Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 08.153a May 20, 1999 1) Yiddish in Contemporary American Culture (Janet Hadda) [Moderator's note: Mendele Vol.08.153 reprinted Janet Hadda's article from the Jewish Quarterly. The journal version was slightly abridged, here we reprint the full text of the article. Also, I want to apologize for saying in the introduction to Vol.08.153: "it may be very difficult to agree with Janet Hadda's main conclusion: that Yiddish is dead". The article touches on more than one topic, and I should not have rated its conclusions. - i.v.] 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 15:32:11 -0700 From: Janet Hadda Subject: Yiddish in Contemporary American Culture Last December, an ad for Godiva Chocolates in The New York Times caught my eye. Under a picture of a box wrapped in ribbon and decorated with a menorah, a message appears in large caps: GIVE GODIVA THIS HANUKKAH AND LEAVE THEM ABSOLUTELY FARKLEMPT. In smaller letters underneath, the ad continues, "Make sure you're remembered well beyond eight nights. When you give a Godiva Hanukkah Ballotin this season, you'll prove that you truly are a mensch. All completely Kosher, of course." More recently, I came across an article in the newsletter of the Southern California District Arbeter Ring, reprinted from a local newspaper. Headlined "No Nudniks Allowed," its opening paragraph reads: "Whether it's the schmaltz of the culture or the opening sequence of television's "Laverne and Shirley" that has embedded schlemiel and schlimazl in impressionable viewers' minds, the Yiddish language is peppering the speech of many on the Westside, much to the joy of native speakers." The article goes on to talk of renaissance, Yiddish clubs, and the Web. There is also "an informal Yiddish lexicon," consisting of such items as kvetch, nebbish ("little nerd"), and kakameyme [!] ("crazy"). I am convinced that no renaissance is dawning, and this misinformed essay only strengthens my conviction. But there is a Yiddish phenomenon in American culture. People are yearning for a connection to Yiddish as never before -- or, at least, differently from ever before. In my remarks today, I want to (1) describe the form of this yearning, (2) suggest a psychological reason for the phenomenon, and (3) offer some speculation about the future. Yiddish culture in America -- like Gaul -- is divided into three parts: erudite, informed, and popular. Strange as it seems, I must first distinguish between Yiddish among people who know the language intimately or moderately well -- the erudite and the informed -- and among people who do not. The Godiva advertisement and the Nudnik article are examples of popular culture -- The New York Times and the Arbeter Ring notwithstanding. They are clearly aimed at an audience that possesses scant familiarity with Yiddish. Of the classification erudite I will have little to say here, although my experiences at the university level are fundamental to all my ideas about Yiddish. But my colleagues Aptroot, Clifford, Noversztern, Peltz, and Roskies have already dealt ably with that category. Instead, I will focus on informed and popular cultural manifestations. Concerning informed Yiddish culture, I see two remarkable developments: (1) the proliferation of communal activity, such as Yiddish festivals (which I will discuss later), and (2) Yiddish postings on the Web. Here I want to talk about the Yiddish bulletin board, Mendele. While not exclusively American in its membership, Mendele was started in the U.S. and, from what I can tell, most of its membership is from the U.S. Democratic in concept and practice, Mendele has a life of its own: participants freely post news, questions, comments and responses to other postings. The level of knowledge ranges from ameratses to bekiyes; the temperature ranges from cool to incendiary. Last June, I followed a particularly engrossing discussion on Mendele. The stimulus for this exchange was an article by Michael Chabon in the June/July 1997 issue of Civilization, the magazine of the Smithsonian Institute. [1] Entitled "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts," the essay was a meditation on the poignant irrelevance of Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's 1958 _Say it in Yiddish_. Chabon, who does not know Yiddish, mused about the futility of such phrases as: What is the flight number? I need something for a tourniquet. and Can I go by boat/ferry to -----? Where and when, in 1958 and subsequently, would these expressions ever have been useful, Chabon asks. After playing around for a while with the notion of a Mediterranean Yiddishland or one in Alaska (or Alyeska), he gets to the heart of his argument: The Weinreichs are taking us home, to the "old country." To Europe. In