Cahan, 48, grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium, and is determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state, where he has lived for the past 30 years. He’s the first to concede he is not the best administrator: He owes roughly $40,000 to city hall for overdue property taxes, he smokes Camel cigarettes inside his library of 40,000 old books, and his meager budget provides the collection with no protection from Tel Aviv’s oppressive summer humidity.

But Cahan, who speaks Hebrew and English as well, also bears a quixotic passion for fully living in the half-dead language he loves. In summer he teaches Yiddish and performs musicals in his native tongue in Lithuania and Poland. He is also the lead singer in the band Mendy Cahan & Der Yiddish Express. On their 2005 album Yiddish Fever he sings translations of “Summertime” and “Fever,” along with other Yiddish classics and his own compositions. He whispers, sighs, and languorously wanders through the words, evoking the full range of emotion in a language often confined to old folk songs.

“After having paved the way through hundreds of years to build Jewish identity, finally we build our homeland,” he told me in English. “I find it unacceptable and wrong if Yiddish would not find its respectful, loving space.”

***

The first time I met Cahan, he was declaiming a poem by I.L. Peretz for a Russian television segment, which happened to be filming at the height of the summer’s protests in Tel Aviv. “Man!” he shouted in Yiddish, while piano accompanist Amnon Fischer read out the Hebrew translation. “Do not think life is a saloon, where everyone can push his way forward with his shoulders and eat and drink while others are watching from afar with glassy eyes and empty stomachs.”

Cahan’s receding mane of gray hair matched his bushy gray eyebrows and piercing blue eyes as he paced the stage. Behind him was a wall of books, the duplicates of works in Yiddish that he did not have the heart to throw away. At the other end of the library was a plastic pool with “a few fishelach,” as he called the fish he had brought to lighten the dusty mood. Three chairs stood together near the stage, their backs each sewn in the images of the greats of Yiddish literature: the gray-bearded Mendele Mocher Sforim, the redhead Sholom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, with a black tuft of hair to match his thick moustache. “We are friends, the books and I,” Cahan said. “I think they are in a better place than in a paper mill.”

A walking monument to gathering scattered pieces of a whole, Cahan wore a brown vest whose pockets bulged with two passports, four notebooks, a wallet, a yellow box of cigarettes, a city tax bill, vitamins, reading glasses, a USB drive, a mobile flip phone, tissues, a crumpled 20-shekel note, a lighter, and keys. Cahan said that when he immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 1980, he was surprised to see how sidelined his native tongue had become there.

“Many people spoke Yiddish,” Cahan said of the Israel he encountered. “They would read and meet in clubs, but it seemed as if it wasn’t a part of the whole Israeli experience.” In 1990, he started collecting books. At first, Cahan housed his collection in a dilapidated building in an industrial zone in Jerusalem. He then opened a second library in Tel Aviv. He named the organization overseeing the two libraries “Yung YiDish” in an effort to expand the Yiddish circle beyond the elderly. Yung YiDish is one of several Tel Aviv institutions—some 80 years old, and some open less than a decade—that are doing what they can to revive and preserve the tongue that once united the Jews of Eastern Europe, by teaching the language, offering theater, and printing books.

Cahan said it costs $150,000 to $200,000 to properly run Yung YiDish, but private donors provide only half of that. For the rest, he lives by the seat of his pants, begging city hall for a break on his taxes and meeting with the Ministry of Culture to ask for government funding. Cahan spreads word of his center while teaching in Eastern Europe and performing in cities around the world with significant Jewish populations. He dreams of holding Yiddish-cuisine cooking lessons. And he hopes to eventually sponsor translations of Yiddish classics into English, French, and Chinese and continue to promote Yiddish music and film. “Yiddish is more than just the shtetl,” he said.

***

Yiddish, an amalgam of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters, was once the main Jewish dialect in Eastern Europe. But in Israel it was seen as the prime competition to the revival of Hebrew, according to Avraham Novershtern, the director of the Beth Shalom Aleichem Yiddish cultural center in Tel Aviv. “There was a conscious decision which began in early 20th century that Hebrew would be the language of the new state, and in that decision, there was violence against Yiddish,” said Novershtern. He described incidents of kiosks being burnt for selling Yiddish papers. In the 1930s and ’40s, Yiddish movies were sometimes kept from screens. Fights broke out on the streets over the public use of Yiddish.

Continue reading: Israel’s cosmopolitan heart

Stark’s death, at 62, interrupted an encore performance in a Jewish career that began in the 1970s, when as a Brandeis University graduate student he worked summers at the Kallah youth camp run by the B’nai B’rith youth wing, now known as BBYO. He went on to teach at Schechter—always Tanakh, colleagues said, and always in the middle-school grades—and then, in the 1990s, traveled to the countries of the former Soviet Union to run Jewish outreach programs. Over the years, Stark, who never married and had no children, mentored hundreds, if not thousands, of young people, many of whom are now rabbis, teachers, or professionals in their thirties and forties working for major Jewish institutions across the country—people who have infused contemporary Jewish life with the legacy of Stark’s lessons.

Meanwhile, Stark’s death has turned what was meant to bridge generations of Jewish students at Boston’s Schechter school into a moment for those he influenced to gather in mourning. Tonight, many will return to their alma mater for a memorial service, capping a week of informal outpourings on Facebook, where many had reconnected with their old teacher, and in long email chains recounting Stark’s love of jokes and puns.

“He would ask us what the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet was—tough,” wrote Josh Blumenthal, a Schechter student who went on to work in Jewish education. “Twenty-eight years later, I can still recite tzedek, tzedek, tirdof.”

Stark, who wasn’t religious, came to Jewish teaching through his love of language and performance. “He was a zealot for Jewish learning and ideas, the arts, and Jewish peoplehood,” said Stark’s cousin, Scott Lasensky, also a former BBYO camper who now works for the United States mission to the United Nations. “He didn’t see them as any different, because he came from a family where love of the arts, Tanakh, and the stage were interwoven.”

Stark grew up in Freehold, N.J., and went to high school with Bruce Springsteen. At home, Stark spoke Yiddish with his father, Sidney, who was born in Estonia and came to the United States as a teenager in 1924, and his mother, Ida, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up speaking Yiddish with her Belarussian parents as a girl in Sioux City, Iowa. As a child in the 1960s, Stark attended the Kallah youth camps, where future luminaries like Elie Wiesel were featured as speaking guests years before they became famous. He became a staff member in the 1970s while pursuing his doctorate in biblical texts and ancient Semitic languages at Brandeis University and eventually became director of the BBYO summer youth programs, from 1984 to 1989, while teaching during the year at Schechter.

