A Mother Tongue Clings to Life : For Jews Seeking Roots, Yiddish Is Stuff of History

Yiddish has been dying a slow death for at least 50 years, but lovers of the Jewish language of Eastern European villages and East Coast immigrant slums still cling to the mame-loshn , their mother tongue, even in Southern California.

They go to literary lectures, informal discussion groups, classes and songfests. Orthodox Jews sometimes debate the Talmud in Yiddish. Old people on bus benches in Jewish neighborhoods gossip in the language of their youth. And a small but growing number of younger Jews who grew up speaking English are turning to Yiddish studies.

The West Valley Jewish Community Center in West Hills has organized an Oct. 29 “Salute to Yiddish,” which will feature nationally known speakers, Yiddish songs and stories, and a screening of a restored, English-subtitled version of the 1939 Maurice Schwartz film “Tevye.”

This much activity might have surprised the pioneers of the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club, who drew up a 50-year charter when they staged their first evening of tea and cake in 1926. Even then, Yiddishists were worried that America would prove rocky ground for their transplanted tongue .

Formal Program

Sixty-three years later, the club still stages a formal program every Saturday night from October through June at the Institute of Jewish Education on 3rd Street in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, but no one knows how long it will last.

In fact, no one really knows how many Yiddish speakers there are--either in Southern California, home to an estimated 700,000 Jews, or in the world at large.

Joshua Fishman, a sociolinguist who teaches at Yeshiva and Stanford universities, said there may be 3.5 million Yiddish speakers in the world today, including about 1.25 million in the United States, compared to an estimated 12 million worldwide and just under 3 million in this country on the eve of World War II.

Yiddish (the name literally means Jewish) has its roots in the Dark Ages, when Jews who lived in southern France and northern Italy migrated into what is now Germany.

They spoke their own language, similar to the Romance languages of the day, but exchanged it for a form of medieval German, adding words from Hebrew and using the Hebrew alphabet.

Modern Yiddish emerged as they gradually moved to Eastern Europe. It is distinct from modern German, with words folded in from Hebrew and the Slavic and Romance languages like so many raisins in a New Year’s koylitsh , or egg bread.

From the early 1800s on, as more worldly Jews became a part of the cultures around them, some looked down on Yiddish as a zhargon , the language of ignorant village folk.

Literary Tradition

But that ignored a rich literary tradition that goes back at least as far as 1272 and a secular Yiddish literature that flowered from the middle of the 19th Century on. Novels, plays, poetry and newspapers appeared in the language, along with prayer books and translations from the Bible.

In waves of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, about 7 million European Jews spread the language to the United States, Canada, South America and what is now Israel.

But others stayed behind. Most of them were gassed or shot or died of cold and hunger in concentration camps after Nazi forces conquered the Jewish centers of Eastern Europe. Of the 6 million Jews put to death during World War II, about 5 million were Yiddish speakers, Fishman said.

By then, Hebrew had become the language of the Jewish settlers in Palestine. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, Yiddish and all other aspects of Jewish culture were stifled. And in the United States, Yiddish was often discarded as worn-out baggage from the old country.

Now, except for some ultra-religious enclaves in Israel and the East Coast and a small circle of secularists in New York whose Yiddish-language nursery school is so popular that it has a waiting list, there is nowhere left where Yiddish is the common language.

Which is not to say that Yiddish is dead.

The kultur klub (pronounced “cool-toor kloob”) has extended its stay indefinitely at the Institute of Jewish Education, and classes at the Workmen’s Circle, Santa Monica College and the West Valley Jewish Community Center had 147 students at last count.

Yearly Losses

“We lose people every year simply because of the fact that people are dying,” said Moshe Cohen, 78, president of the Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club. “But somehow we find people who’ve exchanged playing cards on Saturday evenings for something more creative. We have a half-dozen young people too.”

About 100 senior citizens gather there once a week for lectures, musical programs, tea, cake and a chat.

Other groups of first- and second-generation Americans meet as far afield as Anaheim, Arcadia, Long Beach and Laguna Niguel for informal evenings of Yiddish literature and conversation.

Labor Zionists, Socialists and disillusioned Communists speak the language at political meetings. Shoppers and shopkeepers use it in the bakeries and butcher shops of the old Jewish neighborhoods of Fairfax and Pico-Robertson.

Orthodox Jews often speak Yiddish in their synagogues, although services are generally conducted in Hebrew, the ancient language of the Bible and the prayer book.

Yiddish speakers use the language as far away as Moscow and Buenos Aires.

“I used to fly to a lot of places around the world and I found that a lot of people speak Yiddish,” said Sy Cohen, 70, of Los Angeles, a retired pilot for Flying Tiger. Marion Herbst, a Los Angeles artist and folk singer, fell in love with the language when a friend played a record of folk songs for her.

