1) Yiddish in today's America
Sent on: 04/30/1999 17:19:35
[Published in the Jewish Quarterly, no.170, Summer 1998. Reprinted with permission]
Popular wisdom has it that the Yiddish language is making a comeback in the United States and elsewhere. While I see no evidence of such a renaissance, there is definitely a Yiddish phenomenon in American culture. People are yearning for a connection to Yiddish as never before - or, at least, differently from ever before. I would like to try and describe the form of this yearning, suggest a psychological reason for it, and offer some speculations about the future.
Yiddish culture in America - like Gaul - is divided into three parts: erudite, informed and popular. Although my experiences at the university level are fundamental to all my ideas about Yiddish, I will focus on informed and popular cultural manifestations.
Concerning informed Yiddish culture, I notice two remarkable developments: the proliferation of communal activity, such as Yiddish festivals, and Yiddish postings on the Web, notably the bulletin board 'Mendele'. While not exclusively American in its membership, Mendele was started in the US and, from what I can tell, most of its membership is in the US. 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. 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 re-establishing 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 20 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 sombre 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 labourers 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 travellers is needed . . . throughout the world . . . (Mendy Fliegler)
I think that the Mendele controversy illuminates the current situation. Some Mendelyaner feel compelled to defend not only the existence of Yiddish but also its growth. Yet the very argument is flawed; the need to assert that a language is thriving implies doubt. No one makes comparable pronouncements about Spanish, Chinese, or even Flemish.
Rabboy, in his reply to Chabon, quotes Max Weinreich's marvellous bon mot, '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 (in the Diaspora) 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 American 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 ten 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. But Chabon puts his finger on the ultimate cause and the anguished refusal to accept the truth: Yiddish did not 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.
I now want to propose a psychoanalytic explanation for the argument 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 from 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' (Volume XIV of the Standard Edition), Freud noted: '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.' More recently, Heinz Kohut suggested that cultural possessions can provide psychological sustenance, especially in times of crisis.
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 twentieth-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 on mourning is Britain's 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 behaviour studies, he eventually reached generalizations about the larger subject of separation and mourning in adults. (See, for example, his paper, 'Process of Mourning', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XLII, Parts 4-5, 1961.) 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 endeavours 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 behaviours 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 nurtured. I suspect that the current enthusiasm for klezmer music stems partly from the longing for a past that is simple and freylekh (joyous), albeit sometimes in a minor key. Ditto for the Yiddish-flavoured 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 (Commentary, November 1997), 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' precisely because it was the language of millions of martyrs. Like the consumers of klezmer-yiddishkayt, 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 (Hanukah top) and giant pickle that functioned as leitmotivs in a recent production of '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 mother, 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.
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 hated him. This inability to accept Bashevis's personality in all its complexity has a strange reflection in Dvorah Telushkin's memoir of her relationship with him, Master of Dreams (New York: William Morrow, 1997). 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' in 'we', which therefore emerges as 'vee'. Few of the reviews even alluded to this tacky and inaccurate manoeuvre, let alone questioned 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 (Institute for Jewish Research), 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 favourite examples of an evolving Yiddish literature are writings that blend English and Yiddish into a new entity. First, just consider Singer'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.
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 flavour of Yiddish wondrously persists. People who read Singer at his best in translation can savour that flavour, as can, for that matter, people who read certain works by Saul Bellow. I have also been seeing the spirit of Yiddish in English, in the work of authors who do not know Yiddish, for several years. This is a corpus that, however small and pale in comparison to the original, nonetheless provides a form of access to the realm of Yiddish.
A wonderful example can be found in the writings 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', which appears in the collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (New York: Viking, 1986). 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.'
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 (New York: Pantheon, 1986 and 1991) 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.'
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, by 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 (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995; London: Quartet, 1996) 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 Humash, 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 hasidishe home.' 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 becomes, 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 Snow in August (New York: Warner, 1997). Set in the mid-1940s, the book concerns an unusual friendship. At the age of 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 (fated) 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. 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 antisemitic incident at the hands of Frankie McCarthy's gang, Michael succeeds in bringing the Golem to life in Brooklyn. After 'whispering an Our Father', the boy utters the proper incantations and is rewarded with a Golem who is 'as dark as Jackie Robinson'. 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 (martrys), 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'. But the book fails because its flavour is inauthentic. It is a literary blueberry bagel. No writer familiar with Yiddishkayt 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. Snow in August is being made into a film, and I imagine it has a chance of being successful. 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.
Janet Hadda
Janet Hadda is Professor of Yiddish at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a practising psychoanalyst. Her latest book is Isaac Bashevis Singer: A life (Oxford University Press).
A different version of this paper was delivered at a conference in April 1998 on 'Yiddish in the Contemporary World' held by the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies; it will also be included in a book of the same name (edited by Dr Gennady Estraikh and Dr Mikhail Krutikov) to be published in January 1999 by Legenda Press of the University of Oxford.