“It was a real dream come true for Peter,” said Robin Minkoff, who worked for Stark at the camp. “He was very romantic about the founding of Kallah and wanted the teens coming through in the 1980s to have the same experience the kids coming through in the ‘60s had.” That meant inviting guests like Aaron Lansky, who went on to win a MacArthur genius grant for his work preserving Yiddish books, and Marvin Tokayer, a rabbi and scholar who preserved the history of Jewish refugees in Asia. “Peter was a real Renaissance man, knowledgeable about every subject you could imagine, and I think he wanted us to be also,” said Marc Blattner, a former camper who is now the executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. “He taught teenagers about the global Jewish world and what people were doing, to say, ‘Don’t think your bubble is the world, it’s larger than that and you need to connect to it.’ ”

Others recalled Stark—who acted in or directed more than three dozen light-opera productions with local companies over the years—making his charges act out scenes from the texts they were learning. “He thought we needed to understand what it felt like,” said Nadine Greenfield-Binstock, who now works for the American Jewish Committee in Washington.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stark began traveling across Eastern Europe for B’nai B’rith and other Jewish organizations to run outreach programs in cities like Vilna, Riga, and Birobidzhan. He left Schechter in 1992 to become principal of the Hebrew High program in Worcester and began taking students on annual trips to Lithuania, where he put on day camps modeled on those he had run for American teenagers. “He felt he’d tackled the Jewish youth in America and wanted to do what he could to help Jewish kids elsewhere,” Blattner said.

“He had no kids, and still he had so many kids,” said another former student, Ilya Fuchs.
Fuchs, a Soviet émigré who is now a lawyer in Boston, was among those who encouraged Stark to return to teaching last year, after a decade-long hiatus working as an Internet consultant and caring for his ailing parents in New Jersey.

In recent years, Stark was in ill health, overweight and suffering with a bad back, and initially he resisted. “Then out of the blue he says, ‘Write me a recommendation,’ ” Fuchs said. “He wrote me a recommendation for high school, a recommendation for college, and a recommendation for law school, so last month I wound up writing him a recommendation to get back into teaching.”

The head of the Schechter school, Arnold Zar-Kessler, quickly welcomed Stark back to his old position, initially filling in for another teacher who is on sabbatical. Zar-Kessler, whose own daughter was among Stark’s pupils in the 1980s, said he wanted the school’s current students, some of them the children of people Stark had once taught, to experience Stark’s teaching style—one that balanced intellectual rigor with delight in the subject matter. “He never lost his curiosity, and he was successful with the brightest kids, the ones who reach adolescence and get disenchanted with the texts,” Zar-Kessler told me. “His first class was to have been the next day, and the irony is painful.”

• The International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran are warily considering the former visiting the latter. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• According to the comptroller, Israel lacks the sufficient number of bomb shelters and is generally unprepared for war on the civilian front. [NYT]

• The value of Iranian currency has been in free fall over the past few days due to uncertainty and fears of sanctions. [AP/WP]

• Due to Israeli efforts, the Jordan River may once again flow rather than just quietly babble. [AP/WP]

• Yiddish is the hot new class on several college campuses. [AP/WSJ]

Basya Schechter invites Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry into her home in downtown Manhattan to talk about the connections between Heschel’s little-known poetry and his later works, and about her own journey from yeshiva girl to widely acclaimed singer-songwriter. [Running time: 24:06.]

Dude. “Fakarkte,” corruption of verkakte. You represent a tony part of San Francisco; your father was mayor of Baltimore. Come on.

Do we think this is as bad as Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s mangling of “chutzpah”?

(8:30 mark)

Such dire comparisons are not unusual for Hasidim. As in other fundamentalist communities, everything is understood to be powerfully meaningful within a single, comprehensive worldview. Renting apartments to artistn, like watching television or buying a “trayf” cellphone—that is, one that takes pictures or accesses the web, thereby offending Hasidic standards of modest conduct—has the potential to undermine the sacred mission of an entire Hasidic community and, therefore, of the Jewish people as a whole.

Some Hasidim also understand Sept. 11 as an occasion for miracles. In 2002, a Skvirer Hasid published a Yiddish book on the attacks, recounting cases of people who, thanks to supernal intervention, missed their plane or left late for work and so escaped the destruction. The book’s title, Himl Signaln, or “heavenly signals” in English, is telling in its ambivalence. Were these attacks terrorist messages that came from the sky—one possible meaning of himl—or were they divinely ordained signs from on high?

Here, the two possibilities are one and the same, the former guided by the latter. Therefore, to cite but one example from the book, a devout, God-fearing Jew who worked in the twin towers survived the attack on Sept. 11 because he had a doctor’s appointment that morning—not by happenstance but by a miraculous intervention that affirmed his piety.

Many Americans found their faith—in religion, in government, in humankind—shaken, or at the very least troubled, by the events of Sept. 11. American Jews were alarmed at anti-Semitic responses to the attacks, including malicious rumors that Jews “knew” to stay away from the World Trade Center on that fateful day. The Hasidic response to Sept. 11 appears to be quite different: The attacks did not cause them to question their faith in God, nor did defamatory conspiracy theories disturb their embrace of Jewish chosenness. Sept. 11 may have altered the convictions of many people, in some cases radically. But for others, including these Hasidim, it reinforced strongly held beliefs, becoming for them a case study in divine authority and a metaphor for urban destruction.

The remembrance of Sept. 11 in this one Jewish community offers an object lesson in both the power and the limits of catastrophe as a shared experience. The terrorist attacks galvanized people around the world, riveted by the horrifying images that swiftly circulated through the mass media. The global outpouring of sympathy for New Yorkers was extraordinary. But it did not take long for Sept. 11 to become a divisive subject, whether locally, nationally, or worldwide, as debates proliferated: what its causes were, who was at fault, how it should be responded to, how it should be remembered.

The 10th anniversary of the attacks may well seem an appropriate time for Americans to come together as a nation, especially in a period that is so politically riven. At the same time, it is worth remembering that even events of the enormity of Sept. 11 do not change everything, though at first it may seem as though they do. Rather, they erupt in the midst of busy lives, each going about its busy-ness with a different sense of purpose. Catastrophes evoke an intense desire to restore life to its former business, to reassert its sense of purpose. Those whose lives rest on firm foundations of faith, like these Hasidim, are most likely to reaffirm their convictions. Those who are by nature skeptical find that they have that much more to question.

