David Ilyich Rebi

Born Daout in 1922 in Yevpatoria, Crimea, David Rebi survived the horrors of the Holocaust to find his entire community massacred.  When David Rebi walked out of a Nazi camp in April 1945, he walked back into a silence that had no bottom.

 

For fifty years, he did not speak Krymchak, not because he forgot, but because the Soviet state prevented Krymchak from being taught or spoke, under penalty of death. 

Fifty years of silence, carrying his language deep inside himself - his mother's songs, grandmother's voice, the specific way his people said "Mother" and "I love you" and "Stay safe" — keeping that door locked because the world prevented him from speaking it. 

Finally, in his seventies and eighties, David Rebi, from a newly independent Ukraine sat down at a desk and wrote furiously the words of his people. He translated the fairy tales locked inside him, stories that had not been spoken aloud in decades, and he returned them to the world.

He opened a Sunday school called "The School of Grandfather and Grandson." He taught the language he had not spoken in fifty years, relearning it as he taught it, rebuilding the grammar from the ruins of his own childhood bit by bit — crumb by crumb — the way you rebuild anything after a catastrophe: slowly, on your knees, with whatever your hands can find.

He paid five hundred and sixty dollars to put those pages into lead and ink. He published the definitive Krymchak language textbook — on phonetics, morphology, syntax. He compiled the dictionary. He published translations of the old fairy tales and songs. His work was eventually recognized by the Russian Academy of Sciences, by the government of Ukraine, by the Crimean Academy of Sciences.

Every language that dies takes a universe with it. A way of seeing. A way of naming the color of the sea at dusk, the feeling of coming home, the specific texture of grief. The Krymchak word for an object is truly the accumulated fingerprints of every person who ever used it, every context it was ever spoken in, every prayer it was ever part of.
David— Daout Rebi saved as many of those words as one man's memory could hold.

He was chairman of the Krymchak cultural society from 1992 to 1997.
He received medals. He received certificates of honor.
He kept working. He left them for us. He left them for children who hadn't been born yet, for a digital age he couldn't quite imagine, for researchers and dreamers and descendants who might one day come looking — for anyone willing to follow the crumbs back through the silence to the world that existed before the winter of 1941.