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Home , Greek to me, Sassov (Hasidic dynasty), Yiddish

LUCY S. DAWIDOWICZ

YIDDISH: PAST, PRESENT & PERFECT

N HEARING THAT the first is taught at many universities; O volume of an unabridged Yiddish writers, in translation, have at- ten-volume Yiddish has just tained considerable vogue; adult educa- been published, people ask, "Today?" tion courses in Yiddish and Yiddish litera- Their skepticism reflects the common ture have unpredicted popularity. The knowledge that Yiddish has fewer speakers Yiddish novelist today than ever before. Why, then, an recently commented on this phenomenon, unabridged dictionary of the Yiddish formulating what may be designated as language now? The editors of the Great the law of Yiddish status: the fewer its Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,* speakers, the greater its prestige. Judah A. Joffe and Yudel Mark, linguists About three million people-nearly a and Yiddish scholars, explain in their in- quarter of all --speak Yiddish today troduction that they wished to create "a or know it well enough to speak. Perhaps monument" to the centuries of Ashkenazic half as many more understand it. Before creativity: "We have not forgotten for one the Nazi holocaust Yiddish had nearly moment what happened to our language 7 million speakers, or 40 per cent of all at the bloody hand of the murderer and Jews. Back in 1900 over 60 per cent of all in the tempests of linguistic assimilation. Jews spoke Yiddish. Most Yiddish speak- We consider our task to be not just ers nowadays are bilingual, knowing and linguistic, but social and ethical." Or, to speaking also the language of the country use the words of Hillel, "And if not now, they live in, but Yiddish was predomi- when?" Under the pressure of history, nantly once the spoken language of the Mark and Joffe see their responsibility Jews. Statistically, English has displaced as primarily to preserve the Yiddish lan- Yiddish: nearly twice as many Jews speak guage for the historical record and second- English, and English has nearly twice arily to set standards for and define its as many Jewish periodicals published all usage as a living language. over the world (not counting Israel) as Yet however melancholy the outlook Yiddish. In the United States, where for Yiddish today, its prestige in America about 20 per cent of Jews speak Yiddish, has never been higher. Madison Avenue the Times has many more - dictates: "Dress British; think Yiddish." ish readers than the 115,000 who buy the city's two Yiddish dailies. Lucy S. DAwmowlcz has long been a steady con- The decline in the number of Yiddish tributor to COMMENTARY of pieces dealing with Jewish social and cultural concerns. Now a re- search analyst at the American Jewish Com- * Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, mittee, Mrs. Dawidowicz was at one time an edited by Judah A. Joffe and Yudel Mark. Vol. 1: aspirant (fellow) of Yivo. In- (alef-alef-vov-mem). Yiddish Dictionary Committee, Inc. 32 + 508 pp. $15.00. 375 376 COMMENTARY speakers and the ascendancy of English and most uncultivated men. Early - are easily explained by the great migra- dish books were addressed to "women and tion from Eastern Europe at the turn of the common people who cannot study the century and by the enormous Jewish ." (The Tsene-Urene was re- losses during World War II. It is unlikely nowned as the "women's .") The that any language would long survive the status of Yiddish has been reflected in worldwide dispersal of its speakers amid some of the more common epithets ap- alien tongues and the destruction of its plied to it: taytch ("translation" or "ex- linguistic base. That Yiddish has survived planation"), meaning Yiddish as inter- at all under such conditions illustrates its mediary between the learned texts and adaptability and its speakers' persistence. the common people; mame-loshn (literally This determination to hold on to Yiddish "mama-tongue"), meaning one's own is one of the ways in which Yiddish speak- language, with emphasis on the woman ers have tried to win acceptance and sta- and mother; prost-Yiddish ("plain Yid- tus for their language. dish"), pointing to Yiddish as connected with the common and uneducated; zhar- ALMOST EVERY LANGUAGE has, at some gon ("jargon") and shifha ("maidserv- stage in its history, aspired to polit- ant"), both embodying contempt. ical recognition and social acceptance. The The struggle of most for struggle for recognition of the native lan- recognition was frequently a class conflict. guages in and symbolized The lower classes spoke the the peasants' defiance of the Polish- and and the upper class, the nobility and the German-speaking landowners. In Finland educated, spoke , French, German, and Norway the native languages fought or whatever the prevailing cultural style for emancipation from foreign rule. In was. In 18th-century Russia, after Peter Norway the conflict persists between the Great's reforms, when French culture Riksmaal, the official Danish-derived lan- flooded the upper classes, Russian was guage, and Landsmaal, the modernized looked upon as "the language of lackeys standardized form of Norwegian . and of all common people." Just so, In Ceylon today the two million Tamil- Yiddish was associated with the lower speaking Hindus have revolted against classes among Jews. It was offensive to the government's plan to make Sinhalese, the educated upper class, and despised by the language of the Buddhist majority, the middle class aspiring to society the . is today seek- where German, Polish, or Russian were ing status as the national language of spoken. While most 'vernaculars have India, competing with the high prestige gained status with the emergence of the of English and the multiple claims of the middle class as an influential factor in regional languages. Most modern lan- society, the emergence of a Jewish middle guages have suffered the disabilities of class in the main spelled doom for Yid- their speakers, in class, caste, religion, or dish. (Ultra-Orthodoxy among middle- nationality, but none, I think, has ever class Jews was the most significant factor had as large a share of disabilities as in halting linguistic assimilation.) So in- Yiddish. tent were these modern skeptics, the newly Yiddish developed as a vernacular educated middle-class Jews, on integra- among Jews, under a double disability. It tion into Gentile society that they even was despised as faulty German by those blamed anti-Semitism on Yiddish, as a who did not discern its distinctive char- particularly objectionable aspect of Jewish acter. And as a written language, it had separatism. At the beginning of the 19th the lowliest status, being a substitute for century, German Jews appealed to Polish Hebrew among women and the meanest Jews to discard Yiddish: "How long will YIDDISH: PAST, PRESENT & PERFECT 377 you continue to speak a corrupt German . In these countries, the durabil- instead of the language of your ity of Yiddish may be attributed in part country, Polish? How many misfortunes to a later Jewish immigration. But there might have been averted by your fore- are reasons other than the time lag that fathers had they been able to express Yiddish is spoken more in Toronto and themselves adequately in the Polish tongue Winnipeg than in New York, more in before the magnates and kings!" (Disdain Mexico City than in London, and more for the language of the Jewish masses is in than in Johannesburg. quite old. Long after had spread The English-speaking countries, except as the vernacular among Jews, for bilingual Canada, seem to have been Judah ha- protested: "Why should less hospitable to Yiddish than the Span- the Syriac language be used in ? ish-speaking ones. As for Canada, its bi- Either Hebrew or Greek!") lingualism is surely of profound signif- icance for the high survival rate of Yiddish OST OF TODAY'S three million Yid- (in the 1951 census, though 95 per cent M dish speakers were born in Eastern of the Jews reported they knew English, Europe, though only about a quarter still 50.6 per cent gave Yiddish as their mother live there. (Some 470,000 in Russia gave tongue). Yiddish as their mother tongue in the The subjective reasons that have kept 1959 census; about 250,000 Yiddish Yiddish alive far from its Ashkenazic base speakers remain in Rumania, , and are fewer but perhaps more potent than Hungary.) Transported and transplanted the objective ones. National consciousness, to many countries of different cultural cli- national will, and religion-old-fashioned mates, Yiddish has flourished or withered, orthodox -have been the domi- to complete the , according to nant factors in preserving Yiddish, ad- the fertility of the soil and the care and mittedly among a relatively small number skill of the gardener. Its fate has been in- of Jews. In the United States, the sur- extricably bound up with each immigrant vival rate has been rather low. community and the way in which the America had much to offer the Yiddish- community adapted itself to the host coun- speaking East European Jewish immi- try. The steadfastness of Yiddish has grant: civic and political equality, un- varied from place to place for the widest paralleled economic opportunities, un- variety of objective reasons: the general limited educational advantages. In return, cultural level of the non-Jewish milieu, the America demanded Americanization, or nature of the school system and particu- Anglo-conformity, as Stewart G. Cole larly the existence of Jewish day schools, termed this traditional pressure of the ma- the segregating tendency in many coun- jority on the minority to conform to the tries of the prevailing Catholic culture, basic cultural pattern. Anglo-conformity, the absence of a native middle class and long before its vulgarization, was consid- the entrepreneurial function of Jews in ered a virtue by the Founding Fathers. industrially and commercially underde- John Jay wrote in the Federalist: "With veloped countries, the unreserved accep- equal pleasure I have as often taken tance of cultural pluralism and multilin- notice, that Providence has been pleased gualism. to give this one connected country, to one In the United States, which had the united people, a people descended from largest immigration of Yiddish speakers- the same ancestors, speaking the same well over one and a half million-Yiddish language, professing the same religion, at- among the native-born children of Yid- tached to the same principles of govern- dish-speaking immigrants has not per- ment, very similar in their manners and sisted as well as in Canada, Mexico, or customs... ." 