The feeling, of course, is largely a function of language. Yiddish may be the most onomatopoeic language ever created. Everything sounds exactly the way it should: macher for a self-appointed big shot, shlmiel for the fellow who spills the soup and shlmazel for the poor guy who gets the soup spilled on him, putz for an active louse, shmuck for a hapless one (as in “poor shmuck”), shnorer for a freeloader, nudnick for a pest. The expressiveness is bound into the language, and so is a kind of ruthless honesty. There is no decorousness in Yiddish, nor much romance. It is raw, egalitarian, vernacular.

That is why, even though there was, as Harvey Pekar makes clear in these pages, a vibrant Yiddish literature, the whole idea of a literature may have been inimical to the very spirit of Yiddish. Sentiment, sensationalism, and formula—all of these were natural to a language that was focused on the here and now rather than on airy philosophical discourse, on the forcefulness of expression rather than on nuances, on brutal truthfulness rather than on fine emotions. Yiddish is a blunt instrument. That is its real charm, not the phony whimsy that Pekar so detests in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, perhaps the most famous Yiddish writer.

Instead of great works, the language’s primary legacy is not only the Yiddishisms sprinkled into English for flavor or the subversive candor that impregnated American entertainment through Jewish comics but also the very democracy of Yiddish—its stubborn plebeian pride. Yiddishkeit seems to luxuriate in its own lack of elegance and its own marginalization, which is why a book of comics art, another outsider form, seems especially appropriate to describe it and why a wry shlump like Pekar seems an especially apt coauthor.

Yiddishkeit is abrasive. It is an attitude of challenge just as Yiddish is a language of challenge. As this book amply demonstrates, Yiddish artists were always attacking the status quo, and it is certainly no coincidence that many of these Yiddish artists, not to mention many grassroots Yiddishers, were political leftists. By the same token, the artistic and political Jewish establishments were afraid of Yiddish—afraid of the way it seemed to bulldoze right over politesse. Even the state of Israel reviled Yiddish, ostensibly for fear it would override Hebrew, and, as you will read, there were times when Israel outlawed the Yiddish theater. In effect, though, the real fear of Yiddishkeit was that it was too Jewish, too insular, too much an expression of the loud, wild, lively Jewish hoi polloi whom high-born Jews found so offensive. Who could imagine a state where the citizens spoke Yiddish?

Now that Jews have been largely assimilated into America, Yiddishkeit may seem both anachronistic and nostalgic here. Many Jews of my generation will no doubt remember, as I do, their grandparents speaking Yiddish when they didn’t want the children to know what they were talking about. As the European-born and then the first American-born generations passed, they seemed to take Yiddish with them. And yet Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely, not because there are individuals dedicated to its survival, though there are, but because Yiddishkeit is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.

Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is an author, cultural historian, and film critic. This is excerpted from Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land, edited by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, published by Abrams ComicArts. Introduction copyright © Neal Gabler, 2011. Illustrations copyright © their respective creators, 2011. Reprinted by permission.

Haimish: Tennis.
Not haimish: Golf.

Haimish: The Upper West Side.
Not haimish: The Upper East Side.

Haimish: A good internist.
Not haimish: A good specialist.

Haimish: Gin.
Not haimish: Poker.

Haimish: Catholics.
Not haimish: Protestants.

Haimish: Sending your kids to summer camp.
Not haimish: Letting your kids have TVs in their rooms.

Haimish: Italy.
Not haimish: France.

Haimish: French.
Not haimish: German.

Haimish: Post-its.
Not haimish: Stationery.

Haimish: Wine.
Not haimish: Liquor.

Haimish: Bill Clinton.
Not haimish: Barack Obama.

Haimish: The Chicago Cubs.
Not haimish: The New York Yankees.

Haimish: Navy blue.
Not haimish: Teal.

Haimish: Club Med.
Not haimish: The Bahamas.

Haimish: Commentary.
Not haimish: The Weekly Standard.

Haimish: Decaf.
Not haimish: Regular.

Haimish: Tom Hanks.
Not haimish: Richard Gere.

Haimish: Backpacks.
Not haimish: Briefcases.

Haimish: Law and Order.
Not haimish: The Wire.

Haimish: The Catskills.
Not haimish: The Hamptons.

Haimish: Re-using tea bags.
Not haimish: Not re-using tea bags.

Haimish: New Jersey.
Not haimish: Connecticut.

Haimish: iPhones.
Not haimish: Macs.

Haimish: San Francisco.
Not haimish: L.A.

Haimish: The Harry Potter books.
Not haimish: The Harry Potter movies.

Haimish: The New York Times.
Not haimish: The Wall Street Journal.

The Haimish Line [NYT]

Today we celebrate Dovid Bergelson, who was born on this date in 1884 and executed on the very same day 68 years later. The confident writer, who at 23 tracked down I.L. Peretz in Warsaw (from Kiev!) and wowed him with his literary tales of shtetl life, embraced the Yiddish language and used it to skillfully describe the multitude of changes facing Jews in the Pale of Settlement. When the English translation of Shadows of Berlin, a collection of Bergelson’s short stories, was published in 2005, Boris Fishman declared it a “distinctly cerebral pleasure.”

Reflective of the disconnect Bergelson felt living in the vibrant yet isolating metropolis, the stories emphasize the similar tensions between old and new, familiar and foreign that Bergelson’s work had come to embody. “This atrophy was the lifeblood of Bergelson’s fiction. He portrayed it like no Yiddish writer before him,” Fishman wrote. “His language was Yiddish, but his style was Russian. Like the nouveau riche Jews of the period, their social climbing arrested by the new repression, Bergelson looked beyond rather than within; his writing recalled Tolstoy’s plotting, Chekhov’s introspection, and Andrei Bely’s Symbolist experiments of perspective. The result was a modernist style informed by an anxiety about the degeneration of the familiar world.”

Unfortunately, the very pessimism and critical apprehension of change that informed Bergelson’s work would ultimately presage, eerily so, his untimely death. Though he lived peacefully and prolifically upon his 1934 return to the Soviet Union, Bergelson was among the dozen Yiddishists arrested in January 1949 and shot dead on his birthday in 1952.

Read Back from the Shadows, by Boris Fishman

Is this the exasperated Yiddish word’s first appearance at the highest court in the land? It is not, and close court-watchers could actually guess which justice was the first to use it. It’s not Brandeis or Ginsburg or any of the Supreme Court’s other eight Jewish justices past and present. Rather, the feisty, Queens-born, extremely Catholic Antonin Scalia first deployed “chutzpah” in 1998, and in much the same way that Kagan did: “It takes a particularly high degree of chutzpah for the [National Endowment for Arts] to contradict this proposition,” he complained, “since the agency itself discriminates—and is required by law to discriminate—in favor of artistic (as opposed to scientific, or political, or theological) expression.” In both cases, “chutzpah” is negative; more precisely, it is a specific form of hypocrisy.