“It’s my language,” said Herbst, 57. “Some people are obsessed by French and French culture. Me, I’m obsessed with Yiddish, with Yiddish culture. It’s a mystical thing.”

Tantalizing Sounds

The pungent sounds of Yiddish have also begun to tantalize people who did not drink them in with their mothers’ milk.

More than 200 students are learning their alef-beyz (alphabet) and other basics at UCLA and at Jewish institutions such as the University of Judaism and the Workmen’s Circle, a fraternal organization on Robertson Boulevard.

Seventy-five to 100 people, many of them in the 40-to-50 age group, are expected to take classes in Yiddish at the University of Judaism this fall, and an additional 200 may attend lectures on Yiddish literature, Yiddish theater and the history of Yiddish folk songs.

“These are people who are in search of their roots,” said Rabbi Jack Shechter, director of extension courses at the campus in the Santa Monica Mountains above Sepulveda Pass.

Even in the most strictly observant neighborhoods of Jewish Los Angeles, where women in long dresses and men in long beards throng the sidewalks on their way to shul , or synagogue, on Saturday mornings, many parents speak with their children in English. Others make a point of using Yiddish, said Rabbi Chaim Schnur, 39, director of Agudath Israel, an agency that lobbies for Orthodox causes.

Intrinsic Value

“Yiddish is still perceived by many as having an intrinsic value, as being the language of the Jew, and it shouldn’t be forgotten,” Schnur said.

Los Angeles Yiddishists send money to YIVO, a research institute in New York, and help gather books for the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., which has saved about 900,000 Yiddish books and sent out tens of thousands to individuals and libraries around the world.

About 100,000 of those volumes came from Southern California, said Nanci Glick, associate director of the center, whose founder, an energetic 34-year-old former graduate student named Aaron Lansky, was just awarded a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. He expects to use it to send Yiddish books to the Soviet Union, Glick said.

These groups may well be the saving of Yiddish in America. By the year 2010, Fishman predicts, the number of speakers will stabilize at just under 1 million.

In recent years, Yiddish students at universities heve amused themselves by inventing words: shneykishele (marshmallow--literally, “little snow pillow”), kurtskes (short pants--a diminutive and plural form of kurts , which means short).

17 Printings

The standard text, “College Yiddish,” has gone through 17 printings since it was first published in 1949, and a simpler primer, “Learning Yiddish in Early Stages,” was reprinted in 1987.

But Janet Hadda, 43, an associate professor of Yiddish at UCLA, said the success of college programs--there are about 60 in the United States--does not mean that the language is thriving.

Her classes in Yiddish as a language attract no more than a handful of students, while a poetry class taught in English last spring drew 35, she said.

“When I teach conversations to my students in elementary Yiddish, they and I know I’m not training them to spend their junior year abroad in Yiddishland,” she said.

Still, some have found that Yiddish can be fun--and a way to meet people.

“This gives me a feeling of emotional completeness and accomplishment--and besides, everybody is so nice,” said Sharon Baumgold, 36, an attorney who went by her Yiddish name, Shayndl , when she attended classes at the Workmen’s Circle.

The class, made up of 10 women and one man, had gone beyond the alef-beyz to study the future tense and plural pronouns, but Abe Friedman, who taught the class last year, said most of his students are not interested in grammatical niceties.

The curriculum includes songs and folklore, including jokes about the “wise” men of Chelm, who thought that the sea is salty because of all the herring that swim around in it.

Series of One-Liners

One of the best-known Yiddish writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer, had a series of one-liners when asked about the fate of Yiddish, a question that Yiddishists have been wrestling with for decades.

Jewish people suffer from many diseases, but amnesia is not one of them, he would say. Or, the Yiddish language is sick, but among Jews, the distance between being sick and dying is a long way. Or, why write in Yiddish? I write about ghosts. What could be more appropriate than a dying language? Or, we believe the dead will arise.

His quips were quoted by Marvin Zuckerman, 57, an English professor at Valley College in Van Nuys who taught Yiddish there for several years before it was dropped for budgetary reasons. Yiddish will be restored to the curriculum next spring, Zuckerman said, but he is not optimistic about the future of the language.

“ Lomir zich nit narn (let’s not fool ourselves),” Zuckerman said. “Does it exist in your children’s mouths? If not, forget it.”

Zuckerman, whose parents sent him to a secular Yiddish school in New York, said his own children do not speak the language, but his house is full of Yiddish books and newspapers.

He said parents who let children know that Yiddish was once the language of their people may be surprised by their eventual interest: “You never know what will happen.”