378 COMMENTARY Since 1788, the American ethos has re- In its transplanted immigrant existence, peatedly expressed itself in open and often Yiddish has been cultivated only by two violent hostility to foreignness, whether groups of immigrants for whom it has cultural, linguistic, religious, or racial. The expressed the cultural or religious commit- Antimasonic party, the Know-Nothing ments of their past. They are either the movement, the American Protective As- non-religious (once anti-religious) social- sociation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the ist and Zionist radicals, or the most tradi- Ku Klux Klan, and the "national origins" tionally Orthodox Jews. quota system form an unmistakable pat- tern of how America demanded conform- /OST OF THE radical immigrants were ity to its dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. VIM ideological Yiddishists; Hebraists The immigrants' retention of the old- among them were few. Coming to Amer- country language, religion, and customs ica sixty years ago, these East European was viewed by the natives (sometimes Yiddish-speaking masses created not only justly) not merely as habitual and nostal- the American clothing industry, but a host gic, but also as ideological and politi- of institutions-the Jewish labor move- cal and therefore a threat to American ment, the Yiddish press, the Yiddish thea- unity. ter, Yiddish schools, landsmanshaften, Partly in reaction to the pressure of massive fraternal and communal organ- Americanization, exerted formally through izations-through which they accommo- the public school and the already Amer- dated themselves to America and which, icanized Jewish community and informally ironically, served perhaps more as Amer- in the street and factory, and partly in icanizing agencies than as preservatives an overwhelming response of love to of the old culture. Sharing the revolu- America, Jews jettisoned Yiddish very tionary traditions of pre-revolutionary rapidly. The 1940 census showed how Russia, they were divided on their particu- rapidly. Yiddish ranked fifteenth of lar Jewish ideologies (Diaspora national- eighteen groups in the percentage of its ism or ), but agreed that Yiddish third-generation speakers. Only 3 per cent was the language of the Jewish masses. of those who gave Yiddish as the language They were the heirs of a tradition that spoken at home in their earliest childhood went back to the late decades of the 19th were third generation, while one-third of century, to the narodnichestvo-Russian Spanish and French speakers were third populism, going to the people. generation, and about one-fifth of Dutch This movement had had a great impact and German. Most who claimed Yiddish on Jewish enlighteners and radicals alike, as their mother tongue were the foreign- opening their eyes to the possibility that born, whereas among other groups, the Yiddish, the language they despised and largest percentage admitting a foreign loathed, might be used as a vehicle for language as mother tongue were generally their propaganda. The Westernized mas- the second generation. These figures show, kilim, who thought the benighted Yiddish- starkly and shatteringly, how few Jews speaking Jews needed secular education have valued Yiddish enough to pass it on and Western culture, finally agreed that or even to claim it. The comparatively enlightenment, transmitted even in what high rate of linguistic retention among they considered an unworthy language, Germans, despite their much earlier immi- was better than no enlightenment. As for gration and their high level of accultura- the Jewish radicals, it soon became obvious tion, suggests that the conscious effort to to them that they could preach socialism, maintain the national language-a prod- revolution, labor unity to the people only uct of nationalism or self-esteem-was a in the language of the people. Few of the vital factor in that retention. leaders among the radicals knew Yiddish YIDDISH: PAST, PRESENT & PERFECT 379 and many had to learn it while teaching immediately millions of Jews who do not revolution. speak this language and to prepare mil- Both the maskilim, often believing lions of others for bankruptcy at a later Jews, and the revolutionaries, non-believ- time." ers, propagandized against the fanaticism In another essay, in reply to Ahad and rigidity of degenerating Hasidic Ha'am's views, Dubnow compared the courts, against the rabbinic narrowmind- Jews to a cripple with one natural leg, edness that kept the people fettered in Hebrew, and one artificial leg, Yiddish. superstition. They succeeded in the long "On these two legs our people has stood run, with the aid of great processes like and survived for many generations," he the Industrial Revolution and urban- wrote, "just as in former years it stood ization, in attenuating the adherence to on the linguistic dualism of Hebrew and Judaism. Thus, wherever the