the crazed Moishe Ketzelbourd. Ketzelbourd harbors a wild jealousy of Mordecai Manuel Noah, and he is filled with rage at the sight on stage of Major Ham, the burlesque version of Noah played by Maynard Daizy. "Unable to distinguish between the actor playing Noah and the real man, the creature that was once Moishe Ketzelbourd leaps to the stage" and fatally attacks Daizy (83.5-6). "A quick-thinking stagehand pulls a pistol and shoots at what he takes to be a wolf or overgrown jackal" (83.7). On being shot, Ketzelbourd cries out a strange word, but because he has been living like a beaver for some years and is no longer wearing any clothes, the cast and crew of the play do not recognize that their mysterious attacker was a man; and because all but one of the cast and crew are Gentiles, they do not recognize that the sound he uttered was a word. Ketzelbourd is a victim of his own failure to distinguish the actor from his role, and his mistake is repeated in the crew's belief that this bestial man was actually an animal.

Of course, language has long been considered a characteristically human trait, and Katchor has more to say about Ketzelbourd's last word as it impinges on his identity as man or beast. As "news of the freak attack spreads through the city," a patron at the Chaldean Gardens tea shop reads a newspaper account: "In its death throes, the creature emitted a strange, drawn-out cry, most accurately represented phonetically by the letters: F-A-R-V-O-U-S." Another patron, the kabbalist Yosl Feinbroyt, overhears this account and speaks the letters as a word: "Farvous?" (84.4). The Yiddish-speaking Yosl has recognized the strange cry as the Yiddish for "Why?", but Katchor has obscured this information by spelling the word in an unusual English transcription rather than using Hebrew characters in standard Yiddish orthography. Had Katchor originally spelled Ketzelbourd's death-cry in Hebrew letters, it would have been intelligible as a word, albeit a foreign word, even to readers unable to read the Hebrew alphabet, but the transcription into English orthography momentarily turns the meaningful word into meaningless noise.  continue...