David Daout Rebi, A legacy of words

This is reprinted from the foreword of the translated works of The Krymack Language, by translator Bethany Batya Klein, who has dedicated the translation and this site to the memory of David Rebi.

There are moments in history where the entire survival of an ancient people — centuries of folklore, the prayers their grandmothers whispered over Shabbat candles, the lullabies mothers sang into the dark — do not rest on empires, libraries, or governments.

They rest on the memory of one single man.

David Ilyich Rebi was that man.

David Rebi

He was born Daout in 1922 in Yevpatoria, Crimea. His mother sang Krymchak songs in the kitchen. His grandmother told stories in the old tongue, the kind of stories that travel from mouth to ear to memory, generation after generation. 

In 1939, he left for artillery school in Kyiv. In May 1941, he was commissioned a lieutenant. Within weeks, the war swallowed him whole.

He fought from the first day.

By the end of 1942, he was a prisoner.

And while he sat in a Nazi camp somewhere in the frozen machinery of the Reich, the world he had come from — his mother, his grandmother, his childhood, his people — was being methodically, surgically erased from the earth.

The Krymchaks were a small and ancient Jewish people of Crimea, so old their origins blur into legend. They had survived Mongols, Ottomans, Tsars, and pogroms. They had carried their language across centuries. But in the winter of 1941, Einsatzgruppen came to Crimea and murdered the entire community in a series of massacres.

When David Rebi walked out of a Nazi camp in April 1945, he walked back into a silence that had no bottom.

There is a concept in Jewish thought —  Churban, or destruction — a word reserved it for only the most total annihilations. The destruction of the Temple. The destruction of European Jewry. It is not merely loss. It is the severing of a chain that was supposed to be eternal. It is the moment when the transmission fails, and you stand alone on one side of a broken bridge, holding your end of a rope that goes nowhere.

David stood at that broken bridge.

He could not stay in Crimea. How do you remain in a place where every street corner is a ghost? He left for Leningrad. He studied. He became an editor of literary fiction — a man who spent his working life tending to other people's words while his own people's words sat sealed inside him like something too painful to touch.

For fifty years, he did not speak Krymchak.

Not because he forgot. 

Following the deportations of 1944, when the entire Crimean Tatar population was forcibly expelled in a wave of Stalinist terror that left their ancestral homes desolate, a poisonous silence settled over the peninsula. The state struck 'Krymchak' from the census just as it stripped the Tatars of their history and their land. Schools were closed, books were burned, and the very act of speaking a native tongue became a political transgression—a marker of 'nationalist' deviance.

David Rebi

The Soviets closed the schools. The language became the kind of secret you don't tell your children, not because you don't love them, but because you love them too much to burden them with something the state has decided is dangerous and extinct.

Fifty years of silence.

Can you imagine what that silence weighs? To carry a language inside you like a sealed room — to know that inside that room are your mother's songs, your grandmother's voice, the specific way your people said "Mother" and "I love you" and "Stay safe" — and to keep the door locked because the world has told you the room no longer exists?

And inside that fifty-year silence lived a ghost within a ghost: the little seven-year-old boy named Daout. Before the Nazis arrived, before Stalin’s bureaucracy erased his people, it was a Russian schoolteacher who casually told a frightened child that "Daout" wasn't a real name, handing him "David" instead. For decades, Daout had to stay quiet. 

Finally, in his seventies and eighties, David Rebi, now in a newly independent Ukraine, seems to have made a quiet and devastating decision: that a language is a life. That a people's words are a soul. And that he was, perhaps, the last one who could act.

He sat down at a desk.

He had his memory. He had a handful of faded handwritten manuscripts  — ancestral notebooks written in an almost illegible ancient script that almost no one living could read. He taught himself to read them. He translated the fairy tales locked inside them, stories that had not been spoken aloud in decades, and he returned them to the world.

But when David finally sat down at that desk in his nineties with a pen in hand, he was not just saving a 2,000-year-old culture for the world. He walked back through the ruins of time to gently take that seven-year-old boy by the hand, look him in the eyes, and say: "Your name was real. Your mother’s songs were real. You are Daout, and you will not be forgotten."

