Chapter 1: Family, Hebrew School, Grade School

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Informal Education Despite the merits of Oak Lane Country Day School, no single educational institution could ever be considered the principal source of Chomsky's education. From a tender age, he was an avid reader, delving into many fields. He eagerly worked his way through Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Hardy, Hugo, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Twain, and Zola (this list displays the young Chomsky's taste for realism in literature; each of these writers attempted to describe all elements and strata of the societies in which their works are set), as well as the Bible (in Hebrew), and works of the nineteenth-century Hebrew renaissance and Yiddish-Hebrew writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Mendele Mocher Sfarim. At the age of twelve, Chomsky read a draft of his father's book on David Kimhi (1160 1236), a Hebrew grammarian working in the golden age of Jewish cultural creativity. Robert Sklar remembers a conversation he had with Chomsky concerning the impact his father's book had upon him. Chomsky said that he had come to the field of linguistics informed by the classical philology that he had learned from his father, and from his own readings, rather than by the prevailing structuralist position. In a sense, he became interested in the study of language without benefit of a theoretical background; but he was equipped with a feeling for, and an interest in, historical processes, which led him to seek explanations rather than formulate descriptions: "In fact, giving explanations was regarded as some kind of infantile mysticism. Really the only innovation I think I introduced into the field basically was to try to give descriptive explanations to try to give a theory of the synchronic structure of the language which would actually explain the distribution of phenomena. In my early work, at least, this was very self-consciously modeled on the kinds of explanations that people gave in historical linguistics that I knew about ever since I was a kid" (qtd. in Sklar 32).

Hebrew, language and grammar resources online A passage from David Kimhi's Hebrew Grammar gives us some interesting insight into two lessons that were to mark Chomsky's thought: first, the young Chomsky learned the value of a grammarian's work; and second, he apprehended the ways in which useful knowledge is forgotten or played down in later periods. "`The knowledge of Hebrew grammar'," he has written, "`became a vital need at that time. Grammatical accuracy served as a criterion for the recognition of the merits of literary and religious compositions, and grammatical knowledge constituted the measure of Jewish learning and scholarship. Interest in Hebrew grammar was, therefore, not confined to professional grammarians, but gained vogue among statesmen, poets and philosophers'" (Language and Politics 79). The value of forgotten learning and the importance of language studies became key issues in Chomsky's later work, particularly in books such as Cartesian Linguistics.
To what extent Chomsky was inspired to follow this path by his father is impossible to know, just as it is impossible to measure the impact that realist literature had upon him in his youth. But it is clear that his parents, especially his father, nurtured in him an interest in the workings of language, and that his parents, especially his mother, fostered in him a commitment to confront social issues. It is also apparent that as a child Chomsky was immersed in Jewish and Hebraic culture. This does not mean that he was a product of Talmud-inspired questioning, as many Jews have suggested, but rather that the atmosphere of the Chomsky home was infused with concern for Jewish and Hebraic issues: " I grew up [with] an intense Jewish and Hebraic background, but not one where the Talmud played any special role (except for Agadah the legends and stories). Yes, I studied some Talmud, and it was kind of fun, but frankly I never took it very seriously; at least, consciously. What was going on below, I can't know, of course" (31 Mar. 1995).