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Sept. 30, 2011
Thoughts, remorse about Yiddish
Nostalgia about Yiddish, even unbidden, rises easily, buoyed by a multitude of stimuli.
EUGENE KAELLIS
In an interview some decades ago, Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Nobel Prize in literature laureate who wrote in Yiddish, was asked about the future of his idiom. He was, he stated, confident of its survival, pointing out that there were approximately as many Jews (worldwide) as Norwegians, and the latter had obviously managed to preserve their language, blithely ignoring the fact that Norwegian-speakers live together in their own country using its own official language; Yiddish was nowhere an official language and unlikely ever to become one.
For Israelis in their early days, Yiddish was seen as the language of defeat and slaughter. “You should grow old, retire, sit in a rocking chair and speak Yiddish” was then, it turned out, a curse, albeit a humorous one. In fact, in the early days of the Jewish state, especially with the Israelis’ experience of successful repeated assertiveness in their own defence, Yiddish was considered the language of people who had “somehow” permitted themselves to become victimized by the Holocaust. At that time, young Israelis, who had vigorously and successfully defended themselves through the use of arms, could not understand why European Jews had not done likewise during the Holocaust. While being surrounded by larger, hostile populations was familiar to them, the idea of defencelessness in the face of an armed, overwhelming and utterly brutal force was simply beyond their ken.
I learned some of this in a Yiddish conversation with an old Czech-Jewish woman, a survivor who had managed to make her way to Jerusalem. Overhearing our conversation was a young Israeli man, evidently curious. He and the woman spoke cordially in Hebrew for a while before he left. Then the woman shook her head in apparent futility. “He,” she said, indicating the departing youth, “simply does not understand what it means to be helpless.” (Gott tsu danken!)
Now, with a greater understanding of the Holocaust, some Israelis have become Yiddish enthusiasts. Yet, the overall outlook for the language is still dim. Today, there are a few American university German departments offering courses in Yiddish and, here in Canada, the universities of Manitoba and Ottawa offer Yiddish programs in their Judaic studies departments. Other examples include a depository of Yiddish books in Amherst, Mass.; in Vancouver, there is a group of Yiddish enthusiasts; and in Ramapo, a Chassidic suburb of mostly diamond workers commuting to New York City, Yiddish is the “official” language. These facts, and the attraction Yiddish now has for linguo-anthropologists, unfortunately, are not signs of resurgence. When the social scientists enter, it is often the “ice man” who is not far behind.
Although its demise is probably irrevocable, for me and other Jews who grew up in Yiddish-speaking households, the loss remains a touchingly sad inevitability. In the New York City of my youth, then with more than two million Jews, spoken Yiddish was common. For the vast Ashkenazi Jewish majority in the area, descended from Yiddish-speakers and growing up in Yiddish-speaking homes, as I did, nostalgia about Yiddish, even unbidden, still rises easily, buoyed by a multitude of stimuli.
The New York of my youth had four Yiddish-language dailies: Morgen Journal, Tag, Forverts and Freiheit, ranging, in that order, from conservative to liberal to social-democratic to communist. Some of them, it must be admitted, often used transliterations: vindeh (window) instead of fenster, for example, a cause for some rancor by Yiddishists. Interestingly, it was the communist daily that used the “best,” i.e., the least anglicized, Yiddish, as if trying to display its loyalty to Jewish culture, while maintaining its allegiance to a Soviet regime that, as it repeatedly pointed out, had set up a Yiddish-speaking Soviet community in Birobidjan. (This turned out, along with most Soviet claims, to be largely a pretence, perhaps even presaging Stalin’s plans, just before his death in 1953, of a forced Jewish “relocation to the East,” a phrase that had already acquired a sinister meaning under Nazism.)
One of my favorite memories is of a lengthy newspaper strike in New York. With my usual New York Times, or any other English language paper, unavailable, I recall contentedly sitting down in a crowded subway car and unfurling my Yiddish paper while the other passengers, bored, looked at me with envy.
New York then had several well-attended Yiddish theatres, a Yiddish language radio station and, in many populous neighborhoods, the discourse among neighbors, friends, customers and shopkeepers was invariably in Yiddish. The Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle), a social-democratic, anti-communist organization that split from the socialist Jewish movement after the Bolshevik putsch in Russia, was associated with the Forverts and offered neighborhood Yiddish classes for youngsters. For me, they were far more enjoyable than the strictly liturgical Hebrew I studied in the local shul, the latter learned by rote, leading only to a bar mitzvah recitation of a Haftorah and never used in reading or conversation. We children in the Arbeiter Ring school read I.L. Peretz, Mendele Machersforim and Sholom Aleichem in Yiddish. I felt a kinship with the people of Chelm, Boiberek and Yehupetz. I even went to neighborhood movie screenings of works by Warsaw’s Yiddish Art Theatre, often starring Maurice Schwartz. I shall never forget The Dybbuk, a tragic story of grief and possession, or a film about the Golem of Prague, a famous and fanciful attempt at invoking a supernatural power to save threatened Jews.
One attribute – purists would say defect – of Yiddish was its facile incorporation of surrounding languages. In Paris, I once (rudely) followed two women talking in Yiddish, to overhear their use of French words. Before they noticed me and hurriedly entered a store, I noticed that, as expected, they incorporated a considerable number of French words in their conversation, not enough, of course, to endear them to L’Académie Française. English, the most-used language in world history, never striving for linguistic “purity,” is still growing by confidently appropriating 5,000-6,000 new words a year. The dilution and then near demise of Yiddish, rouses my sympathy for la Francophonie in Canada.
Even my mother, who always spoke Yiddish, described it, not as a bona fide language, but rather a “jargon”; as Max Weinrich has observed, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” Farsmodrevet (an almost onomatopoeic combination of fatigue and disheartenment), one of my favorite Yiddish adjectives, often used by Jackie Mason, is evidently one of the many Russian and Polish words that entered the welcoming interstices of Yiddish, and remained there.
In spite of the popularity of klezmer, the long-term survival of Yiddish is unlikely. Language is an organic expression, not a hothouse plant. It has to compete for resources and lebensraum and needs at least a minimum number of adherents, living in close, supportive proximity, to do so. Unfortunately, Yiddish lacks these qualifications.
Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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