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.

It was September of the year 2000 when a reporter from across the sea came to his small, warm room in Simferopol. He was seventy-six then. His hair was white and his eyes were dark with things no living man should have to hold. He laid a thick stack of paper upon the table. 

 Outside, the century was turning. Outside, the gray Soviet blocks stood cold under a Crimean sky, and at the edge of town, the concrete held the bones of his mother and his father and his sisters under the earth.

He knew what the numbers were. He knew the UNESCO lists were typed in capital letters. Nearly extinct. Deficient. He knew the young people were gone or silent or spoke only the state’s tongue. He knew that when he walked out into the street, he was walking among ghosts, and that when he closed his eyes, finally, in death, an entire nation went dark with him.

And yet he looked at those pages, placed his old hands on the paper, and spoke into the quiet room:

"There are peoples who have left behind nothing but a few pottery shards. If the Crimean Krymchaks are no longer around soon, there will always be this book."

He did not say it with grandness. He said it like a man setting down a heavy stone at the end of a long road. He was saying: We were here. We loved. We sang. We had families, just like yours. We existed under G-d’s sun, and we were not a mistake. We lived. 

David Rebi

He had paid five hundred and sixty dollars to put those pages into lead and ink. Five hundred and sixty dollars scraped together from the pockets of a dying people who had nothing left to give. He did not know if the publishers would take them. 

He did not know if the binding would hold. He knew only that the dark was coming on fast and that a man must leave something against the cold. No state wanted it.  The world looked at him through small square windows and asked why a Jew needed a different book to die by. 

And he answered nothing. He only laid his hands upon the paper. As if he might keep it warm. As if the words themselves might catch cold and perish if he looked away.

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 published the definitive Krymchak language textbook — this very book — 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.

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.

There is a prayer in Judaism that is said for the dead:

Zichrono Livracha. May their memory be a blessing.

But there is a newer formulation, born from the particular grief of the twentieth century: May their memory be a revolution  

David Rebi did not die in the camps. He did not die in the silence. He outlived the Nazis, outlived Stalin, outlived the Soviet Union, outlived the empire that tried to make his people's name unsayable.

He drew his last breath on April 22, 2019. He was 97 years old.

And here is the tragedy that lives inside the miracle: he died in the quiet dark, not knowing if it had been enough.

He did not live to see what the digital age might do with the crumbs he left behind. He did not know if anyone would come looking. He had spent decades doing the loneliest possible work — the work of a man who is not sure anyone is listening, who writes anyway, who teaches anyway, who translates fairy tales for children who may not yet exist — sustained by nothing more than a faith so stubborn it borders on defiance.

The Nazis wanted to exterminate the Krymchak people. They wiped them from the face of the earth with bullets and gas as they sought to ensure that no one would be left to remember.

The Soviets, in their own way, finished the work. They did not need bullets to complete the genocide; they used bureaucracy, censorship, and the systematic erasing of names from census rolls to ensure that even the memory of the Krymchak people withered away into non-existence. 

David Rebi said: No. No. I am still here. And I am here to stay. 

Not loudly. Not with armies or manifestos. With a desk, and a pen, and fifty years of locked-up memory, and the particular stubbornness of a man who has survived things that should have broken him and has decided, in his seventies, that survival is not enough — that he owes the dead something more than merely breathing.

He died waiting. He died hoping. He died with the faith of a man who plants a tree he knows he will not sit under.

And now, through this translation, we begin the work of finally answering him. 

Хош кельдынъ эвге, Давид. 

Хош кельдынъ эвге, Даоут. 

Хатырынъ быр инкълаб олгъай.

Тыльынъ дуньйа-дуньйагъачъез йашагъай.

Да быз ташлагъан кесечыклерынъе лайыкъ олгъайых.

Welcome home, David. 

Welcome home, Daout.

May your memory be a revolution.

May your language live forever.

And may we be worthy of the crumbs you left behind.