Whither Yiddish

WHITHER YIDDISH.pdf

Title

Whither Yiddish

Identifier

WHITHER_YIDDISH

Creator

Jacob Schlitt

Description

"There are a lot of people with a background similar to mine: Eastern European born, Yiddish speaking parents..."

Date

2016-01-22

Format

application/pdf

Type

text

Text

WHITHER YIDDISH

There are a lot of people with a background similar to mine: Eastern European born, Yiddish speaking parents; growing up in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore—even Auburn Maine and Worcester Mass. Having Yiddish as their first language, and then assimilating. No more Yiddish. Sometimes their parents actually encouraged the absence of Yiddish. They stopped speaking Yiddish in the presence of their children. They used it as a secret language. It was the language of the old country and they did not want their children tainted with it. They wanted their children to be 100% American.

Other Yiddish speaking parents took pride in the language, its expressiveness, its literature, its theatre, and they encouraged their children to retain it. And it was the children who rejected it. In a few cases, there were children who were sent to after school Yiddish shulen, and to Yiddish camps who learned the language and shared their parents’ love of the language.

Yiddish has had a checkered history. Advocates insist it is over 1000 years old, and trace its history (and geography) from Germany eastward, concentrating in Poland and Lithuania and the surrounding lands. Jews living there spoke the language of their neighbors, but had their own language as well. Actually, they had two languages: Hebrew—the holy tongue (loshen kodesh) and the mother tongue (mama loshen). To some educated Jews, Yiddish was jargon (accent on the second syllable). However, writers who started out writing in Hebrew, realized that if they wanted to reach the people, they had better write in Yiddish. That is the language the people spoke.

Today, almost all those native Yiddish speakers are gone. What is left? Some ultra-Orthodox sects who still believe that Hebrew should only be used religiously. To speak to one another in casual conversation, speak Yiddish. Some secular Yiddish speakers have turned the preservation of Yiddish into a religion. Yiddish has become a cause. If it dies, Hitler has won. And there is YIVO, and the Yiddish Book Center, and Yiddish Farm, and Yugntruf, and a growing interest in Yiddish in academia, and small groups of Jews who are groping to hold on to the language of their parents, and their childhood, which is really the subject of this piece.

Ironically, some Zionists viewed Yiddish as a symbol of a shtetl mentality, of fearful Jews who did not stand up to their persecutors. They opposed the speaking and teaching of Yiddish in Israel. The new Jews learned and spoke Hebrew, even though the previous generation spoke Yiddish. Over the years, the obsessive opposition to Yiddish has softened. Some old time “farbrente” Zionists look back nostalgically, and miss the Yiddish songs and the sound of mamaloshen.

So, what is my story? Why am I spending time trying to hold on to something I really don’t have much of a grasp of? Guilt? I don’t have anything better to do? I find it silly and inaccurate that I am currently viewed as a “mavim,” a variation of the line, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” As noted at the beginning. I together with many of my contemporaries, had Yiddish as our first language. When we started elementary school, we stopped speaking Yiddish, in my case, to the disappointment of my mother. She sent me to an Arbeter Ring Shule for a year when I was eight, but then decided it was more important that I go to Hebrew School, learn what most other Jewish boys learn in America, and have a Bar Mitzvah.

Original Format

application/msword

Citation

Jacob Schlitt, “Whither Yiddish,” Autobiographical stories & other writing by Jacob Schlitt, accessed February 10, 2025, https://tsirlson.omeka.net/items/show/425.