Valley Weekend : Outings : Celebrating a Resilient Language and Culture : Community: <i> ‘Yiddishkayt: </i> A Family Festival in English & Yiddish’ is a two-day appreciation for the words and ways of Ashkenazi Jews.

There was a time in America when nearly every Jewish child’s parents switched from English to Yiddish whenever they argued or talked about sex.

Such children learned a lot of Yiddish.

This weekend that rich fusion language and the Jewish culture of which it is so vital a part will be celebrated at a festival at the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Sherman Oaks.

Called “Yiddishkayt: A Family Festival in English & Yiddish,” the program opens Saturday night with a concert, featuring actor Leonard Nimoy, who spoke Yiddish before he spoke Vulcan. Sunday’s program, which is free, includes storytelling, performances, Yiddish films, Klezmer music, food, crafts and interactive workshops.

“This is not an Israeli festival,” says Lester Paley, a former president of the Jewish Community Center and chairman of the festival committee. “There’s not going to be hummus and tahini. We’ll have pickles, and I’ve had 75 pounds of halvah contributed.”

As people who have eaten halvah, a candy made from sesame seeds, already know, Yiddishkeit was the culture of Eastern European or Ashkenazi Jews. The language itself, a 1,000-year-old descendant of Medieval High German, is full of borrowings from Hebrew, Russian, Polish, English and other tongues and is written in Hebrew letters.

Like Hebrew, Yiddish is written right to left and read from what English speakers think of as the back of the book to the front. Which brings us to the world’s only Jewish newspaper joke. A reporter for the Jewish Daily Forward (the legendary Yiddish newspaper of New York) stumbles upon a big story and frantically calls his editor. “I’ve got a scoop!” he yells. “Hold the back page!”

Yiddish was the language in which the Jewish mothers of Eastern Europe sang their lullabies. It was the tongue in which business was conducted and small talk made. In “The Joys of Yiddish,” a book that illustrates such durable Yiddishisms as schlemiel with apt jokes, author Leo Rosten has this to say about Yiddish: “Steeped in sentiment, it is sluiced with sarcasm. It loves the ruminative, because it rests on a rueful past; favors paradox, because it knows that only paradox can do justice to the injustices of life; adores irony, because the only way the Jews could retain their sanity was to view a dreadful world with sardonic, astringent eyes. In its innermost heart, Yiddish swings between shmaltz and derision.”

The Nazis killed most of Europe’s Yiddish speakers, and the newly created State of Israel suppressed Yiddish for a time as part of its effort to establish Hebrew as the national language. But Yiddish wouldn’t disappear, and today it is undergoing a revival. Archie Barkan, who will emcee Saturday’s sold-out concert and speak Sunday on Yiddish humor and proverbs, has been in Wisconsin this summer teaching Yiddishkeit for Elderhostel. Hundreds of American colleges and universities, including the University of Texas at Austin and Ohio State, have thriving Yiddish programs, Barkan says. Even Israel has relented and begun offering Yiddish courses. “It’s now an elective in every high school.”

Barkan, of Woodland Hills, thinks there’s a “Roots” phenomenon at work. Among today’s Jews, he speculates, “is a feeling that my parents, my grandparents, they lived Yiddish.”

Another factor in the revival is the establishment in 1980 of the National Yiddish Book Center, based in South Hadley, Mass. A diverse literature, much of it secular, was written in Yiddish in the last 200 years, and the center was founded to rescue these books and to circulate them, says its Los Angeles representative Johanna Cooper. The center will have a booth at the festival.

Aaron Paley, whose Community Arts Resources firm is producing the festival, developed a taste for the language and culture while growing up in Van Nuys. Paley, son of Lester, explains that his parents and their friends started schools where their children could study Yiddish and Jewish culture. “It was very left wing and political,” he recalls. “We didn’t study religion. We didn’t study Hebrew.” Social justice was a major concern. “The whole school would get on a plane and go to San Francisco for the Anti-Vietnam War Mobilization, or we’d go out and picket with farm workers.”

Paley figured he was just the person to produce a Yiddishkeit festival (“I do this for a living,” he told himself), especially after a recent trip to the last few shtetls, or small Jewish towns, in the former Soviet Union.

One of his major aims, Paley says, was to let people know that Yiddish is “hot, happening, relevant,” not dated or dying. He points out that a recent Klezmer concert in Los Angeles attracted 1,200 screaming fans. “There’s a huge market for this.”

Klezmer is the instrumental music that Eastern European Jews traditionally played for all happy occasions, especially weddings, explains Yale Strom, who will appear with his Klezmer band, Zmiros (Yiddish for melodies).

A filmmaker as well as a musician, Strom will also screen his documentary “The Last Klezmer.” The film deals with the life of Leopold Kozlowski, a Holocaust survivor and the last of the traditional Klezmer musicians still performing in Poland. “It’s about triumph over tragedy and how music was the thread that connected all the various events in his life,” says Strom, who also has a New York-based Klezmer band is called Hot Pstromi.

Karen Golden and others will tell stories Sunday. Genealogists will counsel people on tracing their family trees. Sabell Bender will recall her career in one of the great Yiddish theaters of New York. You can learn how to make a nice blintz or to cut paper, Ashkenazi style. There will be sing-alongs, traditional dancing and workshops in Klezmer, calligraphy and the creation of tsdoke pushke or alms boxes. Children can make kites out of old Yiddish-language newspapers. (A pun on Yiddishkeit, not a traditional Jewish craft.)

How resilient is Yiddish? So resilient it has found its way onto the Internet. Garry Margolis will be at the festival to demonstrate how to marry an interest in Yiddish with a passion for PCs. Margolis reports that he recently tracked down his old college roommate through a Yiddish bulletin board.

“It’s a very small world,” he says, “a virtual shtetl.”

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DETAILS

* WHERE: The Valley Cities Jewish Community Center is located at 13164 Burbank Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

* WHEN: Sunday’s program, which is free, begins at 10 a.m. and continues until 5 p.m.

* FYI: Free parking is available on the Valley College campus.

* CALL: For festival information, call (213) 962-1976.