this Europe the millions of Jews who were never killed produced grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. The countryside retains large pockets of country people whose first language is still Yiddish, and in the cities there are many more for whom Yiddish is the language of kitchen and family, of theater and poetry and scholarship. A surprisingly large number of these people are my relations....For my relatives, although they will know some English, I will want to trot out a few appropriate Yiddish phrases, more than anything as a way of reestablishing the tenuous connection between us. These words resonated deeply for me: I remember vividly how -- as I started my academic career -- my colleagues would go off every summer to Germany, Austria, or Norway, and I would be reminded that there was no Yiddishland that I could go to. Already twenty years ago, I worried that perhaps I was perpetuating a dream by teaching my students the Yiddish words for "marshmallow" and "stereo." Chabon concludes this somber contemplation by wondering what it means to come "from a culture that no longer exists" and to speak "a language that may die in this generation." Perhaps it was these words that inflamed Mendele's readers; perhaps it was the very idea of questioning the total vibrancy of Yiddish. In any case, there was a hue and cry that went on for days and that contained, in addition to a response from Mr. Chabon himself, such comments as: How many hundreds, even thousands, of laborers must be employed by Yiddish-speaking Hasidim in the New York area in service industries, retail and domestic work, or any number of other sectors of an often-underground Hasidic economy (such as the cash-only construction trades)?.... How many such workers -- and one thinks especially of shabes- goyim -- might benefit immensely, might draw tremendous advantage, from learning those basic Yiddish skills that would allow them to significantly alter the emotional and psychological footing on which they must interact with their Yiddish-speaking employers. (Ron Robboy) and: Listen up friend Chabon. A number of us have gotten together and created a dictionary of chemistry, in Yiddish!! (I hope it will come out in a short time)...And who needs it....?? WE need it because it is our Yiddish CULTURE.....for the same reason that the Guide for travelers is needed....throughout the world.... (Mendy Fliegler) I think the Mendele controversy gives a flavor for the current situation. Some Mendelyaner feel compelled to defend not only the existence of Yiddish but also its growth. Yet the very argument contains the seeds of its flaw; the need to assert that a language is thriving implies doubt that it is actually flourishing. No one makes comparable pronouncements about Spanish, Chinese, or even Flemish. Robboy, in his reply to Chabon, quotes Max Weinreich's marvelous bon mot that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." But -- even without a military establishment -- no one disputes the independence of Yiddish. No one disputes that -- pace Weinreich -- Yiddish has continued to exist in goles for a millennium. At issue is the future. What will happen next? Dictionaries of chemistry do not prove that a language is flowering. The effort to produce such works indicates that those who love Yiddish cannot bear to acknowledge that an era has ended. Yiddish is not the only language that is endangered. Of the 175 Indian languages still extant today in the United States, only 20 are now spoken by mothers to their babies, and an additional 55 are used by 10 or fewer tribal members. Linguists estimate that, because of increased communication and a globalized economy, about half of the world's 6,000 languages are expected to become extinct within the next century. [2] But Chabon puts his finger on the ultimate cause and the anguished refusal to accept the truth: Yiddish didn't die out because of television or the European Economic Community -- it was murdered. Like the survivors themselves, Yiddish is tenacious and plucky, filled with insight and information. But tenacity and pluckiness do not bestow immortality; only speakers can do that, and only as long as they and their culture are one. Changing hats now, I want to propose a psychoanalytic explanation for the insistence that Yiddish is just fine, thank you. Those who continue to speak the language and those who love it are mourning its death throes. As mourners, we are behaving in ways well recognized by practitioners and well delineated by theorists. You may be thinking that the loss of a language or a culture is something quite different than the loss of a person, and of course it is. Yet, the notion that people mourn objects and ideas as well as people is not new. At the beginning of his seminal 1917 