secular Aramaic." teachings had prevailed, Yiddish was often This was a period when nationalist the one remnant of a purely Jewish cul- ideologies flourished and when no one ture that could be taught and transmitted questioned the then popular notion that as part of an acceptable Jewish heritage. language and nation were inseparably The vernacular became the hallmark of fused. Pan- and Pan-Slavism and the symbol of Jewish provoked small nations to seek a new national self-consciousness. national mystique through the elevation It was this kind of linguistic nationalism and cultivation of their own national lan- among Jews that Ahad Ha'am particularly guages. The Jews shared in this nationalist detested. In the tradition of the Russian ferment and ideological explosion and, in maskilim, for whom rational humanism the long run, the Yiddish language was and high culture were the greatest de- the beneficiary. The Jewish Daily For- siderata, Ahad Ha'am considered the ward in New York City, the ideological Yiddishists a threat to the sur- Jewish Public Library, the Colegio Israel- vival of Judaism. He wrote in 1909 to ita de Mexico, the Workmen's Circle Yid- , the Jewish historian and dish schools, are part of the heritage of architect of cultural autonomism: "If after that period, however remote the ancestry thousands of years the Jewish people is to may now seem. start developing its culture from the very beginning, if it is to fashion for itself a new IDDISH HAS HAD a more direct line of literary language and new 'literary and continuity among the Orthodox, par- cultural values' which are nothing more ticularly the Hasidim. The tradition of than a pale reflection of other cultures; targum is an ancient one among Jews, dat- if it is to be just like the Lithuanians and ing back to the Septuagint. Aramaic, as the Ruthenes and so forth: then I can see the language most widely spoken by the no point and no purpose in a national Jews, became the language of translation existence on so low a level." par excellence in the Talmudic period. Dubnow, also a maskil, was a lukewarm The prescribed that a pious Jew partisan of Yiddish as the basis of lin- should read the weekly portion on the guistic nationalism. In answer to Chaim Sabbath twice in Hebrew and once in Zhitlowski, who had become the ideologue translation. As the Jews in the course of of Yiddishism, Dubnow wrote: "Yiddish centuries migrated away from the Ar- is dear to us and we must use it as a amaic-speaking , the Aramaic uniting force for the greater half of our targum became unintelligible, but tradi- people in the coming generations; but, to tion had enshrined it as a semi-sacred erect our entire national culture upon language, and it has persisted as such. (It 'Yiddishism' means to cast off from us is an amusing commentary that the Yid- 380 COMMENTARY dish expression targum-loshn, literally ideologize Yiddish, for it is part of an "language of translation," means some- organic whole, where the whole person thing unintelligible, the equivalent of the and the whole Jew are identical. But this English "It's .") is scarcely true of most secularists among The , the founder of whom Yiddish has shrunk from an Hasidism, urged his followers to use Yid- ideology into a cult or, even worse, a dish because that way they could achieve sentimentality. spontaneous expression. The marvellous The sentimentality is, in a way, endemic tales of Nahman of Bratzlav, the sayings to Yiddish. Languages have their char- of Dov Ber, the preacher of Mezritch, the acteristics. German has been described as and poems of Levi Yitzhak of the language in which to give orders, Berditchev, gave Yiddish a sanction over Russian the language to swear in, French and above its use merely as a vernacular. the language of elegance. Yiddish is the In a Yiddish textbook used in the Ortho- language of tenderness and endearment, it dox Beth Jacob schools for girls in inter- is indeed a mame-loshn. I recall a vivid bellum Poland, a poem described Hebrew illustration of this in a Swiss movie, The as the language of holiness and of the Last Chance, about refugees from Nazism, Torah. It was paired with a poem identi- where many languages were used. A fying Yiddish not only as the language of grandfather spoke Yiddish to his little millions of Jews, but also as semi-sacred, granddaughter, Chanele. The Yiddish the language of Levi Yitzhak and dialogue between them touched me more Reb Nahman of Bratzlav.