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City Paper

THE VILNA MENTSH

by Darius James Ross

Dovid Katz, scion of a Jewish family with deep roots in Lithuania, has one abiding passion in life: preventing his mother tongue–Yiddish–from being forgotten as its last speakers, a few thousand Holocaust survivors, die out.

The 49 year-old Brooklyn-born scholar, one of the founders of Yiddish Studies at Oxford, is the spiritus movens behind Vilnius University's one-of-a-kind Yiddish Institute, which brings scholars to Lithuania and trains local experts to study and teach the language in what Katz calls the "heartland of the pre-war natural territory of Yiddish."

"We're not about Yiddish, we're in Yiddish," he says emphatically. Katz is known in Vilnius as an irrepressibly joyful man. He stands out with his long beard and hair–which lend him the countenance of an Old Testament prophet–set atop his customarily baggy suits. He is often seen ambling along the streets of Old Town, lost in thought, swinging his heavily-laden lawyer's briefcase as he walks.

"We're training masters to learn the language the long, slow, hard way to become tomorrow's teachers. We have no illusions, but we have a feeling we're making a little dent, and we do have a certain historic mission to keep alive small modest islands of secular Yiddish."

Yiddish, Katz explains, has a long history in Lithuania, arriving in the days of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (which encompassed an area much wider than the present-day state) during the late Middle Ages, with Jewish immigrants who found refuge from religious persecution in the patchwork of medieval Germanic states, and who had answered the Grand Dukes' calls for settlers and promises of land rights and protection.
The language is a fusion of Germanic, Hebrew and Aramaic, with some Slavic elements, and is written using the Hebrew script.

Why keep Yiddish going? And why, of all places, in a country that saw nearly all of its Jewish population, most of whom spoke Yiddish, massacred in the 1940s? Katz, who has argued his case forcefully in Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (Basic Books: New York, 2004) says the world shouldn't forsake a language with a 1000-year history that is rich in subtle humor, satire, irony and a literature that competes with the best of other cultures, and that was the vernacular of European Jews for several centuries. His father, acclaimed Yiddish and English-language poet Menke Katz, emigrated to the U.S. prior to World War II. He raised his son exclusively in Yiddish, imprinting on him a love for the language as it faced a steep decline, being replaced by American English as Jewish émigrés assimilated and by Modern Hebrew in Israel.

"There are some Jewish people in the West who resent us being here. Period. They think of Israeli Hebrew as the only legitimate Jewish language for the future," says Katz. "Our attitude is to try to escape polemics by simply saying we are here only for those who want to study and learn the language."

To Katz's great astonishment–he expected to find nothing remaining of Lithuania's Jewish past–his first visit in 1990 yielded a linguist's greatest prize: remnants of the language's taproot in the form of scattered pockets of octogenarian and nonagenarian Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews) living in tiny communities in Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus, and still speaking dialects of Yiddish.

"Our significant treasure is the older speakers of Yiddish with all its pre-war wealth, their memories, and what they can show us of their historic homes. These are people who speak a kind of Yiddish that would not be possible in the West for a host of sociological reasons."

The institute has found a home in the History of Culture department of Vilnius University, for which, during the academic year, it provides courses on everything from Ashkenazic (i.e. Central and East European) Jewish civilization, to Yiddish culture, language and folklore, mostly for local Lithuanian students interested in the country's Jewish minority heritage.

"If a young Lithuanian student walks through that door to take my course, it means he or she has a damn serious interest in it. On an academic level, we are completely color-blind, gender-blind and religion-blind. We just want good students."

Some, Katz says brimming with pride, have gone on to earn doctorates in the field at foreign universities, including Sarunas Liekis, the institute's director, who studied at Brandeis University.

"To understand the literature, you need to see the habitat, the architecture, the forests, the surroundings. You need to see a shtetl [little town] and what the wooden houses would have looked like, everything that was described in the great works of Yiddish literature."
The institute's main financial backers are a closely-knit group of Yiddish enthusiasts from around the world, headed by a Santa Monica-based descendant of the famous Vilna Gaon [Genius of Vilnius], Rabbi Eliyahu, a great eighteenth century Talmudic sage, who remains a towering figure among Jewish religious scholars.

Katz has written a massive tome entitled Lithuanian Jewish Culture (Baltos lankos: Vilnius, 2004) covers a gamut of topics in Lithuanian Jewish history and lore. He stated that the Gaon, who relegated all earthly things to be alone with his books, wrote many brilliant treatises on the Kabbalah. The ancient Jewish mystical tradition has become all the rage in certain Hollywood quarters thanks to spin by pop stars such as Madonna and Britney Spears. Katz has toyed with the idea of translating some of the great texts by Lithuanian Kabbalah scholars, but winces at the amount of time the task would consume. Asked what view the great sage Eliyahu might take of the contemporary Kabbalah-for-dummies approach to mysticism, Katz pulls no punches: "Furious. He would be furious about it, that it's being misrepresented and sold as a method to achieve."

And what is the motivation of modern students of Yiddish, those who enroll in Katz's courses? "I've never asked a student why he or she wants to study Yiddish," says Katz. "I mean the wife, friends, girlfriend are all wondering why, so the last thing they need to hear is the teacher ask them why they want to learn Yiddish when they walk into class. If you're here, you're here."

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