paper, "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud notes: "Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on." [3] More recently, Heinz Kohut suggested that cultural possessions can provide psychological sustenance, especially in times of crisis. [4] The psychoanalytic literature contains diverse descriptions of the mourning process, but all writers on the subject agree that denial is a typical first response to loss. Although 20th century Americans often use the words "in denial" pejoratively, denial is a powerful psychological tool; denial can help cushion a blow that, if faced squarely, would be intolerable. The most influential psychoanalytic writer about mourning is British psychoanalyst John Bowlby. Bowlby came to his ideas about mourning from his work with infants and their responses to separation from their parents. Amplifying his observations with information from animal behavior studies, he eventually reached generalizations about the larger subject of separation and mourning in adults. [5] Bowlby divides the mourning process into three fluid stages: (1) attempted recovery of the lost loved one, (2) disorganization and despair, and (3) reorganization. In the first phase -- attempted recovery -- the mourner remains focused on the absent person. Repeated efforts are made to achieve reunion, and when these endeavors fail, as they must in the case of death, the griever frequently fantasizes that reconnection will yet occur. Anger, weeping, protest, and accusations all mark this first stage. As infants, every one of us learned that crying and other displays of distress usually succeed in bringing back the truant parent; these demonstrations also admonished the parent against future wandering. Weeping, protest, anger, and the demand for reunion are thus adaptive infant responses to temporary loss. These behaviors have been reinforced -- either by evolution or learning -- precisely because they are effective in communicating that the missing parent had better return immediately. Adults employ these same strategies when separation results from death, although the gambits look superficially different: "It can't be true that you are gone. How dare you leave me! You can't leave me -- I'll die without you. If you come back, I'll never yell at you again. It's all the hospital's fault! It can't be true that I'll never see you again. It can't be true." My understanding of the Yiddish Chemical Dictionary follows Bowlby's insights. For many people who love Yiddish and who love those who spoke it, the response to its demise is simply denial: "Of course Yiddish cannot be dying. It never has and it never will." The loss of the language is particularly intense because its speakers perished catastrophically and unnaturally. The continued vitality of Yiddish commemorates the dead and constitutes a small victory over the huge and hideous injustice of history. Michael Chabon and his ilk, who threaten to explode the fantasy, are the targets of accusation, protest, and rage. In contrast to those who want to pretend that Yiddish persists as it always has, others -- and these are the people I have encountered most frequently -- see the language as the symbol of a saintly, satisfied, impossibly perfect society that existed at some point in the vague past. These romantics are concerned principally with locating the cultural moments and places where nostalgia and idealization may be gleaned. I suspect that the current enthusiasm for klezmer music stems partly from the longing for a past that is simple and freylekh, albeit sometimes in a minor key. Ditto for the Yiddish-flavored festivals that celebrate food, paper cutting, and wedding recreations. Still other fans of Yiddish identify with its precarious position. In the words of Ruth Wisse, they are "...Jewish (and non-Jewish) spokesmen for gays and lesbians, feminists and neo- Trotskyites [who] freely identify their sense of personal injury with the cause of Yiddish" [6] precisely because it was the language of millions of martyrs. Like the consumers of klezmer- yidishkayt, they seem not to care about how Yiddish evolved over centuries and how it burst into the twentieth century with its contradictions, conflicts, heady developments, and difficult choices. They seem not to be curious about the existence of Yiddish-speaking manufacturers, linguists, political theorists, physicians, and athletes. Remembrance and cultural transmission are fine in themselves. But when they are consistently isolated from other aspects of Eastern European Jewish existence, they create a distorted picture of life in that time and place. As Bowlby would see it, this distortion is precious to those who cling to it. The notion that everything connected with Yiddish and Eastern European Jewry must be joyous