Yet, as Jack Achiezer Guggenheim quoted a New Jersey federal court soon after Scalia’s c-bomb in a fabulous article on the intersection of U.S. law and Yiddish, “Legal chutzpah is not always undesirable, and without it our system of jurisprudence would suffer.” In other words, that Brown fellow who sued the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education certainly had chutzpah, too.

Strong Opinions [TNR]
The Supreme Chutzpah [Kentucky Law Journal/Jewish Law]

Yiddish isn’t dead; if anything, it’s undead. Think about it: Is there anything more unkillable, vaguely erotic, ridiculous, and toothy than the language of the Ashkenazim? In fact, a book published this spring—Sara Libby Robinson’s Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I (Academic Studies, March)—argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the single most recognizable undead gentleman in history, was, as Allan Nadler phrases it, a reflection of “widespread anxieties about the dangers posed by the flood (and the blood) of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Great Britain.”

***

Like Dracula, Yiddish may be a little pale (and allergic to crucifixes), but it’s not going anywhere: Witness Lily Kahn’s Colloquial Yiddish (Routledge, August). “Colloquial,” mind you, meaning: everyday, casual, informal, the kind of Yiddish you speak with your friends when you’re just hanging out at the mall. The book, by a University College London Ph.D. and language instructor, can be purchased with audio accompaniment on CD (talk about something that’s dead) or, more sensibly for the century we live in, as an MP3 download.

***

This spring also saw what seems to have been the first volume of Yiddish poetry to have been funded on Kickstarter: Zackary Sholem Berger’s bilingual זאָג כאָטש להבֿדיל /Not in the Same Breath (Yiddish House, May), a varied, clever collection that works equally well for those poor souls who speak only English as it does for yidish-reders. Berger, whose previous projects include translations of The Cat in the Hat and Curious George into Yiddish, knows a thing or two about breath: In his other, equally impressive career, as a doctor and medical researcher at Johns Hopkins, one of his published articles concerns the “Prevalence of workplace exacerbation of asthma symptoms in an urban working population of asthmatics.”

***

Even the Yiddish literary classics—a wonderful selection of which, edited by Ken Frieden, is now available as a paperback: Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz (Syracuse, September)—remain vigorous and open to new readings. Marc Caplan’s How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms (Stanford, September), for instance, demonstrates how European Yiddish literary texts by authors including Yisroel Aksenfeld, Isaac Meyer Dik, and Y. Y. Linetski resonate with and complement African English and French ones by the likes of Amos Tutuola, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, and Ahmadou Karouma. The comparison isn’t random: All these literatures were written by people with rich oral storytelling traditions who were subject to the whims of imperial regimes.

***

That even the most familiar brands of Yiddish—American, leftist, World of Our Fathers-ish—can be newly animated is the message of Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle’s Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land (Abrams, September), which renders chestnuts of Yiddish cultural history—Paul Robeson’s hotel room encounter with Itzik Feffer in Soviet Moscow; the controversy regarding Sholem Asch’s novels about Christ—in underground comix form. Among the book’s other contents are gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers by Dan Archer and the full text, with occasional illustrations, of “The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum.” It says something—it’s not clear what—that Pekar’s last project was a love letter to his mother tongue.

***

Yiddishkeit (vaguely: Jewishness) comes in a variety of forms, not just the socialist/Communist ones that Buhle (if not Pekar) heavily favors. An example of how Yiddish functioned in one American childhood appears in Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (Biblioasis, September), by the novelist, screenwriter, and raconteur Bruce Jay Friedman. “My father hit me just once,” Friedman recalls, “which is not a bad score for a Depression boy. The blow was sudden, unexpected. It knocked me halfway across the street. I’d used a slang word, putz, though I had no idea it meant penis.”

***

There is a danger, of course, of overemphasizing Yiddish to the exclusion of other languages spoken by Jewish communities; German-speaking Jews, for one example, tend not to be sufficiently recognized for their lasting contributions to American Jewish life. Attending to one of their achievements, Cornelia Wilhelm’s The Independent Orders of B’nai B’rith and True Sisters: Pioneers of a New Jewish Identity, 1843-1914 (Wayne State, July) examines how a German-Jewish fraternity founded in the middle of the 19th century anticipated and addressed many of the challenges that modern Jews have faced since then.

***

Or, for another case of a neglected language, take the dialect of the Jews of Northwest Persia, which “bears a close resemblance to that of the Urmi Syrians,” according to Arthur John Maclean’s 1895 handbook, now available as a print-on-demand title from Cambridge University Press (or, more sensibly, free from Google Books), called Grammar of the Dialects of the Vernacular Syriac (Cambridge, June). To illustrate the similarity, Maclean excerpts an Odessan’s translation of a couple of the Psalms into the Judeo-Azerbaijani vernacular. Where’s the indie comix anthology about that?

The Singers had been family friends since I was 10 years old, when my mother interviewed Isaac for an article in the Washington Post. He and I struck up a friendship, and subsequent invitations for tea and living-room chocolates in his apartment in Surfside in Miami Beach became one of the highlights of my Jewish education. I remember one afternoon in particular, when I brought along my Torah portion to rehearse for him and his wife, Alma. Isaac recited his own Torah portion along with mine—as if it were a Jewish opera or a call and response prayer. I remember being impressed that more than six decades after his own bar mitzvah, Isaac was able to recite every word from memory.

My mother and I regularly met Isaac at a drug store soda fountain in Surfside, for his favorite food—grits, which probably reminded him of kasha—while I had a grilled cheese and fries that he and I would share. “I think we merge with the life of the universe,” he once told me, during a conversation about life after death. “When a bubble bursts over the ocean, the water in the bubble falls back into the sea. It goes back to its source. It really does not disappear.”

Several years after Isaac has passed, I received a call from Alma—we both lived in Manhattan by then, she as a widow and me as a graduate student—asking for help. She needed someone to sort through all the clothes she still kept in their apartment at Broadway and 86th Street. As compensation, she offered to give me one of her husband’s typewriters—a gift of extraordinary meaning to an aspiring young writer who had learned so much about life at a young age from his books. What might it be like to roll Rodin’s sculpting tools in your hands, or to hold Marc Chagall’s surviving brushes over a blank canvas? Wouldn’t it be inspirational to play a few bars on Larry Adler’s favorite harmonica, or forcefully connect with a strong chord or passage on Rachmaninoff’s writing piano?

