Yiddish - Alive And Almost Kicking

The Times, June, 2005

Have you ever witnessed a proper blank stare? I hadn’t, until about three years ago when, in answer to a question about the “hieroglyphics” I’d been scribbling in a notebook, I told a friend I was learning Yiddish. I didn’t think it was so strange. I’m half-Jewish. The thousand-year Eastern European culture that left a heritage of literature, poetry, left-leaning political thought and klezmer music is inherently fascinating; and imagine reading Isaac Bashevis Singer in the original. “But,” asked my friend, “why don’t you learn a language that other people can speak too? It might be less... lonely.”

Actually, there are orthodox Jews who speak Yiddish on a daily basis; but he was right. On the eve of the Holocaust there had been 11 million Yiddish speakers; now there are perhaps one million. And its rarity was part of its attraction. I could play a part in the survival of a language all but wiped out. I would be a mixed-race foot soldier, spreading the secular Yiddish word(s). Three years of fragmented and interrupted study on, I realise how late I came to the party. Without any help from me, Yiddish is undergoing a dramatic resurgence of interest.

Now, at the hip and easy end of the spectrum, clothing labels such as Shoytz, Gail Cooper and Rabbi’s Daughters put Yiddish expressions on the front of T-shirts and bags, which are then worn and carried by Madonna, Kelly Osbourne, Christina Aguilera. It’s the most superficial way to try on a culture - of course - but to a Jew of your grandparents’ generation, it must look extraordinary... like toddlers in spats.

There’s action, too, in the publishing world. “Yiddish with Dick & Jane”, in which the brittle WASPy heroes of the original Dick and Jane readers experience a funky Jewish linguistic culture clash, is cult reading. Californian author Ira Steingroot has recently created a pack of 48 “Yiddish Knowledge Cards”, flash cards in the mother tongue. And New York publisher Zackary Sholem Berger tells me his ingenious Yiddish translation of the wacky sound-verse “Cat in the Hat” (“Di Kats Der Payats”) has sold out of its first run, and will be followed shortly by a Yiddish “Curious George”. (Yiddishists with a taste for classic children’s books can also read about that narisher alter ber, Vini-Der-Pu, published by Dutton Children’s Books.)

Something of a visionary in the Yiddish resurgence is American Aaron Lansky. The story of how he set about rescuing all the Yiddish books he could from the backrooms, basements, ruins and skips of America, lest an entire literature die with the last generation to read it, is told in “Outwitting History” - not a book you’d expect to read like a thriller, but which does. Speaking from Amherst, Massachusetts' National Yiddish Book Center (the resulting collection of one and a half million volumes) he says he is under no doubt at all that something significant is happening, something “different to anything we’ve seen before”:

“All of a sudden, in perhaps the last two or three years, it’s exploded. Now, when I go out and talk, half of any given audience will be in their 20s or 30s. And so this is absolutely not about nostalgia. I mean, the young people who come to us here at the Center were born in... what?... 1985. What’s more, they’re not all Jewish. Not at all.”

A catalyst can perhaps be found in a surprising pairing of the Yiddish language and the Internet. Despite technical, word processing problems (Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, from right to left across the page), the Net has brought a scattered community of Yiddishists together and made them feel less eccentric. Der Bay lists events and hosts a Yiddish pen-friend scheme so that, in fact, there is somebody to talk to. The list of Yiddish Internet radio stations is impressive - and for some they provide the only opportunity to hear the language spoken. I get more emails from the Mendele moderated email Yiddish list than I do from deposed African royalty with funds to share. And if you go to Henry Sapoznik’s Yiddish Radio Project, technology’s affair with this ancient language extends to a “Yid-o-Matic” Realplayer translator.

If the Internet has helped facilitate the interest, what’s causing it in the first place is a lot more complicated. There’s a growing out-and-proud attitude among younger Jews, particularly in the US, expressed in cool, underground journals, radical music and fashion. But when pressed to define their ethnicity, they don’t necessarily identify with Israel or with Hebrew or religion. And then there’s Yiddish - rich and attractive, lively and humorous and increasingly available.

Helen Beer is UCL’s full-time Yiddish lecturer, and faculty head of the forthcoming Ot Azoy! (This is the way!) course, which is about to bring around 60 students from all across the world to London for a week-long intensive language class. Beer has taught priests, a Japanese Jewish literature enthusiast, an African-American and a number of non-Jewish Poles. She says that the current popularity of Yiddish song and klezmer music sends a lot of students her way, and describes Yiddish as “the most interesting subject in the world to teach”.

While Beer is pleased to see her list of phd and graduate students grow year-on-year (and UCL is now one of more than 50 top universities, internationally, offering Yiddish), she strikes a note of caution, and is clear on the distinction between the curious who are content to pick up fragments of the language, and her committed Yiddish students:

“My thing is that unless people acquire the language to a very advanced degree, the culture in the future will be compromised. You will not have excellent translators. Historians won’t be able to do proper research. I teach Yiddish in Yiddish. And I’m very stubborn.”

And it’s not easy. A close relationship with German helps at first; but soon you’re dealing with Slavic, Old French, Hebrew... the Jewish journey presented as vocabulary. And then there are the idioms and shades of tone. Helen Beer points out how many words can be used both as insults and terms of endearment. It’s a subtle language:

“Look you’re not going to get me down that humour and wonderful sayings route, I hate those clichés.” She pauses, “But it does. It does have wonderful sayings and an inbuilt humour.”

Back in Amherst, and currently receiving a hundred applications for each position available at the Yiddish Book Center, Aaron Lansky is enjoying the resurgence too much to question it:

“The truth is it’s funny, and it’s intellectual, and it’s socially conscious, and I think it speaks very loudly to young people. The question is really why didn’t this happen in the past 60 years rather than why is it happening now.” Linton Chiswick

Comments

[Poppy Dinsey]

Very interesting article....especially as I'm wearing a Brookllyn Bubelehs baseball tee as I'm reading it! Unfortunatley I can't help loving the humorous cliche, my make-up bag is emblazoned with 'chai maintenance' and I have a Mensch tshirt for a dog just in case I ever own one. But it is a language that needs to be maintained for more than just the odd word thrown in to a sentence to help North London jews identify each other. I've actually been reading a very interesting chapter on web design for yiddish and hebrew readers but that's a whole nother comment...