USCJ Review - Spring 2006
Yiddish: It's Not Just for Secrets Anymore
In many ways, we are an ordinary Jewish family.
My wife, Laura, is a psychotherapist, and I am a technical writer and calligrapher; we live in New Jersey. Our son, Daniel, 10, is in the local public-school's fifth grade; he takes piano lessons, he goes to Hebrew school, and he is part of the pre-Kadima group at Beth El Synagogue, a United Synagogue-affiliated congregation in East Windsor. Our daughter, Hannah, 4, attends a secular preschool five days a week, and goes to a Torah-4-Tots class at Beth El. On Fridays we light Shabbat candles and say the Kiddush and HaMotzi. We are active in various outside organizations.
But we are also different -- we run a bilingual English and Yiddish household.
Mame-loshn -- the mother-tongue -- has been a part of our home since Daniel was born. He and Hannah speak to me only in Yiddish, and I answer them likewise. I read Yiddish books to them, and Daniel reads Yiddish to me, too. Even Hannah knows letters, such as aleph and shin. This is not a game we play occasionally, and we don't just toss in an occasional Yiddish word or phrase. No, our conversations are entirely in Yiddish. After all, Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazic Jewry. A hundred years ago, some 90 percent of the world's Jews spoke Yiddish. It is our tradition, and it is not one to be taken lightly.
When I was at the University of Pennsylvania I took two years of Yiddish, and joined Yugntruf -- Youth for Yiddish, a group that boasted about 1,000 members. About 15 years ago, I read an article in Yugntruf's journal about the joys and difficulties of raising children speaking Yiddish, and the idea took root. When my son was born, I promised myself that I would speak only Yiddish to him, and thus our bilingual journey began. We were not childhood speakers of Yiddish - I learned a textbook version and my wife knew none till meeting me -- but we have, amazingly, done it. The children discuss school assignments and television, Yu-Gi-Oh cards and pizza, birthdays and dolls, in Yiddish with each other and with me. Laura says that she learns Yiddish along with and from our children.
But a single household is not enough. To let the children hear living Yiddish from their peers, we meet every month or so with Alexander Botwinik, a musician, and Naomi Cohen, a librarian, who are members of another Conservative synagogue, Suburban JCC-Bnai Aaron, in Havertown, Pennsylvania. They bring along their two children, Toviah, 11, and Dina-Malka, 8. The children play together - in Yiddish - and we kvel. Alexander grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Montreal, while Naomi, like me, learned Yiddish primarily as an adult.
Alexander notes that Yiddish, because it "is a Jewish language, is also a means of keeping one's identity. Besides, there is no need to promote English - it is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world." When she was 9 years old, Naomi's Yiddish-speaking grandmother dismissed her interest in mame-loshn. She procured a copy of an old textbook, The Yiddish Teacher, and began teaching herself the language.
But two families who live over an hour apart is not enough - and there's more.
Each year, Yugntruf organizes Yiddish Week. One hundred and seventy people from around the world come to upstate New York's bucolic Berkshire region to immerse themselves in Yiddish for a full week. In 2005, visitors of all ages - including nine babies and toddlers -- came to Yiddish Week from across the United States, Canada, Brazil, Israel, Europe, and Australia. Kids have group activities, teenagers roam in their natural packs, college students are counselors, and everything happens in Yiddish.
Practicing Conservative Judaism is easy at Yiddish Week. Kashrut and Shabbat are observed, and Friday evening and Shabbat morning services are traditional egalitarian. (An Orthodox minyan meets as well.) Instead of the movement's Siddur Sim Shalom, we read a Chasidic prayer book that features commentary and translation not in English but in Yiddish. Everyone joins for Havdalah, where a tekhine, a traditional Yiddish women's prayer, is recited.
Among the Yiddish Week regulars is Zackary Berger, a physician and researcher, who has performed Yiddish rap music and recited impromptu Yiddish poetry. He and his wife, Celeste Sollod, another adult Yiddish learner, belong to the Conservative Tifereth Israel/Town and Village Synagogue in Manhattan. They are raising their toddler, Blanca, in Yiddish. Celeste owns a publishing company called Yiddish House, which offers Zackary's Yiddish translations of The Cat in the Hat and Curious George as well asa new Alef-Beyz poster I designed.
Zackary notes that using Yiddish does not come into conflict with Zionism, love of Hebrew, or Conservative Judaism, but rather is another manifestation of the cultural pluralism within American Jewry. One of Celeste's friends told her that she must be the only person of our generation who had to learn Yiddish to communicate with her husband.
Raphael Finkel is another Yiddish Week regular, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, and a member of Ohavay Zion, a Conservative synagogue in Lexington. Raphael learned Yiddish at Hillel when he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He spoke it to his children, who are now teenagers, from the time they were born, and gave speeches in Yiddish at their bar mitzvah celebrations. For him, mame-loshn is a way to keep from forgetting his family's heritage.
Social worker Toby Ehrlich was born in a German D.P. camp and now lives in Chicago. She and her husband, Henry Jelen, decided that they would speak Yiddish with their daughter, despite their pediatrician's bizarre warning that bilingualism would affect her adversely. All three are annual visitors to Yiddish Week. Leana, now a teenager, attended a Solomon Schechter school through eighth grade. At Yiddish Week 2005, she led several late-evening sessions of Vilde Tents -- wild dancing.
Yiddish Week is directed by native Yiddish-speaker Binyumen Schaechter, the son of a retired professor of Yiddish. Yiddish, he thinks, is the natural language for home and family. A musician and the director of the Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus, Binyumen also belongs to Town and Village. He and his wife, Carol, an adult learner of Yiddish, have three Yiddish-speaking children. Their oldest, Daneel, 15, gave a bilingual d'var Torah when he became a bar-mitzvah. Their middle child, Reyna, 11, has performed in an Off-Broadway Yiddish play, and sends instant messages to Yiddish-speaking friends in Boston and North Carolina. Temma-Liba, 6, is a favorite playmate of Hannah's. Carol, an educational diagnostician, considers her new Yiddish skills as a way of connecting with her late grandmother's world and keeping her memory alive.
There are more than 50 languages - including Spanish Urdu, Romanian, and Yiddish -- spoken at the homes in our school district. The television show Good Morning America recently filmed segments at my children's preschool because it is so diverse. Daniel and Hannah contribute to that cultural diversity. Speaking another language in a way makes them more, not less, like everyone else.
For many of us, Yiddish is another way of being Jewish. Whenever I speak with my children, every word we use is part of a Jewish language, the language of our ancestors, of Ashkenazic Jewish culture, of who we are. Speaking Yiddish with my family is a way of honoring and remembering our oves, our ancestors. It's helping us take part of their way of life, and of being actively Jewish every day.
Dr. Stephen Cohen lives in northern New Jersey.
