By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
“You pray to God in Hebrew. But you talk to God in Yiddish so he’ll understand you,” said Frank Krasnowsky in an address to the Seattle Yiddish Group on Sunday, October 21.
For the members of the group who gathered at the University House last weekend, this quip seemed to be at the heart of the matter: Although Hebrew is the language of the Torah, Yiddish is the language of the Jewish people.
“During the diaspora, Yiddish was what held us together,” Krasnowsky said of the near-millenium old language. “It’s supposed to be Hebrew now, but that’s not the people’s language, except in Israel. What we’re involved in here is preserving not only the language, but also the culture.”
So, in the name of cultural preservation, the 35 members of the Seattle Yiddish Group gather once a month to tell stories, sing children’s songs, watch movies and prove their knowledge of the language through Yiddish vocabulary quizzes and spelling bees.
According to club president Murray Meld, for many club members, getting together to speak Yiddish is also a means of self-preservation.
“It brings back, for many people, memories of their parents and grandparents and so on,” said Meld, who was raised in a Yiddish speaking household in New Jersey.
Meld is quick to acknowledge that growing up with Yiddish is not as common a phenomenon as it once was. Which is why, for the last year and half, the club has met at the University House, a retirement community in Wallingford.
“A number of our members live here, so it seemed like a natural place to hold meetings,” Meld said.
Inevitably, as the Yiddish speaking population ages, the role of Yiddish in Jewish culture is changing.
Betty Arfin, 74, whom Meld describes as “one of the club’s young members,” sees Yiddish’s future primarily in the realm of academics.
“Except for Chabadniks, I don’t think it’s ever going to be a language that’s spoken in the home for anybody anymore,” she said. “But it will be one of the many languages that exists in scholarly circles. There’s a lot of literature out there and if you want to read it in the original, you have to know Yiddish.”
Indeed, through Aaron Lansky’s efforts to build the National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts, many previously lost Yiddish texts have been revived. In recent years, a handful of American universities have added Yiddish to their course catalogues. Stanford offers classes in Yiddish language and literature as does Columbia University, UC Berkeley and a number of others. The University of Washington does not currently have any Yiddish courses, but Meld hopes that the Jewish Studies department will introduce one in the near future.
This language of Eastern European Jews, an amalgamation of old German, Slavic languages, and smatterings of other tongues picked up along the way, dates back nearly 1,000 years. It served as the everyday backup to Hebrew, the much more holy language of the Torah. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Yiddish newspapers in places like New York competed for readers, similarly to their English counterparts. The Forward, probably the closest thing to a national Jewish newspaper today, still prints a Yiddish edition.
Which isn’t to say that interest in the language by younger Jews — and even non-Jewish enthusiasts of Yiddish culture — has completely waned. The Klezmer revival of a couple decades back keeps the language alive through music, and the spread of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement has done much of the same.
But for the use of Yiddish as a language of the people, not everyone in the Seattle Yiddish Group is content to see it go the way of Latin, however. For Steven Wolloch, Yiddish’s place is not in libraries and universities, but in synagogues and Jewish homes.
“Yiddish was the only language spoken in the synagogue where I was raised. I doubt that’s the case anywhere anymore,” said Wolloch, 57, who has made a point of passing Yiddish on to his own children even though it is no longer his primary language.
Although he is pleased by the Seattle club’s steady turnout each month, Wolloch wonders just how much longer there will be Jews who can speak Yiddish.
“The fact of the matter is, I’m the youngest person here,” Wolloch said, gesturing to his fellow club members. “For all practical purposes, the language is going to die with these people.”