Several months ago I attended a wedding in Argentina and had the experience, for the first time in my life, of hearing my father speak Yiddish. Having grown up on the Lower East Side to immigrant parents, Yiddish had been his first language, but he’d had no reason to use it since childhood and though he’d told me he could still speak it, I’d never witnessed it before and had my doubts. Yet here in a Spanish-speaking country, meeting Jews (the groom’s family) that spoke no English but had similar backgrounds to him, he found it useful again. It was interesting to see that Yiddish, admittedly a dead tongue, was still a small thing that Jews from different lands had in common—which underlines one of its original necessities.
In many ways Yiddish’s history mirrors that of the Jews themselves. It was born—and thrived—because of isolation, was partly destroyed by Hitler, was disregarded by Zionism as backwards, and finally perished due to assimilation. It had its own literature, its own theatre, and, briefly, its own cinema. It had, like Jews themselves, a disproportionate effect on Western culture relative to its small size. (If Kafka was influenced by Yiddish culture and Kafka created the modern short story and perhaps modern literature itself…well, you get my point).
Yet, Yiddish, which is really a Jewish dialect of German, is also a terribly biased language. Every work written in Yiddish, in theatre or literature or journalism, was an expression of one particular culture, one particular religion, and one particular people. Sholem Aleichem, perhaps the most important Yiddish writer, who like my grandmother was born in the Ukraine and died in New York, wrote solely on topics of the shtetl, and then the ghetto. His readers wouldn’t have expected or understood anything else. Yiddish, whenever written, focused exclusively on Jewish themes. This was often true in translation as well.
The Yiddish King Lear, for example, written in 1892 by Jacob Gordin, was one of the most famous and influential works in the Yiddish Theatre. In this case the king is a wealthy Jewish merchant who seeks to retire and go to the Holy land after dividing his fortune among his daughter’s husbands. The husbands are common stock characters in Yiddish culture: the deeply religious Hasid, the business man, and the secular intellectual. These men represent the great debate going on at the time within Jewish immigrant communities, explored more thoroughly by writer Abraham Cahan, as to whether to hang on to tradition, assimilate and join in the money mad culture of this American land, or seek to change society altogether through various radical organizations and beliefs. So the play becomes hardly a simple English-to-Yiddish translation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, rather, like all great adaptations, it is a “theft” of themes and situations which are then used to explore more particular communal concerns. (Note: Shakespeare himself stole the story from Geoffrey of Monmouth). To Yiddishize something was also to Judaize it. Numerous other works of Shakespeare were used for Yiddish theater, almost always being re-tooled to reflect the cultural beliefs and biases of the Jewish audience. Sexual innuendos were toned down, supernatural events (like the ghost in Hamlet) were played-up, and moral questions which resonated in Jewish theology were highlighted.
This is generally the case with languages. A group’s dialect almost always splits away from its language of origin when that language ceases to be useful in articulating that group’s concerns. American English is said to differ from British English due to its Americanisms, words and terms which reflect American culture. If German, for instance, was capable of commenting on Jewish concerns then Yiddish would never have come into existence. To this day, many Jews still use some Yiddish words, whether they know it or not, to describe certain Jewish things which have no concise English description (i.e. Lox, bris, and yamulke).
Yiddish, with its small size and self-contained culture, gives us the opportunity to see clearly certain biases of language that we tend to ignore or take for granted in our own.
(Photo: Jewish Women’s Archive)