* In elevating than anything else in the film. I cannot the common and uneducated man, in remember now whether it was the poign- teaching that the unlearned man was the ancy of the situation or the evocative equal in God's eyes of the scholar, that power of Yiddish that called forth from fervor and faith could compensate for me tears for the destroyed Jewish world ignorance, the Hasidic rabbis succeeded of Eastern Europe. For Yiddish, originally in elevating not only the common people, the expression of a culture and its way of but also their language, lending it the life, became first a symbol and then a sub- dignity of the intercourse with God. To- stitute for that culture. Today, it has be- day, in Hasidic-based and come the embodiment of a tragically lost , Yiddish still remains the lan- past. That is why the Yiddish dictionary guage of translation and interpretation is important. It will contain the complete and is, I suspect, more effectively mastered wealth of Yiddish, offering in place of than in some secular Yiddish schools. The sentimentality and tears, words. reason may be-though I am surely simpli- fying-that among the Hasidim Yiddish II still fulfills a real function in their trans- HE EDITORS ESTIMATE that planted but living culture. For they be- upon completion the Great lieve a Jew must speak Yiddish; other- Dictionary of the Yiddish Language will wise he speaks "goyish," that is, any non- contain about 180,000 words. In compari- Jewish language. They have no need to son with Webster's 450,000, Yiddish may seem poor, but not in comparison with *Two of the verses read: Yidish loshn, hartsik loshn/fun milyonen brider,/Reb Yitskhok-Levi other major European languages like hot mit dir/geshafn frume lider./ S'hot Reb Nakh- French, Russian, Spanish, or Italian, whose men mayselekh oyf yidish undz gegebn./ Yidish total vocabularies are estimated to range loshn, mame-loshn/freyd fun undzer lebn. (Yid- dish language, tender language of millions of our from 140,000 to 210,000 words. But brothers. Reb Levi Yitzhak composed devout though Yiddish is undoubtedly not what poems in Yiddish. Reb Nahman gave us stories the linguists call a "sociologically com- in Yiddish. Yiddish language, mother tongue, joy of our life.) plete" language, being deficient in scien- YIDDISH: PAST, PRESENT & PERFECT 381 tific, technical, and military vocabularies, ture, not only the pre-classical and meager in botanical, zoological, and and Hasidic , and not only the agricultural terminology, it is nevertheless three modern fathers, Mendele, Sholem linguistically abundant in other areas of Aleichem, and Peretz; not only fiction and expression-religion, personal and social poetry, but also the scholarly, historical, relations, morality, ethics, intellect, and linguistic, political, journalistic, and phil- feeling. osophical writings that appeared at a time For the first time in the brief history when Yiddish was flourishing. of Yiddish lexicography, each word's com- plete record is given. Stress is shown and H OW DOES ONE decide what words go pronunciation given for Hebrew words H into a dictionary? Who defines their (Yiddish is phonetic). Each word is gram- status? The practice varies. In France, matically described: part of speech, the French Academy; in India, the gov- gender for nouns, verbs characterized as ernment's Language Commission; in Eng- transitive or intransitive, with inflectional land, the Oxford English Dictionary; and forms for nouns and verbs. Etymologies in the United States-at least until the are given for basic words. Substandard publication of the 3rd Edition-Webster's borrowings from other languages are in- Unabridged. But whatever the source, the dicated (Germanism, Slavism, American- basic criticism is universal: the standard- ism, Hispanism); regional and local dia- izers are attacked either for being too lects are indicated (Lithuanian dialect, conservative, for not admitting new words, Ukrainian localism). Special labels are new usages, new definitions; or for being used to indicate subject matter (mathe- too radical, for not protecting the lan- matics, music, trades and professions); guage against corruption and vulgarity. other labels identify the vocabulary by The makers of , like the particular user-the speech of the talmid- interpreters of Jewish law, may be put in khokhem (the religiously learned man), two categories: mekilim, lenient interpret- the language of the and concentra- ers, and mahmirim, strict ones. In the tion camp, thieves' argot. Status and United States, for instance, the editors of usage labels are also given: archaic, neo- Webster's 3rd Edition are avowed meki- logistic, rare, ironic, slang, vulgar, coarse. lim. They were following an old lexico- Definitions are extraordinarily precise and graphical tradition which Oxford linguist subtle in their distinctions. Oyg ("eye") Archibald H. Sayce summed up: "The has thirty-four different meanings; agude sole standard of correctness is custom and ("union") has six; avekshteln ("to stand the common usage of the community." up" or "to set down" are its more com- The editors of the Yiddish dictionary mon meanings) has seventeen definitions. share this outlook. They have defined as All this is topped off by an extraor- a word in the Yiddish language "every dinary richness of quotation, drawn from word used by a group of Jews, thinking folk usage and literary sources. Elijah and speaking in Yiddish." They are ob- Bahur's Bovo-bukh of 1541, the Mayse- viously mekilim, and as such bound to in- bukh of 1602, the statutes of the kehillah cur the wrath of the mahmirim. Standard- of Cracow of 1595, a contemporary Yid- ization is difficult enough in all tongues, dish account of the Turkish siege of even for so high-status a language as Eng- in 1683, are among the early lish, as the present violent controversy literary sources. The recent ones include over Webster's 3rd Edition demonstrates. the Yiddish