I never thought I'd want to learn this language

There are a lot of languages I don’t care about learning. For instance, unless there is a compelling reason to learn a well-known Indo-European language, the idea of learning Italian, German, or even Catalan, just doesn’t do it for me.

I have nothing against them. It’s just that too many people speak them already and they’re unlikely to offer me anything I haven’t seen before.

But there is one Indo-European language that I have always had a particular aversion to.

This language is Yiddish.

For me, there has always been something vaguely embarrassing about it.

It’s the particular shame of growing up as “the other” in a small Russian town with virtually no Jews. Of having old and wrinkled notebook covers (hand-me-downs from your older brother and sister) when all your classmates had new smooth and shiny ones. Of having to go to music school every day after school instead of playing outside like all the normal kids.¹

Of having a grandmother who didn’t knit or bake, but played Mozart’s sonatas all afternoon. Of having a short dad who wore a fedora, carried a briefcase, listened only to classical music and jazz, and thought that the Russian word zhopa (“ass”)² was a very bad swear word.

Of being certain that even if all these things weren’t true, you’d still be different.

The funny thing is that nobody in my family even spoke Yiddish. My parents could understand some (most?) of it because growing up in Ukraine, they heard their grandparents speak it.

My only real exposure to this language was through the Yiddish songs that my father listened to on our old record player.

I didn’t like those songs. Those creaky, whiny, sad, old-people songs.

I liked the Hebrew songs that we sang in the Jewish summer camp:

Ani noladti la shalom she-kvar yagi’a, ani noladti la shalom she kvar yavo (“I was born for peace, let it arrive already! I was born for peace, let it come!”)

The Hebrew songs smelled of sun and sand and freedom and new stationery and freshly picked oranges.

The Yiddish songs smelled of stale books, old creaky furniture, and gefilte fish.

I never wanted anything to do with this language. This pathetic language of helpless people who kept running away from one place to another, hoping that the next place would be better, that they would be given more rights there, or at least wouldn’t be butchered. The language of unbelonging.

But something shifted for me after October 7th.

I guess I used to think we’re not them. “Them” being my ancestors who ran away from pogroms in Latvia to Ukraine, and before that from who-knows-where, always in search of a better life.

But I can't do it anymore. We are them because we carry our history and our generational memory with us, and that colors the way we see the world and guides everything we do whether we like it or not.

So now I am learning Yiddish. Because I guess I want to get closer to the hearts and minds of those people who wrote and sang and listened to those songs that I so despised growing up.

Learning through songs

Those songs were the most obvious place to start.

I don’t have any patience for language apps anymore. I just wanna go straight to the content that interests me and field grammar questions as they arise.

Who said you can’t do that? Nobody.

Yiddish is a Germanic (an Indo-European) language related to German, Dutch, and English. It is written with the Hebrew alphabet and has borrowed many words from Hebrew, but its grammatical system is that of a Germanic language.

Its sentence structure is very similar to that of English and German. This sentence, from a famous song Tumbalalaika means “Whom to marry and not be ashamed” or something like that. As you can see the sentence structure is identical to that of the English translation.

Vemen tzu nemen un nisht farshemen

whom to take and not be-ashamed

Not particularly relevant

I mentioned to someone on Focusmate (it’s a co-working platform that I use sometimes) that I was looking for resources on Yiddish and he said “Oh, that’s very relevant these days.” I was puzzled: how is it relevant to anyone but me these days??

Then I realized people think that Yiddish is spoken in Israel.

It’s not. In general, there are not very many people who speak Yiddish today. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was spoken by around 11 million European Jews, more than half of whom were murdered during the Holocaust. Since then, the language steadily declined, particularly because Jews who immigrated to Israel wanted to assimilate and chose to speak Hebrew.

Today, Yiddish is spoken only by certain communities of Ultra-Orthodox Jews of Ashkenazi origin. It is said to have around 250K native speakers in the US and about the same number in Israel. In Israel, it is spoken as a first language only by a small sect of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who still consider Hebrew is a holy language that should be used only for prayers.

Like an old chest in the attic

Let me tell you, listening to those songs was like opening an old dusty chest in the attic. I had no idea what I would find there. Would I feel the same vague annoyance I felt back when I was a kid? At these old-people songs that are played at Ashkenazi weddings to make old people happy?

But at the first sounds of Tumbalalaika I started freaking crying.

Maybe it reminded me of my dad I don't know. But also because there is something incredibly positive in these songs that I couldn’t quite say at first what it was.

Oh my god turns it’s a love song. It turns out that those people didn’t just sing about being sad and about their longing and their Jewishness. They sang about falling in love, they sang about the weather, they sang about food and walking under the rain and all that.

It sounds dumb to say that because of course I knew it, but knowing it is not the same as witnessing it.

But also there is something else in those songs that I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps I project too much (we always do) but when I listen to these songs now, I imagine people who were “othered”, discriminated against, driven from one place to another, generation after generation, but still kept singing about everyday things, and kept hoping that one day — one day — things will be better. These people had hope.

Hope that I sometimes struggle to feel these days.

My great-grandparents did speak Yiddish but not with their daughter (my grandmother), I don’t know why

1. Don’t kid yourself. Music school was not why you didn’t go play outside 🙄

2. Zhopa isn’t a very polite word indeed but Russian has so many actual heavy swear words, that this one is pretty innocent in comparison.