skygiants | (no subject)

My Yiddish teacher recommended Dovid Katz's Words On Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish so often this past year that I called for it at the library as soon as the class ended. Linguistic history makes for slow but fascinating reading; I knew the vague outlines of a lot of what was in the book, but not all of it and certainly not all the details.

The thing about Yiddish that's -- probably not unique? but certainly unusual -- is that it's a language developed and used by a diasporic people, which is to say a minority language, never a national one; and on top of that, it's a daily spoken language among a people who are almost universally literate, but are supposed to be reading and writing in Hebrew and Aramaic, not Yiddish at all. The linguistic politics are a MESS. A fascinating mess! The wars about whether it's even appropriate to write books in Yiddish at all span centuries; at first it's considered shady and potentially impious to write anything meaningful in Yiddish rather than Hebrew, and then once everyone's gotten used to the idea of secular literature there's the Jewish Enlightenment and a whole new generation of Jewish intellectuals who think everyone should be writing in proper enlightened languages like German and French rather than giving weight to lowly Jewish 'zhargon,' and then the Zionist movement happens and it's the fight between Yiddish and Hebrew all over again. (I knew Israel was not particularly pro-Yiddish but I had not realized there were actual ANGRY GANGS of intense Hebraists beating up people who tried to promote the Yiddish language in the early state of Israel? A COMMON THING, APPARENTLY. )

And of course it will be no surprise to any of you my heart is very much on the romantic side of Yiddish in that battle; I mean, it's no surprise to me, but it's something again to read Dovid Katz talking kindly and a bit pityingly about all the ideals Yiddish was over-simplistically associated with at the turn of the twentieth century -- ideals of Diasporic Judiasm, often a secular socialist Judaism -- and find myself nodding along with every one. "Where a [Hebraist] nationalist might say 'Our sacred duty is to care first for our own and concentrate our people in its own secure, powerful nation-state and develop our historic language as its official state language,' a [Yiddishist] humanist might say, 'our sacred duty is to stay where we are to help build a multicultural democratic state where we can develop the language of our people, just as others will do alongside us, in friendship, harmony, and mutual respect.'" Yeah, OK. And then, quoted from Y.L. Peretz's editorial in the front of one of the first Yiddish anthologies: "We have a lot to thank the Diaspora for. Many good ones, but many painful ones too. In the millenial struggle for existence, in ancient times, when all nations built up power and used it for murder, burning and forcing one's will on others, we built up strength and used it for being patient, enduring, tolerating, to live through the bad times. [...] For the time that we have been living in the Diaspora, we don't have on our conscience, on the conscience of our Judaism, a single drop of foreign blood." That one hurts quite a bit because, of course, in the hindsight of history, we can say Y.L. Peretz was right to associate that particular quality with the specifically Diasporic element of Judaism. It's certainly not true anymore.

Of course, also in the hindsight of history, the Hebraists were also right. That particular variant on Yiddish culture was mostly wiped out. I think about something Joann Sfar said about writing his comic Klezmer, about twentieth-century Diasporic Jews who made the choice to stay in Europe as the clouds gathered, rather than fleeing to Israel: "Jews who had the courage to remain in Europe made a noble and worthy choice. I write to justify the Jews of Europe. They were right. And many died for it."

This isn't the turn of the twentieth century. That moment passed long ago, and romanticizing the past isn't ever a particularly good look, but I can't help agreeing to a certain extent with Sfar. History came down like a hammer on the Yiddishist Jews of Europe; that doesn't mean they were wrong. I don't think they were wrong.

Threaded | Flat

From:

monanotlisa

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I really appreciate them.

"For the time that we have been living in the Diaspora, we don't have on our conscience, on the conscience of our Judaism, a single drop of foreign blood."

Shivers down my spine. At its truth, but also my knowledge now from a different historical vantage point...

From:

sovay

"Where a [Hebraist] nationalist might say 'Our sacred duty is to care first for our own and concentrate our people in its own secure, powerful nation-state and develop our historic language as its official state language,' a [Yiddishist] humanist might say, 'our sacred duty is to stay where we are to help build a multicultural democratic state where we can develop the language of our people, just as others will do alongside us, in friendship, harmony, and mutual respect.'"

I apologize for quoting an extensive excerpt from something I linked a couple of days ago and which you may already have read anyway, but this is from Jacob Plitman's "On an Emerging Diasporism" and you will see why I was reminded immediately of it:

"In her 2007 book, The Colors of Jews, scholar and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz gave more shape to the idea of diasporism by discussing the meaning of home:

"What do I mean by home? Not the nation state; not religious worship; not the deepest grief of a people marked by hatred. I mean a commitment to what is and is not mine; to the strangeness of others, to my strangeness to others; to common threads twisted with surprise. Diasporism takes root in the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund's principle of doikayt—hereness—the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are...Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don't belong…I name this commitment Diasporism.