press of New York and Buenos What about Yiddish then? It has no coun- Aires and contemporary Yiddish writers try, no government, no academy, no all over the world. Between them is the permanent dictionary committee, no min- incredibly rich treasure of Yiddish litera- istry of education, no geographical limits, 382 COMMENTARY no higher education to speak of-just Much of this achievement may be credited words and speakers. to , one of Yivo's found- The first attempt to standardize Yiddish ers and directors, who has been largely was the Yiddish Language Conference responsible for the high repute of Yiddish held in Czernowitz in Rumania in 1908. in the halls of Academe. It was initiated by Nathan Birnbaum, one of the great (and unjustly neglected) per- HE YIDDISH SCHOOL systems, after sonalities of the recent Jewish past, who the First World War, in Poland, Lith- wanted to have Yiddish proclaimed as the uania, and Latvia, the rapid growth and "national" Jewish language. The specific proliferation of the Yiddish press and purposes of the conference were to deal book publishing, and over all the unique with standardization of spelling and gram- authority of Yivo, made possible some mar and the compilation of a dictionary. standardization where cultural anarchism But little was accomplished, because the had been rampant. Yivo and the Yiddish conference became a platform for quarrels schools in Poland agreed in 1936 on one between Yiddishists and Hebraists. Time hundred and fifty rules for simple, hyphen- was short and the ideologically charged ated, and compound words, plurals, ab- atmosphere was not conducive to the breviations, spelling, and punctuation. But laborious and tedious tasks of linguistic the rules were not universally accepted: standardization. The conference adopted those that seemed too radical, departing the position that Yiddish was a (not the) too much from tradition, were often dis- national language of the Jewish people: regarded. Most of the daily press has re- this, like most compromises, satisfied no sisted standardization, modernizing its one. (Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz, who took spelling only with the speed of glaciers. a leading role at the conference, had Even today, the of the Yid- argued that Jews had no national lan- dish daily press is far from consistent and guage: Hebrew was no longer the national scarcely correct by modem standards. language and Yiddish, aspiring to it, was The editors of the Great Dictionary of not yet it.) the Yiddish Language-both connected No progress in standardization of Yid- with Yivo for a long time: Yudel Mark dish was made until after . has been editor of Yivo's periodical Yid- Only then were modem school systems ishe Shprakh for over twenty years-felt established in which Yiddish was the lan- a few rules should be reviewed. They de- guage of instruction. (The Polish Minori- cided, on the basis of replies to a question- ties Treaty had guaranteed cultural or na- naire from some two hundred Yiddish tional minorities the right to schools in writers, linguists, teachers, editors, and their own languages.) A new university- journalists, to retain the silent alef (which educated intelligentsia arose, identifying Yivo had eliminated) between combina- itself, like the earlier populists, with the tions of vov (generally when the double- Yiddish-speaking masses. They helped to vov, the consonant, followed or preceded create a wide network of institutions which the single-vov, the ) and yud (as made it possible for Yiddish to aspire to vowel, semi-vowel, and diphthong). The high culture. One of these was the Yid- other important difference from the old dish Scientific Institute-Yivo (an ac- Yivo standards concerns the spelling of ronym based on its Yiddish name), compound words or phrases (whether founded in 1925, which became for the separated, hyphenated, or as one word). Yiddish-speaking world an academy and The editors concluded that meaning must university in one, bringing to Yiddish a determine the word unit: for example, in luster and prestige among educated people the new dictionary farayorn ("last year") that it had scarcely ever before enjoyed. is one word rather than the three far a yorn. YIDDISH: PAST, PRESENT & PERFECT 383

These deviations from the Yivo rules settled and the way Poland got its name. deprived the dictionary of Yivo's impri- matur. But Yivo in fact had given the RDINARY WORDS ARE permeated with dictionary working space, staff coopera- O and tradition. Then tion, and moral support, and perhaps for there are the special words. Take a place this reason or in an excess of courtesy, the name, , for example. It is defined editors of the dictionary published, in the this way: prefatory matter, the Yivo's ne impri- Geographical name. Large city on the matur, explaining that it could not give Black Sea, the . In 1797-246 its sanction to the dictionary because the Jews; in 1914-165,000, a third of the dictionary had not given its sanction to population. Nicknames: Odessa hoboes, Yivo's orthography. free-livers, crooks, pickpockets, knaves. To live like God in Of course, most of the words in the Yid- Odessa = to live in com- fort. Explanation: