Miriam Weinstein - Yiddish: A Nation of Words

Copyright 2001 by Miriam Weinstein

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to:
Steerforth Press L.C., P.O. Box ,
South Royalton, Vermont 05068

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weinstein, Miriam, 1946
Yiddish : a nation of words / Miriam Weinstein.st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58642-210-3
. Yiddish languageHistory.. JewsCivilization. I. Title.
PJ5113.W44 2001
439.109 DC21

2001002706

v3.1_r1

Un vi der uralter kerndel

Vos hot zikh farvandlt in zang

Vein di verter oykh nern,

Vein di verter gehern

Dem folk, in zayn eybign gang.

And like the ancient kernel

that transformed itself in the stalk

the words will also nourish,

the words which belong

to the people, on their eternal journey.

Abraham Sutzkever

For Peter, Eli, and Mirka
my own personal golden chain.

The careful reader will find that on occasion the same Yiddish word may be spelled in more than one way. Wherever possible, I have transliterated and spelled Yiddish according to the YIVO standard, which is very clear and makes for easy pronunciation. (Just loosen up your throat and go for the gutteral in the kh.)

When quoting material that was originally translated by others, however, I have retained earlier spelling. Just as we are aware of Shakespeares spelling being different from our own, or the way we notice that our British contemporaries use theatre where we Americans write theater, the varieties of Yiddish orthography have their own story to tell. I hope that readers will see this as part of the larger tale.

Yo, got, mir zinen dayn oysdervaylt folk, ober farvos hostu undz gedarft oysvaln?

Yes, God, we are your chosen people. But why did you have to choose us?

M y parents loved to travel. They were not rich people, but in the years after World War II they would leave our Bronx apartment and head off on vacations, first to Europe, and then little by little to almost every continent. They visited big famous cities and dusty crossroads towns. Often, they would return telling a variant of a familiar tale: There we were, in this little shop in (fill in the blank: Dublin, Johannesburg, Tashkent). I dont know; somehow I got the idea. (From what? A tilt of the head? A look in the eyes?) So I says to him, Vus makhst? (whats doing). And this guy who, two minutes before, wouldnt give us the time of day becomes all of a sudden our buddy, our friend. He invites us home, shows us around the whole neighborhood, a regular landsman (fellow countryman).

For a thousand years, this was the standard Jewish story. Yiddish was the secret handshake, the golden key. It was the language that defined a world and a people. Yiddish means Jewish. Its words were, simply, the sound of Jewish life.

Babies were born into rooms full of women crooning in Yiddish; corpses were washed and prepared to the sounds of Yiddish grief. For a people without a country, without a government, without protection of any dependable kind, language became a powerful glue. It connected European Jews to each other even as it separated them from their neighbors people among whom they may have lived for hundreds of years. It also linked them to their past through their sacred language, Hebrew.

Because it was so easy for words and phrases from the Hebrew prayers they recited every day to slip into their ordinary Yiddish speech, their place in Jewish time was confirmed, from the beginning of the world until the coming of the Messiah and the End of Days. It allowed them to live outside Christian or secular history and keep their vision of peoplehood alive. In the meantime, when they wandered in the real, here-and-now world, it was their passport and amulet. It was their strength.