Vielen Dank (or should that be "dank"?), Wilfried, you've set my mind at rest after more than thirty years of wandering.

Good old Goethe, he used to be one of my big heroes, I might have guessed he'd be intrigued by Yiddish. I can still remember the buzz I got the first time I went to Strasbourg and stood in front of the Cathedral on an Easter Sunday morning. Instead of just admiring the cathedral I was imagining Goethe standing where I was, seeing himself as Faust and admiring Gretchen at the door.

Without wishing to give offence to any French sensibilities, I've always perceived Strasbourg as being at least as German as it's French because of the Goethe connection, and it is also a major Jewish centre, which makes it all the more appropriate as a seat of Europeanness. It's a pity that Chirac has been so dogged in invoking this history in support of a nationalist assertion of power to keep the European Parliament meeting there in particularly inappropriate working conditions.

James Joyce, as I'm sure you know, was also fascinated by Yiddish, and more generally in Jews and their culture. So it's nice that the two of them should be coupled in the well-known reverse-Irish joke about the English foreman on a building site sneering at a Paddy labourer that he wouldn't know the difference between a joist and a girder. "Of course I do", replied the Irishman, "Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust".

Sorry for the meandering thread drift, am I a reincarnation of the wandering goy?