Yiddish macht frei
By Debbie Nathan
The Yiddish class was full of Germans, a fact that the younger students found merely curious but which discombobulated the older ones, including me. I was in my late 40s and had finally decided to learn the language by vacationing in England – in Oxford, a city of antique, stone buildings as grey as rebbes’ beards, and which had one of the world’s only Yiddish summer programs. I knew I’d be sharing classes with college kids barely older than my own teenaged children, and I wondered how that would feel. But I had not thought about ethnic and national differences, and I doubt anyone else had either: we’d just assumed we’d be all Jews. Well, maybe with a Japanese or two.
But Germans?
There they were: callow grad student types, mostly, in designer European jeans and Italian sandals. The teacher asked us to tell our reasons for studying Yiddish. The Germans were soft-spoken and earnest. One, a tall, spare blonde with an outsize Star of David around her neck, said she had sensed from early childhood that she was a Jew, even though she had no family history to suggest such a tie. Three more were klezmer musicians performing regularly in Berlin. Another young woman explained that, as part of her advanced work on “the dialectics of cultural memory,” she wanted to interview elderly concentration-camp survivors in their native tongue (a tongue that her nation had effectively “liquidated,” I reminded myself duly and silently).
The first day of class, the administration treated us to a monologue by one of the last surviving grande dames of the Yiddish stage, who had lived in Southern California for decades and was extremely old, and very ugly in that bewigged, lipsticked actress way. By the way she shrugged and cackled, it was clear she was telling ironic stories about things like money, politics and sex.
The Jews didn’t understand. Most of us were rank beginners; others had 400-word Yiddish vocabularies based on what they’d heard from their parents when they were five. The actress’s jokes were meant for grown-ups who had lived complicated lives in complicated countries. That you could tell by the Germans’ reaction.
As languages go, the difference between Yiddish and German is more than between British and American English, but probably less than Spanish versus Portuguese Thousands of German and Yiddish words are virtually identical, the only difference between many being a slight angle of the tongue. Velt and velt mean world, lebn and lebn are life, tag in one means day and in the other it’s tog. So the old actress was a piece of cake for the Germans. They guffawed, giggled, stomped their feet, and echoed her punch lines. They got it.
The Jews, meanwhile, sat, some with frozen little smiles, a few openly resentful. We were waiting for real class to begin, with books and pens. Then, I thought, is when we would prevail. We might not understand much spoken language, but it’s written with Hebrew letters and we’d all used prayer books in synagogue. The Germans understood that actress’s Yiddish speech. But the fascists had never seen what that it looked like in print. Bring on the text!
Next day, after an hour of reviewing our letters, we were asked to read. Almost without exception, the Jewish recitation was robust, efficient, capable, with a crisp salute and a sharp crease in its trousers. German reading, on the other hand. was malnourished, frightened, groveling and ragged.
One from the latter group pushed aside his textbook. “Vy,” he asked in English, “Doss zeess language hoff to yooss zeess Hebrew alphabet? And vy does it hoff vords like “Hannukah,” which are unrelated to German?? It makes it – so hard!!”
In the hall during mid-morning coffee break, I spotted professors from other sections, conferring with their colleagues in hushed tones. Apparently there were many more Germans in this year’s program than in the past, and the instructors were trying to figure out why. “Maybe more are getting doctoral degrees these days and need the language credit,” one speculated. I saw a burly, bearded man whom I recognized as a teacher at a community college in New York. “Is Yiddish destined, then, to become nothing more than a type of Latin — a sacred language of the Germans?” he asked.
Another summer instructor, an Englishwoman, took the old New Yorker’s hand. “They are not responsible,” she said. “They are babies. Besides, none of this should be our concern. We are professors of Yiddish. Our job is to teach it. To anyone who wants to learn.”
Back in class, another demographic split became apparent, this time between the younger Jews — and here I counted myself since I was not yet in the AARP — and our elders. My cohort was keen on memorizing grammar charts and learning to read the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer in the original so we could write papers about him someday — even if we’d never spoken Yiddish and knew we probably never would. The old Jews had gravelly accents from the Lower East Side, and they could rattle on with their 400 words from kindergarten. But that was it, and they hadn’t come here to do lit crit. Their husbands and wives had passed away recently and they were waiting out their own deaths, but first they wanted to return to 1939 to their mammes and tates and bobes and zeydes. They’d thought they could do that in Yiddish class. And now they were here — with Germans.