“There are three,” Alma said matter-of-factly of the typewriters. “One of them you can take with you after we’re done.”

It occurred to me that it might make more sense for her to donate them to a museum or a university library, but I knew I’d be an excellent caretaker. And admittedly, I hoped having Isaac’s typewriter in my modest apartment on West 113th Street might serve as a sort of talisman or magnet to draw some of the complicated, mysterious women he had written about so vividly in Enemies, A Love Story and The Magician of Lublin.

***

I passed through the massive gated archway on the Belnord’s south entrance and went up to her apartment. Alma came to the door slowly and didn’t smile as she greeted me. She was older than I had remembered, and her face seemed frozen in a frown of resignation and loneliness. A pang of guilt reminded me of the other reason I had volunteered for this assignment. I had walked past this enormous stone building on West 86th Street nearly every day on my way to what I still called “the 1/9” and had often seen Alma pulling a wire cart full of groceries and other sundries as I rushed to catch the subway. Had I not been habitually racing to wherever I needed to be in those days, I would have stopped to help, I reasoned.

But this Saturday would be different. I would be there for as long as Alma needed me. After an obligatory plate of prune pastry and marzipan, she explained that this was going to be a disposal operation, rather than a sorting-and-packing job or prep work for a charitable donation.

“You don’t want to save everything?” I asked, puzzled.

“I did save everything,” she replied flatly. “How much longer must I keep it?”

Several people had apparently made promises to stop by and cart off whatever she had left to various organizations, but they never arrived, and Alma had gotten tired of waiting; she wanted everything out.

“You can take whatever we don’t throw away,” she said.

She then beckoned me to follow her into a room that was already piled high with turquoise seersucker jackets, blue rubber tennis shoes, and old, worn straw hats. Ah, the straw hats with turquoise blue bands! They seemed a part of a blue-and-white uniform Isaac wore in his days of walking in the ocean breezes of Surfside. Could a man’s life be reduced to this? A stack of hats, a pile of socks, and some frayed undershirts?

“You should try this jacket,” Alma said, attempting to drape one of his seersuckers over my shoulders. Alma seemed to want to believe that his jackets would fit like the proverbial father’s hand-me-downs but, alas, it was at least two sizes too small. The jacket, along with everything else that didn’t fit—shoes, slacks, belts, and even his undershirts—went into the trash bags unsorted, in armful after armful for the garbage truck.

As I helped gather everything for the garbage collectors I thought about happier days with Isaac and Alma in their sunny Florida living room, where he and I would ponder the meaning of the universe, Spinoza’s teachings, and ghosts. But on this lonely Saturday afternoon in the New York present, there were no philosophical discussions of metaphysical reality. Only the sad and halting “yes” or a “no” in regard to what should stay and what should go among the remnants of a man who regaled millions with stories of Old World dybbuks, malevolent spirits, and often rakish protagonists visiting their complicated, passionate mistresses.

In that room a passage from The Cafeteria, one of Isaac’s short stories, came to me:

“I have been moving around in this neighborhood for over thirty years—as long as I lived in Poland,” he had written. “I know each block, each house. There has been little building here on uptown Broadway in the last decades, and I have the illusion of having put down roots here. I have spoken in most of the synagogues. They know me in some of the stores and in the vegetarian restaurants. Women with whom I have had affairs live on the side streets. Even the pigeons know me; the moment I come out with a bag of feed, they begin to fly toward me from blocks away.”

“What would they think of him now, reduced to a pile of undershirts?” I thought, as I glanced around the room for the typewriters.

As the afternoon wore on, I wondered if the belongings of someone whose work had been translated into so many languages and whose visage had been memorialized in enormous caricature on a wall of the Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street should be better preserved—or at least acknowledged with a prayer for such things. Was there a yizkor I could say after tying up the twist-tie on each bag?

Had his spirit been present in the room that day, Isaac might’ve simply shrugged. He had told me many times in my youth that “women are the only people who take life seriously. Men know it’s a joke.” The day’s purge was the wish of his widow, who had certainly earned the right to make such decisions. Alma had supported Isaac in the early days when they were first married by working as a salesgirl at Lord & Taylor while Isaac stayed home to write. She had also stayed with him over the years despite his detachment while writing and in defiance of his other romances. “Ours is a real marriage,” I remembered him once telling my mother.

Alma interrupted my reverie: “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Sure,” I said.

***

Several hours later, I finally stumbled across the typewriters in a closet. There was an old Royal with many of its keys mashed down and its teeth all jumbled and seemingly fused together. There was a second, white plastic manual typewriter that looked like it might be a starter toy or somebody’s idea of a “portable” device back in the 1970s. And finally, there was a beige IBM Selectric that used a center-strike ball.

Noticing my lingering fascination, Alma sighed heavily and told me that the typewriters had already been promised to others and that she was sorry she could not let me have one after all. I was unable to hide a twinge of surprise.

“Really?” I asked. “Not even the mangled old Royal with its snarled keys?”

I stared at the typewriters half-expecting them to emanate shafts of light and spiritual energy, like the lost Ark of the Covenant. Without possessing one of them, how would I ever be empowered by Isaac’s mystical literary powers and be energized with whatever charisma had made him such an intriguing figure to so many people?

But the situation itself was the prize—a turn of events straight out of one of Isaac’s own short stories: A young man, a writer even, is crushed to learn that some things are forever out of reach, that promising ventures often have disappointing outcomes, and that so many journeys that should lead on to fortune take the brave and fearless down winding roads to unhappy endings. I had wanted to take possession of a mystical object that would afford temporal (and possibly libidinous) benefits by mere ownership, but, at the end of the day, I saw much more clearly how our experiences and setbacks inform truly great works of art.

“I see,” I said, trailing. “No problem.”

What else could I say to the widow who had been through so much?

As I walked east along Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard toward Central Park, it occurred to me that I would have to seek out experiences to generate my own stories, buy my own seersucker jacket—one that fit—and be on the lookout for the mysterious women living along the side streets. I reflected also that, in any event, Isaac had actually composed many of his best fables and universal allegories while sitting on a couch, writing longhand in pencil.

Reed Martin is the author of The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn’t Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film and a former business case writer in the Global Research Group at Harvard Business School.