Popular wisdom has it that the Yiddish language is making a comeback in the United States and elsewhere. While I see no evidence of such a renaissance, there is definitely a Yiddish phenomenon in American culture. People are yearning for a connection to Yiddish as never before - or, at least, differently from ever before. I would like to try and describe the form of this yearning, suggest a psychological reason for it, and offer some speculations about the future.
Yiddish culture in America - like Gaul - is divided into three parts: erudite, informed and popular. Although my experiences at the university level are fundamental to all my ideas about Yiddish, I will focus on informed and popular cultural manifestations.
Concerning informed Yiddish culture, I notice two remarkable developments: the proliferation of communal activity, such as Yiddish festivals, and Yiddish postings on the Web, notably the bulletin board 'Mendele'. While not exclusively American in its membership, Mendele was started in the US and, from what I can tell, most of its membership is in the US. 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. 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 re-establishing 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 20 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 sombre 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 labourers 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 travellers is needed . . . throughout the world . . . (Mendy Fliegler)
I think that the Mendele controversy illuminates the current situation. Some Mendelyaner feel compelled to defend not only the existence of Yiddish but also its growth. Yet the very argument is flawed; the need to assert that a language is thriving implies doubt. No one makes comparable pronouncements about Spanish, Chinese, or even Flemish.
Rabboy, in his reply to Chabon, quotes Max Weinreich's marvellous bon mot, '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 (in the Diaspora) 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 American 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 ten 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. But Chabon puts his finger on the ultimate cause and the anguished refusal to accept the truth: Yiddish did not 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.
I now want to propose a psychoanalytic explanation for the argument 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 from 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' (Volume XIV of the Standard Edition), Freud noted: '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.' More recently, Heinz Kohut suggested that cultural possessions can provide psychological sustenance, especially in times of crisis.
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 twentieth-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 on mourning is Britain's 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 behaviour studies, he eventually reached generalizations about the larger subject of separation and mourning in adults. (See, for example, his paper, 'Process of Mourning', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XLII, Parts 4-5, 1961.) 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 endeavours 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 behaviours 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 nurtured. I suspect that the current enthusiasm for klezmer music stems partly from the longing for a past that is simple and freylekh (joyous), albeit sometimes in a minor key. Ditto for the Yiddish-flavoured 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 (Commentary, November 1997), 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' precisely because it was the language of millions of martyrs. Like the consumers of klezmer-yiddishkayt, 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 (Hanukah top) and giant pickle that functioned as leitmotivs in a recent production of '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 mother, 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.
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 hated him. This inability to accept Bashevis's personality in all its complexity has a strange reflection in Dvorah Telushkin's memoir of her relationship with him, Master of Dreams (New York: William Morrow, 1997). 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' in 'we', which therefore emerges as 'vee'. Few of the reviews even alluded to this tacky and inaccurate manoeuvre, let alone questioned 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 (Institute for Jewish Research), 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 favourite examples of an evolving Yiddish literature are writings that blend English and Yiddish into a new entity. First, just consider Singer'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.
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 flavour of Yiddish wondrously persists. People who read Singer at his best in translation can savour that flavour, as can, for that matter, people who read certain works by Saul Bellow. I have also been seeing the spirit of Yiddish in English, in the work of authors who do not know Yiddish, for several years. This is a corpus that, however small and pale in comparison to the original, nonetheless provides a form of access to the realm of Yiddish.
A wonderful example can be found in the writings 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', which appears in the collection Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (New York: Viking, 1986). 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.'
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 (New York: Pantheon, 1986 and 1991) 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.'
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, by 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 (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995; London: Quartet, 1996) 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 Humash, 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 hasidishe home.' 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 becomes, 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 Snow in August (New York: Warner, 1997). Set in the mid-1940s, the book concerns an unusual friendship. At the age of 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 (fated) 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. 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 antisemitic incident at the hands of Frankie McCarthy's gang, Michael succeeds in bringing the Golem to life in Brooklyn. After 'whispering an Our Father', the boy utters the proper incantations and is rewarded with a Golem who is 'as dark as Jackie Robinson'. 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 (martrys), 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'. But the book fails because its flavour is inauthentic. It is a literary blueberry bagel. No writer familiar with Yiddishkayt 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. Snow in August is being made into a film, and I imagine it has a chance of being successful. 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.
Janet Hadda
Janet Hadda is Professor of Yiddish at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a practising psychoanalyst. Her latest book is Isaac Bashevis Singer: A life (Oxford University Press).
A different version of this paper was delivered at a conference in April 1998 on 'Yiddish in the Contemporary World' held by the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies; it will also be included in a book of the same name (edited by Dr Gennady Estraikh and Dr Mikhail Krutikov) to be published in January 1999 by Legenda Press of the University of Oxford.