A Mother Tongue Without a Country : Yiddish Is the Common Language of Many Jews Seeking Their Roots

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.

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 .

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, 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.

“While the use of the language as a primary vernacular has been declining, interest in it, both sentimental and seriously intellectual, has been rising,” says the Jewish Encyclopedia. “(T)he measurement of the present knowledge of Yiddish . . . requires tools far subtler than those of ordinary censuses.”

But there is no doubt that the number has been shrinking. 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 that 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 (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.

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 emigration 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.

“The emphasis was Americanization,” recalled Irving Teitelbaum, 67, a building contractor who arrived in Chicago from Poland 50 years ago. “One week after I came to this country my brother schlepped me to night classes and said, ‘Learn English.’ ”

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 quite dead yet.

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.

“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.

Services Generally in Hebrew

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 can also 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 the Flying Tiger line. “Somehow you’d look somebody in the face and something would make you both say, ‘ Vos makht a yid (How’s it going)?’ ”

A World War II veteran of the Air Transport Command, Cohen said Yiddish came in handy when he volunteered to fly supply missions during Israel’s War of Independence.

“There were two pilots who escaped from Russia and we put them in the cockpit as co-pilots,” he said. Since no one spoke Hebrew, the Americans and the Russians communicated in Yiddish.

“We would say aruf mitn (up with the) gear, arop mitn (down with the) gear,” Cohen recalled.

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, but she said it can be useful too.

“There are still more speakers of Yiddish than there are of Esperanto, if you’re looking for a practical reason for speaking Yiddish,” she said.

‘A Mystical Thing’

But Herbst, 57, goes beyond practicality in explaining its appeal. “It’s my language,” she said. “Some people are obsessed by French and French culture. Me, I’m obsessed with Yiddish, with Yiddish culture. It’s a mystical thing.”

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.

“I always wanted to learn Yiddish. It was always the language of secrets in my home,” said Susan Page, 40, of Garden Grove, who studied Yiddish at a Jewish Community Center in Long Beach.

Starting with the alphabet, she progressed until she could write a letter in Yiddish to her aunt.

“I love it,” she said. “I feel a real good connection with Jewish people in the world.”

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 . . . not people who know the language, but people who have the feel of it or the smell of it,” said Rabbi Jack Shechter, director of extension courses at the campus in the Santa Monica Mountains above Sepulveda Pass. “It’s a way . . . to deal with the Jewish side of them.”

Many Parents Speak English

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 (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.

“Yiddish is still perceived by many as having an intrinsic value, as being the language of the Jew, and it shouldn’t be forgotten. It should be preserved,” Schnur said. “Some of the older boys in yeshiva (high school) study in Yiddish, because that’s a form of discussion that goes back” to the 18th Century.

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 old 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.

“By that time its speakers, as distinguished from its admirers and those who have love affairs with it from afar, will probably be ultra-Orthodox,” he said.

Words Invented

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

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. “Although I do hear reports of former students using their Yiddish in diverse situations, they are unlikely to go out into the world, find a mate who speaks Yiddish and conduct a courtship in that language.”

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

A Berkeley resident, for example, recently advertised in the National Yiddish Book Center’s monthly publication “to find and have a correspondence, in the warmth of Yiddish, with another gay Yiddishist.”

Others make friends in class.

Feeling of Completeness

“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.

“You’d expect Yiddish to be a moribund language and only older people to speak it, but that’s obviously not true. It can’t be dying if we speak it,” she said.

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 classes last year, said most of his students are not interested in grammatical niceties.

“When we get into the dative, accusative and genitive cases, I lose half my class. People run away,” he said. “I taught it the first year and I haven’t taught it since.”

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