Clearly not a word she learned on the kibbutz. We look forward to her apologetic speel about how she has always shepped nachos from her strong knowledge of Yiddish-kike and that she considers herself and the Jewish people to be Mitch’s polka. (This was not just some pandering stick, in other words; what kind of a smock do you think she is?.) Furthermore, if the Republicans and Obama could only sit down together, smooze, and kibbutz, they’d get rid of this sore ass in no time.

Scattered across the predominantly Jewish neighborhoods of Flatbush, Borough Park, Crown Heights, and Williamsburg, the independent shomrim are ancient organizations trapped in a 21st-century game of tug of war. As a kind of shtetl police, the groups are devoted to protecting its streets, its secrets, and, ultimately, the Hasidim who share them. But as neighborhood watch groups, the shomrim must meet the legal and social demands of secular society. Caught in the middle are its patrol members—men by turns open and reserved, trusting and deeply paranoid. Despite a confluence of traditional indicators such as high unemployment and recession, national crime rates hover (puzzlingly) at their lowest in 40 years. Still, the shomrim continue to prove their unofficial value to the New York Police Department even as the relationship between the organizations can occasionally grow contentious. Just last week, the neighborhood watch in Crown Heights, also in Brooklyn, posted a complaint that they were victims of a targeted ticketing campaign, totaling over $3,000 in fines, by officers of the NYPD’s 71st Precinct. As New York plunges into another long, hot summer, the shomrim aren’t likely to cede much turf.

***

The word shomrim is derived from the Hebrew shomer, which means to guard, preserve, or protect. Founded in 1924 by Police Captain Jacob Kaminsky, the Shomrim Society of New York, like so many Jewish, social institutions of its time, was established to help preserve the group’s ethnic identity. According to its website, the organization was actually born of an anti-Semitic slur: Kaminsky was on patrol with a nightstick tucked under his arm when a city resident suggested he might feel more comfortable with a hunk of salami. By 1937, well over 400 salami-bearing officers were serving as shomrim across the city.

The Williamsburg Shomrim grew out of a purely Samaritan desire to do good for the local community, according to Pollack. The patrol started in 1977 when Moses Hoffman, a local rabbi, discovered a man lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. After alerting the police to the attack, Hoffman returned to his Williamsburg apartment and began devising a plan for a neighborhood watch—one he would establish in his synagogue the following morning. “At that time, the crime rate in this area was practically double what it is now,” Pollack says. “Hoffman’s idea was to help protect the community. That meant everyone—black, Hispanic, or Hasidic.”

Today, the Williamsburg Shomrim employs more than 60 volunteers, at least half of whom make themselves available 24 hours a day and seven days a week. While the law prohibits them from carrying firearms, they can make citizens’ arrests. More important, their constant communication with the New York Police Department helps deter would-be assailants and accelerate the apprehension of suspected criminals.

The daily routine of the shomrim patrol is at once thrilling and banal. On any given day, they may be called upon to tail a suspected burglar down a narrow side street or pry open a bathroom door for a nervous mother whose child has locked himself inside, identify a mugger at the local precinct, or provide a makeshift pest control to an apartment owner with a squirrel scampering about his living room. “It’s rare that someone will get called more than three or four times a week, but he has to be ready—and for anything,” Pollack says. (The “he” here is instructive; while women occasionally work out of their living rooms as dispatchers, they are not allowed to patrol for the shomrim because some—though not all—Hasidic rabbis believe it is inappropriate for women to drive cars.) All members are required to take turns “rolling” in a privately owned car, each of which is equipped with a two-way radio that allows them to communicate with fellow volunteers of the neighborhood watch as well as an operator at the 90th Precinct.

Over the past year, the organization has had no shortage of reasons to call in. On December 7, 2010, a local CBS News affiliate ran the report: “Cops: Hispanic Teens Beat Up Hasidic Jews ‘For Fun,’ ” after 44-year-old Moshe Guttman was assaulted returning home from a Hanukkah party in Williamsburg earlier that evening. Two weeks before, the same assailants left Joel Weinberger, a 26-year-old teacher and father of four, with a broken leg and a jaw that needed to be wired shut. At the time of the incident, family spokesman Isaac Abraham told reporters: “All his religious articles—his hat, his jacket, his fringes—were ripped apart. I’m not the best investigator in the world, but what do you think would lead to a bias crime?”

Pollack, who has been with the patrol since the branch’s birth and has lived in Williamsburg his entire life, offers a more measured response. “I’d be reluctant to get the bias unit involved unless I saw something really flagrant, like a swastika spray-painted on the walls of a school,” he says. “I won’t say that anti-Semitism has completely disappeared, but the neighborhood has changed. And that’s a good thing.” Pollack leans back in his chair and stretches his long, bony arms like a scarecrow. His grin speaks not only to his pride in the work of the shomrim but to the greater diversity of the community it’s been assigned to protect.

While the basic mission of the neighborhood watch has remained the same for the past 30 years, the ethnic make-up of the community it patrols continues to evolve. In 2000, more than 160,000 people lived in Brooklyn Community District 1, which consists of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. Of that number, about 40 percent identify as Hasidic Jewish. The vast majority of the Hasidic population belongs to the Satmar sect, an immigrant movement comprised almost entirely of Romanian and Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many have inherited a complicated relationship with authority. “The Shomrim has always served as a kind of liaison between the community and the police,” Pollack says. “The older generation is still afraid of police uniforms, and they pass this fear, phobia, whatever you want to call it, to their children. We have to explain that the NYPD is there to help.”

Almost by default, the Shomrim is an exclusive club: The Yiddish barrier all but guarantees that the organization is composed entirely of Hasidic Jewish men, and its elaborate screening process tries to ensure that only the most trusted and valued members of the community can join. According to Pollack, the Williamsburg Shomrim recently accepted three new members only after weeks of investigation.

Perhaps no one is more familiar with the organization’s membership policies than Jacob Hoffman, a Satmar school administrator and the eldest son of the Williamsburg Shomrim’s founding father, Moses Hoffman. Despite a healthy paunch and an electric red beard that hangs below his Adam’s apple, he looks at least a decade younger than his 53 years. While Pollack wanders toward a screen displaying a live feed from the front door surveillance camera, Hoffman assumes a seat adjacent to me at the office’s Formica table. His eyes are set very close to one another, and his gaze is unblinking. If Pollack has revealed himself as a kind of gregarious good cop, Hoffman seems primed to play the part of the bad cop. When asked what kind of patrol member he typically recruits, he says bluntly, “Someone prepared to leave his family on the Sabbath to go look for a lost child.”

