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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: The Geek Code discovery
Date: 15 Cheshvan 5781
Nu, this reminds me of something my grandfather would do.
In Munkács, before the telephone, before the telegraph, there was a man named Reb Zalman who kept a record of every family in the community. Not the official records. Those were kept by the chevra kadisha and the rav, and they were formal, in proper Hebrew, with proper dates. Reb Zalman kept a different kind of record.
He had a notation. Nobody could read it but him. My grandfather saw it once, when he went to Reb Zalman on some business for his father. He described it to me years later: small notebooks, dense with marks, three dots and a line for one family, a circle and a question mark for another, sometimes a letter from an alphabet my grandfather did not recognize, sometimes just a scratch.
When someone came to him asking about a shidduch, Reb Zalman would consult his papers, run his finger down a page, and say yes or no. Nobody questioned his system. Nobody asked what the marks meant. It worked. For forty years, it worked.
When he died, his children found boxes of these papers. They could not read a single page. My grandfather said they tried for weeks, brought in scholars, compared notebooks, looked for patterns. Nothing. The system died with the man.
I am not sure what the moral is. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps it is that every format is private until someone else can read it.