No one bothers God in dish dictionary are like words in any lan- Odessa, no one asks anything of him, guage. Ober is a conjunction like "but"; it people leave him alone; parallel to: to is also an adverb and even a substantive, live like God in Paris. Proverbs: "Odessa used in precisely the same sense as "But is Little-Paris." (Mendele, Fishke the me no buts." But Yiddish is, I think, more Lame: "Odessa is Little-Stanislavchik," ironic.) "Hell burns ten miles around Jewish than English is American. Yiddish Odessa" (it is a very sinful city). "God pro- holds the mirror up to nature, recording tect us from Kamenetzer helping hands and reflecting Jewish history and Jewish and Odesser rakes." Saying: "Don't be- dispersion. The etymologies of the words little the Odessa moon" (ironic, when and the labels affixed by the editors reveal someone describes the wonders of the big city). "An Odessa moon"-a the spread of Yiddish beautiful from the woman (Ukrainian and White Russian eastward and then outward: Western Yid- Yiddish expression). "The wise men of dish, Hungarian Yiddish; then the Odessa"= the scholars and writers of Ukrainian, the Lithuanian, White Rus- Odessa in the Haskalah period and at the sian, East Galician dialects; the later sub- beginning of the 20th century (Mendele, Ahad Ha'am, Dubnow, versive penetrations from the German, the etc.) "Odessa Yiddish" = full of Russian words. Russian, the Polish, English, and Spanish; the exotic kinds of Yiddish in and A miniature social and cultural portrait in 19th-century under Turkish emerges, reflecting the ambivalence of the rule. Oysshnaydn ("to cut out," "to folk about the well-to-do, secularly edu- carve") seems an ordinary verb, yet, cated, Haskalah-minded, skeptical Jewish unexpectedly, it contains a chunk of community of Odessa. Jewish folklore. In defining the word, Oysleyzgelt ("ransom") is another ex- the editors quoted Peretz: "The fa- ample of a word given specific colorations mous forest looms darkly in the corner to all its meanings by Jewish history. The of the sky; on these trees our an- definitions and quotations refer to pidyon cestors carved the names of the tractates ha-ben, the ceremonial redemption of the of the Talmud which they finished study- first-born; pidyon-shevuyim, ransom for a ing on their way." The reference, the edi- prisoner or money paid to ward off perse- tors explain, is to a legend about Jewish cution or avoid great peril, with citations settlement in Poland. The first Jews who from medieval history through the Nazi came to Poland stopped in a small forest occupation; money paid to avoid conscrip- near the town of Laszczew, where they tion in Czarist times; and, finally, to - carved the names of the Talmud tractates man restitution ("atonement payments"). they had studied on their long wanderings. The dictionary is indeed more than a Then they heard a voice: "Po-lin" (He- collection of words and definitions; it is a brew: rest here). That is where they vast repository not only of the Yiddish 384 COMMENTARY language, but of Jewish customs, folkways, dish appears dull and listless. Yehoash and history. The dictionary, when com- once said that the Hebrew words wore top pleted, will, I am rash enough to predict, hats. They have dignity, style, tradition, stand beside , Peretz, elegance. These qualities they bring into Mendele, and Yehoash's translation of the Yiddish. Their absence impoverishes the Bible as one of the great achievements of language, cutting it off from the culture, Yiddish. the religion, and the very traditions that The dictionary, too, is a marvelous wit- shaped it. ness of how Yiddish has preserved Hebrew. For, in the final analysis, the religious The words and expressions from the Bible culture created the Yiddish language. The and Talmud which are extensively used religion and the way of life it imposed on in Yiddish have received their formal its believers separated the Jews from their acknowledgment in the dictionary; par- neighbors in medieval Germany. It deter- ticularly the speech of the talmid-khokhem. mined the vocabulary and from the very The definitions of ahavas-yisroel ("love of inception made Yiddish different from Israel"), for example, encompass a Jew- German. Later on, other factors came into ish tradition, beginning with the Penta- play, strengthening and supplementing the teuch, and going through the Talmud, role of Judaism in shaping Yiddish: resi- the Rambam, the Kabbalists, down to dential separation and occupational dif- Hasidism and modern times: ferentiation; governmental and popular 1. Love of Jews for the Jewish people, anti-Semitism and the persecution of Yid- for all Jews, expressing itself in constant dish itself which, in fact, only reinforced readiness to help Jews, to seek and find the language; restriction of educational merit in Jews. Derived from the com- opportunities and discrimination in em- mandment to love one another "thou ployment. Finally, national consciousness shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviti- cus 19:18) and from Rabbi Akiba's say- -most nearly a substitute for Judaism- ing "This is a great principle in the and the will to maintain Yiddish. Today, Torah." ruled that ahavas- it appears that only the most old-fashioned yisroel was a positive commandment of kind of Judaism, national consciousness the Torah. Before praying pious Jews used and national will, remain as crucial fac- to resolve to love Jews as themselves: "I am prepared to take upon myself the posi- tors to perpetuate Yiddish. tive commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself" (Kavaanat Ha'ari). "The TN A SMALL way, national consciousness ahavas-yisroel spark in each Jew should I has manifested itself among some be kindled" ( Isaac , Likute Diburim). 