As the organization’s vice-president, Hoffman is responsible for hiring new recruits, organizing the Shomrim’s patrol schedule, and arranging its biennial training regimen at 1 Police Plaza, the NYPD headquarters. Hoffman sees volunteering his time and money to the neighborhood watch as a family obligation. If he harbors any feelings of resentment toward his father for the burden he’s inherited, he refuses to reveal them. “It’s a question of honor,” he says, as if explaining a simple math equation to a child. “We honor those who give back to our community.”

Pollack is reluctant to discuss any specific cases, but he admits that the neighborhood watch sometimes acts as a buffer between the police and the Hasidic community. If, for example, a Hasidic person commits a crime against a fellow Hasid, he or another member of the Shomrim might take it upon himself to convince the offended party not to press charges. Pollack insists that the Shomrim file a police report for every crime that’s reported, but that’s as much as he’s willing to concede. “If I told you anything more, I’d be finished on the street,” he says. “No one in the community would ever speak to me again.”

***

In February, administrators at the Crown Heights neighborhood watch posted a message on the organization’s Facebook page inviting members of the local community to a dinner marking the first anniversary of the death of its coordinator Reb. Isaac Zellermaier. After my calls to the Shomrim headquarters went unreturned, I decided to attend.

Ateres Miriam Simcha Hall, the site of the event, is tucked away in the basement of an unassuming row house on Carroll Street in Brooklyn, a scant few blocks from the central headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. When I stepped into the harsh glow of the dining hall, the conversation—a merry mélange of English and Yiddish—dropped to a low murmur.

“Can I help you?” inquired a man in his thirties, his face a mess of pockmarks and frizzy, red hair.

Knowing the answer, I asked if this was the meeting of the Crown Heights Shomrim.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, his features suddenly brightening. After guiding me gently to an open seat at the table closest to the dining hall’s exit, the host waved his hand at a tight-faced young man wearing a stylish set of black eyeglasses and a gray pullover. But for the thick nest of hair lining his cheeks and neck, he looked like the captain of a high school debate team.

He introduced himself as Ben Lifshitz, head of media relations. “You really shouldn’t be here,” the 24-year-old warned in a voice that sounded a pitch too high for someone trying to impose authority. Lifshitz works as a freelance photographer when he’s not managing the publicity requests of the Crown Heights Shomrim. (“The New York Post, the New York Times, they’ve all tried to talk to us at one time or another,” he said.) On this evening, he was engaged in both occupations. After grudgingly agreeing to let me stay for the memorial service, he hopped up from his chair and walked briskly across the room toward a tripod set up against the opposite wall. Lifshitz swiveled the camera’s lens toward the end of the U-shaped table, where a trio of rabbis sat in silence.

A hush fell over the dining hall and Rabbi Moshe Bogomilsky, a weary-looking septuagenarian with a thick pair of eyeglasses and a sagacious white beard to match, cleared his throat. What followed was a fable about the importance of giving back to the community, with a few tortuous detours about exiles and the redemptive power of a loving and supportive wife. Then Shloime Zellermaier rose from the seat adjacent to Bogomilsky and added some brief but pointed words about his father, the late coordinator: “It was Hashem that guided him and Hashem that helped him pull his people out of jail when he needed to. My father always believed that if you do kindness to a fellow Jew, God will do kindness to you.”

Appearing every spring in the Yiddish press and in humor journals produced specifically for Passover, these haggadot lampooned the poor, the rich, communists, socialists, capitalists, alcoholics, farmers, lepers, immigrants, loose women, politicians, rabbis, Hebrew teachers, even vacation homes. You name it and there is probably a mock haggadah skewering it.

Some of these spoofs functioned as political propaganda or critical commentary masked as holiday fare. Leftist ideologues, often products of the yeshiva world, took to undermining the traditional texts they knew so well. An early, beloved secular parody first appeared in the London-based Worker’s Friend in 1887 and was reprinted multiple times as the Socialist Haggadah. Lamenting the pitiful situation of the Jewish worker versus the exploitative Jewish capitalist, the author took a text familiar to every Jew and used it to promote socialism:

“Ma nishtane, why are we different from Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meyer the banker, from Zorach the money lender, from Reb Todros the rabbi? They don’t do anything and they have food and drink during the day and also at night at least a hundred times over, we toil with all our strength the whole day and at night we have nothing to eat at all.”

But every parodist had an ax to grind, and if the subject being parodied wasn’t the might of the capitalist bourgeoisie, it was something else. In 1909, a New York satirical weekly, Der groyser kundes, worked a bit of Yiddish-theater criticism into its haggadah:

“Ma nishtane, why is the current theater season worse this year than in all previous seasons? Shebekhol halaylos, every season for the past ten years had chometz and matzah, awful potboilers, but also some good literary dramas, and this season has been only unadulterated crap.”

The characterizations of the four sons in a 1916 Der groyser kundes parody might seem dated in the details, but its underlying dynamics are surprisingly familiar:

“The Wise Son: a shtetl horse thief who escaped from prison, stowed-away on a ship to America where he became a horse poisoner and a gangster until he managed to become a saloon keeper and a politician. Today he’s the president of his synagogue, a fighter for Judaism, in short, a mentsh …

“The Wicked Son: a man who fills his wallet with relief receipts for victims of the war that he picked up off the ground and shows them to volunteers asking for money to prove what a big philanthropist he is. ‘See how much I already gave?’

“The Simple Son: a kid who sits with a girl until 2 a.m. waiting for permission to kiss her.

“The Son Who Doesn’t Even Know How to Ask a Question: a traveling salesman who only comes home on Passover to find his wife about to give birth and doesn’t think to ask how a woman can be pregnant for 12 months.”

By the early 20th century, the haggadah had become the most parodied text in Jewish history. It’s easy to see why: With its fixed structure of four questions, four brothers, and 10 plagues, it is a simple text to manipulate. The vast majority of Jews—from children to the elderly—were at least nominally familiar with the text, a fact that made the gags easy to understand.

The parodies ranged in scope and ambition, from a 1911 advertisement titled “The Eleventh Plague,” which explained how the most horrible affliction of the Passover holiday was hemorrhoids, to longer parodies that took the “Kadesh, Urkhats” Seder mnemonic and played on the various duties required of Seder participants. Some parodies are complete haggadahs unto themselves.

The quality of the parodies often depended on the Yiddish news cycle. Local and international news always crept into these works. A good local scandal often made for the juiciest parody. When, for example, a political scandal surrounding a Jewish beauty pageant in Warsaw exploded in the early spring of 1929, Yiddish satirists produced an unusual amount of beauty pageant-related Passover material.

