592. Y is for Yiddish

For the month of April I am participating for the ninth time in the annual A-to-Z blogging challenge, writing a post for every letter of the alphabet. My theme this year is the world, the world that is always with us, that we must not keep out and cannot do without.

 

Massachusetts Review 44.1/2 (Photo: Jerome Liebling)

As a graduate student at UMass Amherst in the fall of 1987, I enrolled in American Realism, taught by Professor Jules Chametzky. What a terrific course it was! By that time Professor Chametzky—Jules, he soon became, to me as to everyone else—had been at UMass for thirty years, where he had founded and edited the Massachusetts Review, served as President of the faculty union, and was an all-round mensch. He became one of my grad school mentors and supporters, and it is no exaggeration to say that he taught me how to write critically about literary texts. Jules Chametzky passed away in 2021, and just a few lines from the tribute, Remembering Jules, by his colleague Bruce Laurie in the Massachusetts Review, will give you a taste of who he was:

Jules represented the best of the secular Jewish tradition—humane, tolerant, intent on doing justice. This helps explain his commitment to the life of the mind as well as world peace, human rights, and decency. It tells us why he shared his home with people of all races and backgrounds, why mourners who gathered at his funeral were so racially diverse, and why there were vigils for him not just here but also in his native Brooklyn and in Europe. It’s also why it was such a blessing to have called him my friend.

In American Realism we encountered the Lithuanian-Jewish writer Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), who immigrated to the U.S in 1881, became the editor of the Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward, which he transformed, and simultaneously pursued a literary career in English as well as his journalism, which was written in Yiddish. He had been the subject of Jules Chametzky’s second book, From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977). Cahan was my introduction to Jewish immigrant writing and also my introduction to the multilingual world of the late 19th-century immigrant culture in the United States. He made nonsense of the claims of the advocates of the “English-only” movement, and taught me that the U.S. had always been multilingual as well as multicultural. If you want to make your own acquaintance with this multilingual tradition, you can look up the Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (Norton, 2000), for which Jules Chametzky served as a co-editor.

Yiddish has been the language of Ashkenazi Jews in Central Europe, and to a lesser extent in Eastern Europe, since the 9th Century. It is a vernacular “fusion” language, meaning, in its case, that it is based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew. . .and to some extent Aramaic. Yiddish was spoken by three-quarters of the world’s Jews before the Second World War—up to 13 million—but 85% of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, and those who survived dispersed into the diaspora. It is now spoken by about 600,000 people in Europe, North American, South America, and Israel, though Hebrew, which is different from Yiddish in many respects, is Israel’s national language. Interestingly, the 2021 inclusion of Yiddish in the language-learning app Duolingo gave it it quite a boost: during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 300,000 people signed up to learn it.

When we first immigrated to the United States, my family lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, where 30% of the population was Jewish. I soon encountered dozens of Yiddish words and phrases that have become part of the American English vocabulary, and soon became part of mine. Here are a few of them: klutz (a clumsy person), kvetch (to complain), mensch (an honorable man), meshuggeneh (crazy), nosh, oy vey, schlep, schmooze, schmuck, tchatchke, tuchis: look them up.

The Yiddish Book Center, housed on the campus of Hampshire College, has made a lasting contribution to the preservation and celebration of the Yiddish language. 
Founded in 1980 by 23-year-old Aaron Lansky, it has rescued more than a million books and has become a powerful vehicle for the transmission of history, culture and identity across several generations (Bridge of Books video). Here is a link to just one set of documents in their digital archive, copies of Gerechtigkeit, or Justice, the weekly paper of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), published between 1919 and 1969.

   the Yiddish Book Center

How does this story of Yiddish relate to my A-to-Z theme of the inescapable presence of the world in our lives? I don’t presume to know very much about the language, and yet it has entered my English vocabulary and its words are regularly on my lips. It is dispersed globally but has a vibrant local presence wherever it has set down roots and features prominently in my own local community. Thanks in no small measure to my dear professor, the late Jules Chametzky of UMass Amherst, Yiddish now occupies a place in the 19th-century American literary canon, and thanks to Aaron Lansky and Hampshire College , my town also houses a major collection of Yiddish books.

Let me leave you with two Yiddish folk songs, with two renditions of each one. First, Tumbalalaika, sung here by the Barry Sisters and here by Ruth Rubin with Pete Seeger. And second, Dana Dana/Donna Donna, sung in Yiddish by Aviva Semadar and in English by Joan Baez.

From Youtube via Rivka’s Yiddish blog

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents