Back

Outlook

The following is the acceptance speech given on the occasion of receiving the Yiddishkayt Award of the Southern California Arbeter Ring/Workmen's Circle on Nsovember 7, 2004, in Los Angeles.

When I was what is now considered very young—about 18—I attended a conference of the Yiddish children's schools-shuln-of the Jewish People's Fraternal Order of the International Workers Order. (And the fact that I can bring that up here is an indication of how long ago that was.)1 One of the main issues at that conference was the role of English in the nominally still Yiddish-teaching shuln. One of the most adamant defenders of the purity of Yiddish instruction was my fiancé's father, Khayim Shteyn (Hyman Stein), an activist in the Bronx and, later, here in Los Angeles. As a representative of the bilingual Club Friedman—made up of some 200 young graduates of the shuln and counselors at Camp Kinderland—I took the view that, since the children in the shuln no longer came from Yiddish-speaking homes, it was essential that English be used as a tool in teaching Yiddish and—what was worse—as the language of instruction in history and cultural classes, including Yiddish literature in English translation.

It is, of course, a tribute to my mekhutn—my soon-to-be father-in-law–that our disagreement on such a vital issue hot nit geshtert tsum shidekh-didn't put an end to my engagement and eventual marriage to May, who would have loved this event.

I bring all this up because that same conference heard an address by the late Morris Schappes, then editor of Jewish Life magazine, which became Jewish Currents, with which the Arbeter Ring has just established an interesting relationship (if you'll forgive me for hopping back and forth over the decades). At any rate, Morris spoke for several minutes on the importance of secular Jewish education, and then switched to Yiddish for a single sentence. But that sentence was greeted by, as we said in those days, stormy applause and cheers. Morris glared at the audience and said something to the effect of: "Why are you cheering the way in which I expressed a thought—not the thought itself? Which is more important: the Yiddish words, or what the words mean?"

Those words had a profound effect on me.

All of this is an introduction to presenting my approach to the mother tongue. My approach is both simple and clear. For me, Yiddish is the language that embodies the very soul of Secular Jewishness. Yiddish is the treasure or, more accurately, the treasure chest that contains the values, the thoughts and the history of Secular Jewishness. The very foundation of Secular Jewishness is the Yiddish language and its culture. Therefore, my main responsibility is and has been to bring the riches of Yiddish to the English-speaking world. I consider that to be my purpose and my responsibility. Certainly it is important that Yiddish be studied and learned as a language. But I am aware that I lack the talent and skill to be a language teacher. I am a translator. And there are thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of Yiddish poems and songs, many, many hundreds of thousands of Yiddish articles and essays that wait, that implore us to translate them into the current universal language—into English. So that's what I do. Sometimes, I translate from a Yiddish text. More often, however, I translate into English the thoughts and concepts, the thought-processes that are my inheritance from my parents, my teachers, and from the pages with the little square letters that I peruse from time to time.

It is said by many nowadays that Yiddish is dead, and that may be essentially true—but they are wrong when they say that Yiddish died. It was, in large part, murdered and, to an extent, it committed suicide. The most brutal murder, of course, was committed in the ghettos and gas chambers of Nazism, which virtually wiped out the Yiddish-speaking, Yiddish-living population of Europe. A second act of murder was committed by Josef Stalin and his cohorts, who exterminated Yiddish writers and teachers in the cellars of the Lyubyanka prison and in the gulag. A more subtle form of extermination took place in the West and, sorrowfully, in the Middle East. In the 19th century, the Czarist regime banned Yiddish theatre in its empire. In the 20th century, the public use of Yiddish in any form was banned in the yishuv, the Jewish settlement in Palestine. And on these sun-kissed shores, both the Anglo-Saxon Establishment and the Jewish Establishment declared that using Yiddish was an insurmountable bar to the achievement of the American Dream. And it appears that they were right. Can anyone imagine a third-generation, Yiddish-speaking American Jew as a member of the cabal we now know as the "neocons"? (Since those words were spoken, the author has become aware of gratuitous and shrill support by a Montreal-born academic whose field is Yiddish—and who has made a new career of declaring Yiddish "dead"—for the U.S. President's policy of preemptive war and the president of Harvard's blatant sexist remarks. It seems that Yiddish is not such an effective protection against neoconservatism after all. Oy!—H.H.)

