Words won’t feed the admiral’s cat

“Words won’t feed the admiral’s cat” is a neighbor’s parting rebuke in Yolandi’s recollection of the Von Riesen household. Its practical-sounding dismissal of words becomes more complicated in a family that reads, remembers, and uses language to carry both intimacy and pain.

The rebuke in the living room

Yolandi recalls Mrs. Steingart standing in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips, criticizing Lottie’s housekeeping, Jake’s manhood, and the children’s failure to be normal. The family, meanwhile, was lying, sitting, or slumping with books in their hands, largely oblivious to her admonishments. Mrs. Steingart called them a word family and left with the warning, “Words won’t feed the admiral’s cat!” The phrase gives her criticism a memorable, almost proverbial shape: books and talk, she implies, are no substitute for practical responsibilities.

The phrase also exposes a difference in what counts as paying attention. Mrs. Steingart wants the family to look up and answer to her standards; Yolandi says she may have lifted her eyes from her book, but only because of the words the neighbor had chosen. The warning fails to command the kind of attention it demands. Instead, its verbal construction becomes the thing Yolandi keeps.

Words, silence, and inherited memory

The rebuke’s dismissal of language sits uneasily beside the family’s history. Plautdietsch, the language of the older people in East Village, is described as a language of shame: Mennonites had learned to keep silent and shoulder pain. The memory passed down through the family includes the murder of Yolandi’s great-grandparents, her grandfather’s survival by hiding in a manure pile, and his later removal to Canada. Against that history, words are neither an easy remedy nor something the family can simply dispense with. They can be constrained by silence, yet they also give the past a form that can be remembered and named.

Language also carries tenderness. In another recollection, Yolandi’s aunt whispers Schlope Schein, the bedtime blessing she once used for Yolandi and Leni. The same language associated with inherited shame thus remains a vehicle for familial care. Set beside Mrs. Steingart’s warning, this memory complicates any simple opposition between words and practical life: words may not provide material necessities, but they can sustain bonds and transmit what a family has endured.

The phrase’s place in Yolandi’s recollection

Yolandi’s attention to the wording of the rebuke recurs in her account of family history. Reflecting on the cruelty and fear transmitted across generations, she insists that past suffering does not justify frightening or belittling others. Her narration makes language consequential: it can preserve a memory, expose the effects of inherited violence, or become a means of judgment. Mrs. Steingart’s line is therefore remembered not as a useful lesson about the limits of books, but as an example of how words themselves can linger.

The phrase’s force rests on that irony. The family may be absorbed in books rather than in the neighbor’s complaints, but Yolandi does not forget the complaint’s exact, striking formulation. The words fail to change the scene; they succeed in becoming part of the family’s story.