Some of the old Jews couldn’t deal with books, either. This was particularly so for women, who had come of religious age years before bat mitzvah and its studious preparations were instituted for girls. They could speak a little Yiddish. But they couldn’t read a word.
A new widow named Marilyn, from Long Island, was lost before we’d finished Chapter 2. “It’s too hard for me. Too HARD!” she wailed. Her cheeks furrowed and blotched, her lips twisted, and when things got really bad, her mascara started to streak. The Jews among us had known many Marilyns and we did not like them. We tried to feel sorry; we knew we should. But we couldn’t.
Things were different with the Germans. The third time Marilyn tried to read – the time she had her leakiest mascara outburst — the German cultural memory dialectics girl scooted right over to her. “Don’t worry,” she told Marilyn, “It isss hard for me also. Here, let’s do it togezzer. We can also study togezzer at night.”
Marilyn was as obsessed with Auschwitz as the rest of us, but at this point she would take kindness where she found it. Her face and everything painted on it relaxed, and she gave the German girl a smile – a big, true smile, liberated from history. Now, in the beginning days of this beginning class, I understood that I could yak all I wanted about Bashevis Singer and literary symbolism, but when it came down to it I’d really joined the course to sink into the bosom of my old people. Instead, I was confronted with the thick heads of young Germans – or perhaps more frighteningly, with their good hearts.
Studying Yiddish, I could see, was not going to be a vacation.
Comments(8)
Debbie, this is a good slice of life, and yet more evidence of history’s richest irony — the Germans are right now the most consciously moral people on earth. MS
Deb,
First, I like your revamped website, especially the layout and easy navigation.
I was at a Brave Combo show in Houston about 11 years ago. The opening act was a group called “17 Hippies From Berlin”. They played a mix of straight-ahead polka tunes (“Who Stole the Kishke”) and klezmer music. After their set, I talked to a couple of them about being German and playing Jewish music. Their responses showed a love and understanding of Yiddishkeit that blew my mind. Meeting those kids caused me to question my lifelong fear of all things German, a product of upbringing and years of Hebrew school. Since then, I have been more open and not as pre-judgmental when I meet someone from Germany. I know there are still anti-Semites and Third Reich wanna-bes there, but I believe there’s plenty of it here in the USA, too.
If you’re interested, I still have the CD somewhere in my collection. I can send you a copy.
Best to you and your family, Stanley
P.S. My vote for favorite 70’s-80’s porn – Babylon Pink
First, I’d like to mention the following in Yiddish:
S’iz take an iberashung tzu zen daytshe yungn lernen zikh mame-loshn. Ven ikh bin geven in mayne yorn fun universitet vos iz in Meriland(Maryland), Ikh hob genumen a kurs fun daytsh un eyne oder tsvey daytshn hobn mir bamerkt, leyenendik a tsaytung af mame-loshn.
Ikh hob gornits kegn daytshn. Ale mentshn zenen brider vi di alte gezang geyt fun Peretz.
[Editor's translation of above: "It's certainly surprising to see young Germans studying Yiddish. When I was a student in a university in Maryland, I took a German class, and one or two Germans noticed me reading a Yiddish newspaper.
I don't have anything against Germans. All people are brothers, as the old Peretz song says."]
In other words, Yiddish is a great language, and I am proud of the Germans and other nations that take up courses in Yiddish and recognize it as a true language and not some plattdeutsch(low german).
It is for this reason alone why I continue to write and speak Yiddish. I am 34 yrs old, very much secular and love Yiddish language. Hebrew i can’t speak a word of, Ukrainian and Russian I understand b/c my folks came from there.
Tsu di gute daytshn ibern’ velt: Lernt zikh gut, un hot hanoye mit di loshn funem yidn.