But, sadly, Yiddish also committed suicide, in a sense. The conventional wisdom among the most devoted supporters and creators of Yiddish culture in this country was that Yiddish literature cannot and must not be translated into English. The reasoning was that, if Yiddish literature were available in English, there would be no need nor desire to learn and use Yiddish. What they failed to realize, of course, was that if the literature of Yiddish were exposed to that first generation of Yiddish-understanding young people, they would discover that it was not merely a language for the kitchen—or for keeping parental secrets—but something that could help to feed their hunger for modern ideas and values, and that they would then actually answer their parents in the same language in which they were being spoken to, and read the books and newspapers lying about the house. The brighter and more ambitious among them might have included their parents' language and their cultural riches in the satchels and briefcases they carried away from the Lower East Side, from Brownsville, from Boyle Heights.

All that said, what do I see as the future of Yiddish? Some of us here heard a lecture this week by Dovid Katz, the son of one of my teachers. Professor Katz has just published a very useful book on the history of Yiddish that will enlighten many people.2 He ends his book with a look forward into the 21st century, and concludes that the future of Yiddish will endure in the daily speech and publications of the khsidishe yidn, the Hasidic Jews. After all, in Israel the Satmar khsidim speak only Yiddish. Here and in Europe, they and their children speak mostly Yiddish. What's more, Katz quotes the extremely dubious population projection that, at an average increase of five percent per year—due to their amazing birthrate—the 250,000 Hasidic Jews in the United States today will grow to between eight and ten million by 2075! It's a dubious projection because it fails to consider the uncounted but potentially large defection from Hasidism of many, many in those huge broods of children.

Prof. Katz sees hope in the fact that the Secular Yiddish writers of the past two centuries came out of homes and a milieu of Orthodoxy and khsides [Hasidism]. He guesses that some 21st-century khsidim will similarly turn to Secular Yiddish. I'm afraid he overlooks the fact that, when Mendele and Perets and their colleagues and literary descendants rejected Orthodoxy, they were unable to turn to the surrounding, inhospitable world if they wanted to retain their Jewishness in a Secular manner. The ghetto walls of the 19th and early 20th centuries are gone. Young khsidim who opt for modernity know well enough that it is available to them—and to a new concept of Jewish identity—in the larger society and in the English language. Turning to Yiddish to express their Secular ideas would only isolate them still more.

So then, whither Yiddish? Prof. Katz—and we—need look no further than his own surroundings: in the universities, in academe. Hebrew as a spoken language did not exist for 2,000 years. It was preserved, however, in the orin koydish-the Holy Ark, from which it was taken one day a week and spoken aloud. It was the Holy Tongue, loshn koydish. For all other purposes of life, Jews in various parts of the world created other languages; in Central and Eastern Europe, that was Yiddish.

Now, the language of modern Israel is ivrit [Hebrew]. It is the language of daily life. As I've said many times, it is the language in which a pickpocket distracts his mark, in which the cop arrests the miscreant, in which the judge sentences him and in which the jailer harrasses him. In Israel, and to a growing extent in this country, Yiddish has become not loshn koydish—the Holy Tongue-but loshn ha'kidoyshim—the Martyrs' Tongue. It is being preserved, not in the Holy Ark, but in universities from Vilnius to Melbourne, not forgetting Harvard, Yale, New Mexico, and a campus near us.

How long will Yiddish endure in that new ark of academe? I can't attempt to predict, but I can dream that when our great-grandchildren will come to live in a truly multicultural society, they will begin to search for their own roots. They will get a clue from translated Yiddish literatures, and when they search a little farther, they will discover the treasure trove in the university, waiting for them.

And, like the true mameloshn that it is, Yiddish will embrace them lovingly and declare: I have waited for you for so long, but it was worth the wait.

Finally, I want to share with you a poem I recently found on the internet that echoes my own beliefs.

When a Language Dies

Miguel Leon Portilla
(Translator typically not credited)

Divine things,
the stars, sun and moon;
Human things,
thinking, feeling,
No longer are reflected
In that mirror.
When a language dies,
Every thing there is in the world,
Seas and rivers,
Animals and plants,
Neither are thought nor pronounced
With sights and sounds
Which no longer exist.

Then for all the peoples of the world
A window closes,
A door,
A fleeting glance
In a different way
At things divine and things human,
At what it is to be, and be alive in the world.
When a language dies,
Its words of love,
Its sounds of sadness, of homesickness,
Perhaps old songs,
Stories, speeches, prayers,
None of those which were,
shall obtain a repetition.

When a language dies,
Then much has died,
And much can die.
Mirrors shattered forever,
The shadow of voices
Stilled forever.
Humanity becomes poor.

Let us resolve not to further impoverish humanity.


1 This refers to the unpleasant history between the Jewish-American Section of the International Workers Order (later, Jewish People's Fraternal Order) and the Arbeter Ring. The author attended the shuln of the latter. - H.H.

2 Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Basic Books, 2004.

Back