Books: Mr. Pockheel’s Daymare

THE RETURN OF H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (192 pp.)—Leo Rosten, —Harper ($3.50).

Hyman Kaplan, the bagel Bonaparte, has returned from the island of Ellis. As in The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N more than 20 years ago, English is his most beloved enemy, but Waterloo is not in his capricious vocabulary, and as the stars with which he decorates his name on the blackboard testify, his ego is still imperial. He attacks sense and syntax with the same insouciance that originally made him such a verbal charmer. To Hyman Kaplan, the discoverer of the laws of gravity is “Isaac Newman,” the plural of blouse is “blice” and the opposite of nightmare is “daymare.”

The man who must cope with Hyman Kaplan’s daymares is Mr. Parkhill (Hyman renders it “Pockheel”), the earnest and durable idealist who teaches the beginners’ grade of the American Night Preparatory School for Adults. Parkhill’s melting pot simmers with some flavorful characters, though their jokes are unlikely to revive the vanishing art of dialect humor. To class repeaters, including Miss Mitnick. the blushing birddog of blackboard errors. Author Rosten has added some newcomers. There is Mr. Matsoukas. a muttering Greek for whom derivation is the mother of invention (” ‘Automobile’ is Grik! ‘Airplane’ is Grik! ‘Telephone’ is Grik! All, all, all Grik!”). There is Mr. Trabish, whose hero is Paul Revere (“One by Land, Two by the Beach”). Peter Studniczka, an equally avid patriot, lists as traitors “Ben & Dick Arnold.”

The literature and humor of immigrant life no longer seem as real or timely as they once did, but a kind of folklore remains, and in it Hyman Kaplan has an unshakable place. The secret of his greatness is the relentless sweep of his untutorable mind. A brooding Kaplan caps a lecture on etymology with the thrust, “Aren’t eny voids in English fromm England?” Here is the man to bandy homely inapposite proverbs with a Khrushchev: ”Som pipple can drown in a gless of vater.” It is he who gives the principal parts of “to eat” as “eat, ate, full,” and only Mr. Kaplan could conceive of the generalissimo of Nationalist China as “Shanghai Jack.” The world of science straggles beside Mr. Kaplan’s inventive agility; he defines “diameter” as a machine that counts dimes.

While the belly laughs are few, the chuckles are frequent in The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, and as its redoubtable hero might put it, “by Keplen. high-tone crititzizink is a vaste time. Tsplit infinitifs, I got; wrong tanses, like-vise; dobble nagetifs, also. Hau Kay? Enjoy!”