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 youngabout 18I 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 Friedmanmade up of some 200 young graduates of the
shuln and counselors at Camp KinderlandI 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 andwhat was worseas
the language of instruction in history and cultural classes, including Yiddish
literature in English translation.
It is, of course, a tribute to my mekhutnmy soon-to-be father-in-lawthat
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 thoughtnot 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 languageinto 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
truebut 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 Yiddishand 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 kitchenor for keeping parental secretsbut
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 yeardue to
their amazing birthratethe 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 themand to a new concept of Jewish identityin 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. Katzand weneed 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 koydishthe Holy Tongue-but
loshn ha'kidoyshimthe 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.