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Growing up in New Jersey and New York in the early 2000s, I thought Yiddish was the opposite of cool or subversive or sexy. I actively disliked its Germanic sound and associated it with all things fogy. Like many biases, this one was at least partly inherited: My great-grandmother’s Yiddish-accented Russian had once been parodied to great comedic effect by her grandchildren—my mother and aunt—who considered spoken Yiddish to be nothing short of hilarious. This was in Ukraine, where Yiddish language had once thrived—even briefly enjoying official language status in the days of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-1921). After WWII and the Holocaust, Yiddish culture was irreparably damaged, and Soviet Jews abandoned their heritage language both to protect themselves from anti-Semitism and to better assimilate into Soviet society. Thus, to my mother and aunt, my great-grandmother’s accent was a relic, subject to scrutiny by urban Jews who prided themselves in speaking proper Russian. (After my great-grandmother’s death, my mother arrived in New York and was teased by fellow Soviet immigrants for speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent. The irony spans generations.)
Once in the States, my mother’s parents reserved Yiddish for rendering information unintelligible to us grandchildren, the American kindelah. They employed it as a secret language, as I now do Russian in public spaces outside of Brighton Beach. Their spoken language was a hodgepodge of Russian Yiddishisms, whereas mine features English words crassly grafted with Russian syntax. Once again, the irony is not lost. Russian has effectively supplanted the mameloshn of my ancestors, becoming—to quote David Shneer—the “global lingua franca” of this diaspora (or at least, one among many). My family’s Yiddish heritage—unfortunately associated with Old World backwardness and decay—barely survived the Holocaust and Sovietization, only to be abandoned in the later 20th century and sublimated into Zionism. The fact that my mother still understands some Yiddish is kind of a miracle. Unfortunately, none of it trickled down to me. Continue reading "Learning to Love Yiddish" at... |