Tag Archives: Maurice Prager

The brown German flour of Przasnysz

My grandfather Maurice Prager (1902–1992) recalled that flour was hard to come by during and after World War I in his home, the city of Przasnysz, Poland.

After the German troops withdrew, people found elongated bags of brown flour left behind, and these were hurried off to the local bakers so that bread could be made.

But there was something wrong with the flour. The dough was sticky and didn’t rise, and the flour itself was bitter. The bakers didn’t know what to think.

Eventually someone turned up who had been to Vienna. “That is not flour — it is something called Schokolade. You should try dissolving it with a little sugar in hot milk.”

Przasnysz is pronounced roughly “pras-nish” in English phonology ([pʂas-nɨʂ] in my great uncle’s Polish). Its pronunciation in my grandfather’s Russian-fragranced local Yiddish was “prushnyits”; the city’s Yizkor book spells the name “Proshnits”. As is common all over Europe, a given place may have quite different traditional names in different languages.

Recollection of the traditional bagel in central Poland before World War I

My grandfather Maurice Prager (1902–1992) said that in his boyhood in the city of Przasnysz, Poland, bagels were only made by private people for sale on the street, not by bakeries, which dealt in bread, nor by pastry shops. The food economy in that place and time was different from our own — far more of it was in the hands of non-professionals (though my grandfather knew something of the professional food industry because he was close to his uncle, a miller).

As he described them to me, the bagels consisted of thin double strands of dough braided in a circular spiral, and unlike the almost-holeless variety we see in New York today they had much more hole than bread. So far from being chewy or gummy, which define the range of consistency in New York today, these were extremely tough. They were made of white flour and did not have any other flavorings, neither seeds nor bulbs, and forget blueberries or chocolate.

My thought is that they must have had more in common with a traditional German soft pretzel (though boiled before baking rather than treated with lye) than with either the Montréal or New York bagel.

I was moved to write this by the visit of a friend bearing Montréal beygelach.

Doctoral pedigrees

The Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University documents lines of academic filiation (primarily through doctoral degrees) in mathematics. It makes for interesting reading. Though my degree is “Asian Linguistics”, I can connect myself to the mainstream mathematical tree through a sub-branch of four progenitor Doktorväter:

  • Josiah Royce, 1878 (Philosophy)

  • Henry M. Sheffer, 1908 (Philosophy)

  • Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任, 1918 (Philosophy)

  • Jerry Norman, 1969 (Oriental Languages)

[Update 20111213: Chao and Sheffer are now in the tree; see this post.] Sheffer and initially Chao studied logic, a field developed at Harvard by Royce. Sheffer is best known for having introduced the NAND operation to Boolean logic. Chao’s main scholarly contributions were in Chinese historical phonology and modern grammar. Jerry Norman has pioneered the rigorous study of Chinese dialect classification, which you might say is a type of applied logic.

Through Royce, I can trace my “pedigree” to various luminaries of the Humanist era: Erasmus, Vesalius, Ficino, Copernicus, Leibniz, and Marin Mersenne, a student of prime numbers after whom is named the Mersenne twister, a pseudo-random number generator now widely used on personal computers. To Kant, as well, and to non-Humanists like Thomas à Kempis and Thomas Cranmer. Most lines peter out in the early 15th century; earlier stragglers include the mathematician and theologian Heinrich von Langenstein, an antecedent of Copernicus who received his Theol. Dr. in 1375, while the neo-Platonist Georgios Plethon Gemistos seems to have received the first of his degrees in 1380.

There is romance in seeing one’s connection to people like Leibniz and Erasmus, but it means little beyond that. Does anyone with a PhD today, in any field, not belong to those lines of filiation? As of today, Erasmus is shown to have 95301 descendants listed in mathematics alone. I have learned an enormous amount from Jerry Norman, and it is justice to call him my Doktorvater. I find myself in strong agreement with Chao’s model of formal Chinese historical phonology, too, and I have a special love for logic. But the model of linguistic fieldwork I use owes considerably more to Robert Austerlitz and Li Fang Kuei 李方桂 than to Chao, whose approach I consider altogether too literary. I also identify myself intellectually with my maternal grandfather, who left school when he was 12 but was a voracious reader and lifelong pursuer of ideas. At best, all that a paper pedigree can do is remind me to try to be true to the effort that generations of scholars, known and unknown, have made in order to seek knowledge and see clearly — to those ideas and those people all human beings are equally heirs.

There is at least one program available to generate graphs from the Project: see http://www.davidalber.net/geneagrapher/.