and/or funny, even slapstick, is another form of denial, a denial of death, and even of pain: "That world must have been lots of fun, filled with music, celebrations, and great food. Certainly it has no connection to suffering." How else are we to understand the year-round dreydl and giant pickle that functioned as leit-motivs in the recent, potentially marvelous, production, "Shlemiel the First," based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer? I am well acquainted with the denial phase of mourning. I spent years and years believing that, if I kept teaching the Yiddish for "marshmallow" and "stereo," there would one day be a practical use for these words. Like a small child demanding the return of her mommy, I stamped my foot at the slipping away of mameloshn, as if my refusal to accept what was before my eyes would reverse reality. Now, however, I inhabit the changeable space between the second and third stages of mourning. Sometimes I feel hopeless, hating my realization that Yiddish will never again be the vehicle of a vibrant, growing, developing culture. But at other times -- to quote Glatshteyn -- I am glad that I have an internal bobe yiddish, which will live as long as I do: Di nit-geredte, di nit-geleyente, In gerateveter genize Di nit-farumreynte, Unspoken, unread, In a protected genize Unsullied. [7] It was during the writing of my Singer biography that I finally admitted to myself that I could no longer hope for the continuity of Yiddish. I decided that I wanted to use Bashevis's life as a means of illustrating, not only his own sophistication, but also that of his culture. I naively assumed that anyone who could view his work as the stuff of giant pickles was acting out of ignorance. If readers had the proper information, they would surely revise their opinions about Singer, about the Yiddish language, and about the culture of Eastern European Jewry. Nothing doing. Instead of realizing that Bashevis was much more than a benign, vegetarian, pigeon- feeding old grandfather, people started asking me why I hate him. This inability to accept Bashevis's personality in all its complexity has a strange reflection in Dvorah Telushkin's memoir about her relationship with him. Throughout the book, she attempts to create a Yiddish accent, which consists of using a "v" for every "w," as in "vhen" and "vhy," and a double "e" for "we," which then emerges as "vee." [8] What strikes me is that none of the reviews I have read even alludes to the maneuver, let alone questions it. Telushkin's book further highlights the sad scene I have outlined. The picture includes aficionados who deny that Yiddish is in trouble, admirers who appreciate the language because its speakers suffered, and lovers of a simplicity that simply never existed. Is Yiddish in America finished, then? I don't think so. We have the YIVO, the Forverts, and the National Yiddish Book Center. Moreover, Yiddish does indeed have a place where it is thriving and where transmission is organic and natural. That place is the English language. My favorite examples of an evolving Yiddish literature are writings that blend English and Yiddish into a new entity. First, just consider Bashevis's translations of his own work into English. At some point during his long years in New York, I believe he actually began to think in English; then he wrote in a Yiddish style that translated smoothly into English. Certainly, his later works are far less idiomatic than his earlier ones. He even stipulated that his oeuvre be canonized in English. Another example consists of the wonderful poems by Irena Klepfisz, in which she actually teaches the reader some Yiddish words. She writes, for instance: _dos vaybl_ the wife or the little woman... _yidishkayt_ a way of being Jewish always arguable... _di kartofl_ the material counter- part of _yidishkayt_... _di lange shvartse hor_ the long black hair.... _a vaybl kholemt_ _di kartofl_ _di khale_ _yidishkayt_ _zi kholemt_ _di hor_ _di lange shvartse hor_ _zi kholemt_ _zi kholemt_ _zi kholemt_ [9] The capacity to blend English with Yiddish, or to move fluidly between English and Yiddish, however, depends on knowledge of both languages. The problem we are facing today is precisely that only a shrinking number of people still possess that knowledge. Moreover, the possibilities for developing near native fluency in Yiddish are on the wane, at least in the secular world. Still, a sensibility to the flavor of Yiddish wondrously persists. People who read Singer at his best in translation can savor that flavor, as can, for that matter, people who read certain works by Saul Bellow. I have been seeing the spirit of Yiddish in English, by authors who do not know Yiddish, for several years. It is a corpus that, however small and however pale