2. Trait of loving Jews young , most of them third even with their faults; interceding on be- generation, for whom Yiddish does not half of the Jewish people and arguing have the associations of ignorant immi- with God about how wonderful the Jew- grants which their parents felt so intensely. ish people are (reflected especially in hasi- Mostly, these third-generation Jews do not stories about dic writings and folklore, in sea- Reb Levi-Yitzhak of Berditchev, Reb know Yiddish. A study of an Eastern Moshe Leib of , Reb Abraham board Jewish community made about ten Yehoshua Heshel of Apt, and others). years ago showed that among parents, 3. Love of a non-Jew for the Jewish two-thirds of whom were second genera- people, for Jews. Ahavas-yisroel of the tion, about half could speak Yiddish, among the . "From love for pious while of their children, nearly all native, the daughters of Israel he came to love of Israel"--said about a non-Jew who less than 10 per cent could speak it. A converts to Judaism for love of a Jewish more recent study of a Midwestern com- girl. munity was even more depressing. Over Hebrew, of course, has a particular vi- half of the parents, mostly native-born, tality in Yiddish. Without Hebrew Yid- had heard Yiddish spoken at home when YIDDISH: PAST, PRESENT & PERFECT 385 they were children, but only a little more movement, can be understood without than a third could speak it and even fewer Yiddish. The scholar will need Yiddish could read. Among their children, a bare for his work and his Yiddish, in time to 5 per cent could speak it, and nearly all come, will have to depend greatly upon only poorly. Mark's and Joffe's Great Dictionary of For those who know a bit, Yiddish the Yiddish Language. serves as a form of Jewish identification in a broader group-the use of a word or HAT I HAVE WRITTEN reminds me of expression helps to locate other Jews, or a Hasidic story with which Gershom perhaps merely kindred spirits. Sometimes Scholem closes his Major Trends in Jewish it is the object of curiosity and occasionally Mysticism: "When the Baal Shem had a Yiddish becomes the discovery of roots. difficult task before him, he would go to Marcus Lee Hansen, the historian of im- a certain place in the woods, light a fire migration, once formulated "the principle and meditate in -and what he had of third-generation interest," that "what set out to perform was done. When a gen- the son wishes to forget the grandson eration later the 'Maggid' of Mezritch was wishes to remember." In their quest for faced with the same task, he would go into their origin, and that background which the same place in the woods and say: We gives their Americanness specificity and can no longer light the fire, but we can value, many young Jews are curious and still speak the prayers-and what he sometimes eager to know where their wanted done, became reality. Again a gen- grandparents came from and what their eration later Rabbi culture was like. Yiddish is something they had to perform this task. And he too went would like to know or, at least, know into the woods and said: We can no longer about, light a fire, nor do we know the secret Yiddish can help give the individual meditations belonging to the prayer, but access to his past, the world from which we do know the place in the woods to his parents came and whose culture, how- which it all belongs-and that must be ever attentuated its form, has had some sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when influence on him. Yiddish is also important another generation had passed and Rabbi for the group past. Ahad Ha'am, sharp- Israel of Rizhin was called upon to per- sighted and penetrating as he was, was form the task, he sat down on his golden nevertheless mistaken when he predicted chair in his castle and said: We cannot that no one would ever claim for Yiddish light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, as for Hebrew "that it must be studied as we do not know the place, but we can tell a matter of national duty." Today, the the story of how it was done." importance-sometimes the crucial im- For those who remember the place and portance-of Yiddish for an understand- perhaps the prayers, telling the story may ing of the history and culture of Ashke- not seem anywhere near enough. But if nazic Jewry for the last five hundred years telling the story is the only way left to has been generally acknowledged. Neither recall the past, let us try to tell it as well Hasidism nor the Jewish labor movement, as we can and use the Great Dictionary neither Zionism nor the Agudas Israel to find the right words.