By Murray Meld, Special to JTNews
Just before quotas virtually ended immigration from Eastern Europe, I arrived with my family from Daugavpils, Latvia, at age 2, equipped to communicate with the New World with my Momma’s loshn. As with my father and brother, Yiddish served us well. But with Polish and Slavic neighbors, my parents fell back on those other languages; and we kids picked up words like karove for “cow,” pavolye for “take it easy,” patkove for “horseshoe” and katchalke for “rolling pin.”
Public school in Bayonne, N.J., was a great assimilator. Kind though they were, our teachers felt duty-bound to make us “little Americans.” They succeeded, but cheder after school reminded us of our difference. At the same time, my father and mother’s drive to become citizens and my father’s exposure to workmen from other lands increasingly made English useful away from home. The presence of my uncle and his involvement with the Workman’s Circle was a language and cultural refresher for all of us.
In 1935, my father bought a small business on Orchard Street on New York’s Lower East Side. That street brought me face to face with a Yiddish more “choice” than I had ever heard before. After that experience, I enrolled at City College where, perforce, use of Yiddish — or of any ghost accent — was proscribed. Nor was it used in the political rancor of those Depression years on campus. There was also a hiatus for me in the Army where, as a radio operator, my lingua franca was the international Morse Code.
The “G.I. Bill” and a time of scholarship at Columbia’s graduate School of Social Work gave me my profession in 1949. My specialization was “community organization,” which paved the way for my wife Sophie (also an M.S.W. from Columbia), and our daughters to experience life first in New York, and then in Columbus, Ohio, York, Pa., Stamford and Hartford, Ct. Santa Monica, Calif., St. Louis and of course Seattle. But except for Sophie’s use of Yiddish in family counseling, Yiddish was hardly a part of our career, social involvement or interest at home.
It was returning to Seattle following my retirement as dean of Saint Louis University’s School of Social Service, in 1984, that brought Sophie and I back to our cultural heritage. Here we discovered the Yidishe Grupe, which had been going on for a decade, and which accepted us with open ears and hearts. Our knowledge and use of Yiddish has been revitalized and has grown in the subsequent years with the mameloshn its members have generously shared with us.
Murray Meld is president of the Seattle Yiddish Group. For more information, contact him at 206-523-6564 or murmelo4@q.com.