in comparison to the original, nonetheless provides access to the realm of Yiddish. A wonderful example of this phenomenon first came to my attention in the work of Steve Stern. While several stories illustrate his debt to Yiddish, Stern explicitly credits the language and Eastern European Jewish culture with expanding, indeed unleashing, his creativity in "The Ghost and Saul Bozoff." An effete young writer, Saul is transformed when he encounters the ghost of Leah Rosenthal, who transmits to him a wealth of literary subjects from her own experience, including "a perpetual blizzard of feathers in the pillow-making sweatshop, eternal spring in the paper-flower factory, clothes hung in the airshafts like flags at a naval regatta...flaming bodies that plummeted from the Triangle Shirtwaist Company like a flight of phoenixes." [10] Since reading Stern, I've noticed many additional hints of Yiddish in the writing of Anglophone authors who do not know the language. Art Spiegelman, in Maus I and II, has his father Vladek speak two types of English: he is Vladek, the native speaker of Yiddish, and he is Vladek the immigrant, grappling with English. The European battling for his life utters an impassioned plea to his wife: "Until the last moment we must struggle together! I need you! And you'll see that together we'll survive." But the immigrant who is retelling the story concludes: "This always I told to her." He tells his American-born son: "Help yourself for a little cereal...Okay, if not, is not. Only just try then a piece from this fruit cake...I want only you'll enjoy here the summer with me." [11] The technique of rendering native and non-native speech in English is certainly not new; Henry Roth did it superbly in Call it Sleep. But there the point was to show that the same person who butchered English was also capable of eloquence. For Roth, it was a clever way of highlighting the immigrant plight while simultaneously reminding the reader that being limited in English by no means signified lack of refinement. Spiegelman's use of a similar technique, in contrast, suggests that Vladek was once effective and courageous but that now he is a weak old man, forced to communicate in ways that Artie finds both ludicrous and infuriating. Nonetheless, Spiegelman's content emphasizes the modernity and initiative that thrived in pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern Europe, even as his form is quintessentially American. In another moving example, Pearl Abraham's poignant novel, The Romance Reader, uses what might be called Hasidic English to contrast the values of the protagonist's Satmer father with the young woman's own search for freedom through secular literature. The father puts it bluntly: "'The Jews escaped slavery in Egypt because of three things,' he says, quoting from the Chumash, swaying as if he's studying. 'Name, dress, and language. You two call each other by your goyishe names, Rachel instead of Ruchel; you speak a goyishe language; and now you're changing the way you dress. I will not have any of that in this house. This is a Chassidishe home.'" [12] The prose is not Yiddish, of course, but the echo of Yiddish lies beneath the surface. And, with this method, Abraham creates an American novel that evokes the stultifying atmosphere of old-world Hasidism and at the same time convincingly portrays the quest to escape. Where to draw the line with respect to authenticity and aesthetic acceptability is another matter. To use food as a cultural illustration, I recently read that, the more accepted an ethnic dish is among Americans, the larger, i.e., the more American, its size. Enormous, doughy bagels available at Dunkin Donuts and on American Airlines prove the point. Once a food has been adopted, it can be adapted to the majority culture's needs and tastes, as in chicken croissants, blueberry bagels, and, in Arizona, Navajo bagels. So what does it mean when the Yiddish language, the Holocaust, and the Golem all appear in a novel by an Irish-American? I am not making this up: the work is Pete Hamill's 1997 Snow in August. [13] Set in the mid-1940s, the book concerns an unusual friendship. At age 11, Michael Devlin is a good Irish Catholic youngster with more than his share of woe. Rabbi Judah Hirsch is a Holocaust survivor from Prague, now presiding over a Brooklyn shul that has seen much better days. Both Michael and the rabbi have endured great loss -- Michael's father has been killed in the War and the rabbi has lost his wife in the camps. The two also share the experience of being persecuted by a local roughneck, Frankie McCarthy, and his cronies. After they meet in a bashert kind of way, Michael and the rabbi arrange a project of reciprocal education: the rabbi will teach Michael Yiddish and Michael will