Debbie Nathan

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 dialect 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.