"HERENESS is the organizing principle of diasporism, a critical awareness of Israel coupled with a commitment to struggling primarily in the communities in which we live. Hereness invites us to dig in and build a political, spiritual and material fullness. Thereness tell us to search for meaning and well-being elsewhere, to separate our heart and head and displace them from our body. Hereness might have us use our trauma to build close relationships with our neighbors and allies. Thereness encourages us to imagine that isolation will heal our pain.

"Hereness isn't just about place, but about people: centering our politics and spiritual project around those nearest to us, adopting neighborliness as political practice and intergenerationality as a matter of course. Hereness demands that we learn our local histories and resurrect hidden ones of our own. Hereness means we refuse to disappear into the interiority of our liturgy, and equally refuse to stop being Jews in public. Hereness forces us to consider critically our relationship with class and its ordering of our world. Hereness is weird and materialist and queer and fun and angry, and best of all it's already happening."

I think there's a reason that Diasporic callbacks like Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird are taking off like wildfire lately and I don't think it's just romantic nostalgia on the part of American Jews or a nervous dissociation from Israel. It's because there's still something there of immediate, practical relevance to living in the world, in this world as it is taking shape especially.

This isn't the turn of the twentieth century. That moment passed long ago, and romanticizing the past isn't ever a particularly good look, but I can't help agreeing to a certain extent with Sfar. History came down like a hammer on the Yiddishist Jews of Europe; that doesn't mean they were wrong. I don't think they were wrong.

That's well said.

Edited Date: 2018-07-08 03:14 am (UTC)

From:

thistleingrey

Thank you for this.

A friend's mother grew up with bits of both Yiddish and Ladino, by heritage. I think that the linguistic trajectories (pl. for both) are not so similar, but there are points where they cross and diverge again. Wish I knew more.

(Back to Yiddish: any literary medievalist of W Europe worth their salt knows of this text, or ought to.)

From:

alias_sqbr

our sacred duty is to stay where we are to help build a multicultural democratic state where we can develop the language of our people, just as others will do alongside us, in friendship, harmony, and mutual respect.

Oh.

My family has been getting More Jewish lately and I have very complicated feelings about it, and this helped me figure out where I stand, so thank you.

From:

raven

This is so interesting and thoughtful. Thank you for writing it.

From:

sapote

This is beautiful.

My mother's father's mother's family got lost in the diaspora (first to a forced conversion then a resettlement then a potato famine, yikes) and the only things that have drifted down those four confused generations are actually Yiddish. I think my mother genuinely thought until her mid-30s that "bubbelah" was just a strange family nickname for children that her grandma had made up. It lived on where other things didn't!

From:

nextian

Oof. Yes.

From:

luzula

Oh, I had no idea about the different political connotations of Yiddish and Hebrew. That's really interesting, thanks.

From:

ambyr

Huh. I wonder if this would make a good birthday present for my dad (who I sometimes think of as the Youngest Living Yiddish-As-First-Language Speaker In The US, although I suspect this is not actually true)--thank you for bringing it to my attention.

From:

lilysea

I knew Israel was not particularly pro-Yiddish but I had not realized there were actual ANGRY GANGS of intense Hebraists beating up people who tried to promote the Yiddish language in the early state of Israel? A COMMON THING, APPARENTLY.

This was fascinating: thank you for sharing!

From:

jadelennox

I've been thinking so much about Yiddish in the last few years. I'm in the generation where even though my dad was bilingual from childhood with Yiddish and English, that was the "arguing with his parents" language, and they pushed Sephardic Hebrew on us with no effort to Yiddishize us, which I didn't understand at the time was very much part of the post war diasporic Zionist project. But since my dad's death, my mum (who never spoke Yiddish, ever) has been learning it, and I've encountered more of it as I've delved into family history.

And, bah. I bounce like a ping pong ball between three poles:

The romantic: This was my family's language, and I'd learn so much about myself if I learned it, and also it was the language of the radicals and anarchists and communists, and I shouldn't be ashamed of its old worldiness.
The post war diasporic paradigm: This is the language of old people and gefilte fish 👎🏼, not young people and falafel 👍🏼
Aaaargh! Now I can't stop thinking about the Ashkenazi imbalance in Israel and in the world's perception of Judaism!

tl;dr I overthink everything.