[Editor's translation: "To the good Germans of the world: Study well, and enjoy the language of the Jews."]
Oy, vi zenen meine yinge yoren?
I’ve been quietly slithering around Debbie’s site, thinking how late I am to the party:-).
I became chassidic in ‘73 and spent 15 years in a community in NY where I picked up fragments of a language my ear and heart recognized even tho only English and Italian were spoken at home.
About 10 years ago I was invited to attend a conference in upstate NY where Holocaust survivors meet annually with the children of Germans who had actively taken part in the war, as opposed to those who claimed ‘we knew nothing, saw nothing…” The first days were spent with survivors describing what they had lived thru. Emotionally devastating to listen to, slowly, methodically spoken, with such dispassionate facts. One might mistake this manner of speech as a kind of numbness, when it actually is just the opposite, a rawness so deep it must be contained with very careful speech.
The young Germans spoke about the stories they had heard from their parents, trying to explain why they did what they had to do, in that time, sometimes defending their roles, sometimes apologizing to thier own children for the legacy they marked their family with. The sense of shame some of these young adults felt was clear and in my opinion wasted. The final day of the 3 day conference culminated in both groups coming together, Germans offering apologies and survivors trying to accept their verbal offerings.
While cathartic for many, the process seemed an erasure of a history so inexplicable and debased, that apologies border(ed) on pathology.
This pathology becomes clearer as more recently Holocaust revisionists, deniers and others have begun claiming that Jews are “exploiting” an ‘incident’ similiar to the suffering of many peoples. The Jews are milking a moment of suffering (the Holocaust)and have themselves become nazis to other people in a land they stole and sit in illegally. Antisemitism continues to flourish throughout Europe, grows intensely in the Mid East and percolates more quietly in America.
In Poland there is currently a revival of Jewish culture, foods, dances. In one of the most destructive countries that both slaughtered and built the ghettos and ovens of destruction, this too, is a perverse celebratory cannibalism of the dead. Yiddish is no more alive today than the millions of Jews who were sent to their deaths. Yiddish only exists in tiny communities were chassidim continue to use it. And Singer is one of the rare writers that can be read in English without losing nuance; you either know the culture he describes or you dont.
That Others take on the cloak of dead Jews, already soaked in blood and try it on, attempting to fool ‘blind’ folk into believing the Chosen son remains alive, means nothing more than the deceptive act it is. BEcause Others chose to forget or forgive themselves doesnt mean Jews have forgotten or forgiven. Although forgetting, like selective memory is becoming preferrable and politically correct.
Yiddish is a sacred language, I would liken it to Aramaic–which may sound bizaare–both languages created the sacred laws defining a people and the means with which they communicated in their daily lives.
Writing from New Mexico where many New Mexican Hispanics feel Jewish – I sometime wonder what their attractions to Judaism are. Some of them are coming from a wingnut / Christian place searching for the “authentic” – some of them are trying to unravel or decipher the obscured traditions of their families who were forced to hide their faith and traditions for hundreds of years.
The irony of the young Germans taking Yiddish classes is great – reminds me of the ways in which so many white americans appropriate Native spirituality.
All languages that live are sacred and profane – kudos to you for trying to learn Yiddish.
I tried to get my Grandma to teach me yiddish, but she said “why do you want to learn that.”
Don’t get lost searching for authenticity.
It` s nice to be a german and so on the receiving end of mild sarcasm for once, but: why should it be that strange for a german to learn a german language (with very many slavic words, I know), which had been spoken in Germany for centuries?
The alphabets of foreign languages can be a necessary torture to learn, as with Japanese, but for a non jewish german it must feel idiotic to write an everyday spoken european language in Hebrew.
We don` t normally learn Dutch using Chinese writing.
(See also Bloomfield, Languages on the question of writing and speaking).
My mother is jewish,my father Ghanain. I was raised by my father having been abandoned by my mother at the age of 6 months,
I know nothing of my jewish culture and would like to start somewhere.
I lived in England until this year, since then I have been in Berlin,
I have visited Isreal but only a day trip, I have relatives, who run the Merchantile of GB but have lost thier contact details, which I found breifly when my mother died.