tutor the rabbi in baseball. In the course of things, Michael discovers the Golem and the rabbi not only discovers Jackie Robinson but also attends a game in Ebbets Field. At the end of the novel, as the rabbi lies in the hospital after an anti-Semitic incident at the hands of Frankie McCarthy's gang, Michael succeeds in bringing the Golem to life in Brooklyn. After "whispering an Our Father" (p.355), the boy utters the proper incantations and is rewarded with a Golem who "[is] as dark as Jackie Robinson." (p.358) The Golem quickly takes care of Frankie's gang, heals the rabbi and smuggles him out of the hospital and back to the synagogue, along the way restoring the sanctuary to its former glory. Not content with that, the Golem fills the space with the six million kdoyshim, including the rabbi's wife, Leah. Husband and wife, reunited at last, step out onto the roof to dance the dance that Hitler had prevented. What is wrong here? Hamill records with admirable accuracy Michael's Yiddish lessons and his subsequent use of the language. He has done his homework on Jewish folklore and history. Hamill grew up among Jews in Brooklyn and, according to a recent interview in Tikkun magazine, wrote the novel "as a thank you to Jewish culture, because it taught [him] three things that [he] wanted to pass along. Moral intelligence, irony, and tenacity." ( p.26) But the book fails because its flavor is inauthentic. It is a literary blueberry bagel. No writer familiar with Yidishkayt would have a character say an "Our Father" and then call up a Golem who looks like Jackie Robinson. But it is precisely the failure to distinguish between what is authentic and what is not that forms the plight of Yiddish in American culture today. That failure results in the notion that farklemt is one of the two most common words in the language and that it means something amusing, or that cockamamie must be a Yiddish word because it sounds like kakn. Snow in August is evidently being made into a film, and I imagine it has a chance of being successful, even if it is no good. Many people will probably agree with Pulitzer-Prize winner Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, who says of the book: "When you finish that roller-coaster last chapter you'll wonder if the shade of Isaac Bashevis Singer whispered in his ear." Like the bagel, Yiddishkayt has entered the American mainstream, although its cultural translation scarcely resembles the original. But I can report that the love of Yiddish, vulgarized and filled with error though it may be, continues unabated and right up to the minute. As I was writing these remarks, I found the following advertisement in a fancy food shop near UCLA: He'Brew -- The Chosen Beer. Gourmet kosher microbrew with chutzpah. Shmaltz Brewing Company is committed to crafting great beer and great shtik for the Jewish community and beyond...L'Chaim! To shmooze with Global Headquarters...surf www.shmaltz.com. Notes 1. Michael Chabon, "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts," Civilization (June/July, 1997): 67-69. 2. James Brooke, "Indians Striving to Save Their Languages," The New York Times (April 9, 1998): A1, 20. 3. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), Vol. XIV, p.243. 4. Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure, ed. Arnold Goldberg with the collaboration of Paul E. Stepansky (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p.220 5. John Bowlby, "Process of Mourning," The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XLII, Parts 4-5, 1961: 317-340. 6. Ruth R. Wisse, "Yiddish: Past, Present, Imperfect," Commentary (November, 1997): 38. 7. Yankev Glatshteyn, "Gebentsht zol zayn," Gezangen fun rekhts tsu links (New York: CYCO Bikher-farlag,1971), p.109. 8. Dvorah Telushkin, Master of Dreams (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997). 9. Irena Klepfisz, "Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn/ A few words in the mother tongue," A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (1971-1990) (Portland: The Eighth Mountain Press, 1990), pp.225-227. 10. Steve Stern, "The Ghost and Saul Bozoff," Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 228. 11. Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p.122; Maus II: Survivor's Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), pp.78,79. 12. Pearl Abraham, The Romance Reader (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), p. 137. 13. Pete Hamill, Snow in August (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1997). All references will appear in the body of the text. Janet Hadda ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 08.153a Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele http://metalab.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html