But politics was always paramount in the Yiddish press, and the roles of the four sons and the 10 plagues were often filled with political figures. The Hitler Haggadah of 1934 is a typical example.

Appearing in the humor section of the Warsaw daily Moment, just prior to Passover, the Hitler Haggadah zips through the main sections of the text with all manner of sarcastic political commentary in Yiddish interspersed with the original Hebrew. The four sons are Mussolini (wise), Hitler (wicked), Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss (simple), and Paul von Hindenburg (doesn’t know to ask a question). The 10 plagues are transformed into the litany of problems facing German Jewry. The parody is a pastiche of bitterness: A cartoon shows a German Jew sitting in front of a huge bitter pile of horseradish. The four questions wonder how long the Nazis will stay in power. Hitler, who ostensibly answers but simply dodges the questions, is compared to Laban the Aramean, a figure considered to be the Deus ex machina of the Exodus by some rabbis. But Pharaoh only killed the first-born males, whereas Hitler “wants to uproot everything: the males, the females, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the living and even the dead,” a frightening premonition of what was to come.

• God had a wife. Yes, that God. [Discovery News]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Eddy Portnoy has a children’s treasury of Yiddish fight terms. [Shtetl Montreal]

• Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is interested in a New York City satellite campus. [NYT]

• iGrogger [iTunes]

• Contributing editor Vanessa Davis’s workspace is at least as wonderful as you’d suspect. [From the desk of …]

• The doll that got a bar mitzvah. [The Daily]

According to contributor Jody Rosen, 100 years ago today Irving Berlin—one of the heroes of David Lehman’s A Fine Romance—received a copyright for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Irving came to me out of need, which put us on an even footing. This was unexpected, since I owed him a considerable professional debt: In 1969, when I was completing my doctorate at McGill University and teaching sections of the English literature survey course, I petitioned the English Department for permission to introduce courses on Yiddish literature under its aegis. When my colleagues asked how they could justify the inclusion of a subject with no obvious connection to theirs, I pointed out that not a single course in the university dealt with any aspect of Jewish history or culture. Jewish studies would have to start somehow and somewhere: Did they think I’d do better in the German Department? Invited to supply a syllabus, I proposed a course on the Yiddish short story that was based largely on Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories; almost entirely on its own, it won over my department.

Howe describes in his memoirs the emotional-political pressures of the early 1950s that prompted him to seek refuge in this project of Yiddish translation. Because he read his native language only haltingly, he partnered with a Yiddish poet called “Leyzer” Greenberg, who selected the authors and read his choice of stories aloud until Irving hit on the ones that he liked. In this way, he later quipped, he got to know the lesser Yiddish writers much better than the great ones. As the “outside man” on the project, he conscripted translators from among fellow writers who still knew some Yiddish from home. When Saul Bellow agreed to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” Leyzer likewise read the story aloud to him, and Saul sat at the typewriter, translating it sentence by sentence as if taking dictation. The result was so good (if slightly bowdlerized) that Bashevis Singer never allowed Bellow to translate another story, lest Saul be credited for any share of his achievement.

But I digress: I was making the point that Howe and Greenberg’s anthology allowed me to introduce Yiddish literature at McGill. The two men published several more anthologies of Yiddish poetry, essays and stories, until Leyzer’s death in 1977 left Irving without a partner on a project he had come to depend on as the link to his Jewishness.

The most ideologically rigid of the New York Intellectuals, Irving did not change his affiliation over a lifetime. As his fellow leftists turned neo-conservative and their publications edged rightward, he alone remained a socialist, conflating his socialism with what he called Yiddishkayt (Jewishness), so that he could not abandon one without appearing to betray the other. When Jewishness began to matter more to him, he looked for ways to become part of it without compromising his socialist faith, and he’d found a highly creative avenue for this linkage in the transposition of Yiddish literary treasures into English. Leyzer’s death forced him to find a new collaborator on the Yiddish projects that constituted the Jewish portion of his life, and that was how he came to me.

Our first joint venture, The Best of Sholem Aleichem, was conceived when Marty Peretz approached Irving with the idea for this collection to be published by New Republic Books, and Irving—the one with experience—got us to sign away all the rights for $2,000. Irving had composed the introductions to the books he co-edited with Leyzer, but he and I decided to do ours in the form of letters, which we sent back and forth in the days when mail took several days for delivery. Leon Wieseltier, who saw the proofs of the book, asked me whether I noticed that whereas my letters responded to Irving’s by incorporating his comments, his never referred to anything I said. I had noticed it, but it was beneath my pride to show Irving that I cared. And I felt beholden to him. It was his reputation, not mine and not Sholem Aleichem’s, that got our book frontpage coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

We began work on the Sholem Aleichem anthology just as Irving’s most ambitious book, World of Our Fathers, was about to appear. Irving worried that the Times would assign the review of it to Harry Golden, whose work he had panned. Instead, he won the National Book Award, made the best-seller list, and got to tour the country for respectable fees. But fate seemed to conspire against his triumph. His marriage to Ariel Mack, to whom he dedicated this book, was then coming apart. When we started working on the book, he lived with her in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive; by the time we began our second project, he was in a smaller apartment on the Upper East Side.

Domestic matters apart, I was under the impression that Irving felt more comfortable in smaller spaces. He seemed attracted to socialism because he considered it a losing cause in America, and to Yiddish for the same reason, interpreting it as the culture of what he called the “little man.” When he toured to promote his book, he complained that the well-heeled audiences at synagogues and Jewish community centers were nothing like the garment workers and union organizers whom he had so lovingly portrayed in his book. I pointed out that he had memorialized only those parts of the Lower East Side that had not endured in America. His audiences were made up of the synagogue-goers, Zionists, and immigrants who had made good. The ironies of this ought to have been cause for celebration, but, for Irving, they were instigators of regret.

***

I don’t think Irving would have dignified me as a “political adversary” in the first years that we worked together. Feminists may snigger, but I sensed that he felt protective toward me, trying to shield me from the battles he had been fighting since his teens and to which he now seemed condemned. He obviously enjoyed writing and teaching about literature more than duking it out politically, and he may have wanted to grant me the respite he could not allow himself. “Try to understand that I genuinely did not wish to get into a fight with you,” he wrote after he had treated me to a public putdown at a nasty conference on Jewish literature we had both attended in Berkeley, Calif.:

[This] was not because I dismissed you. It was … in part because I know that polemics exact a heavy price from you in pain and suffering, and I keep saying to myself that it would be best to avoid them. But also, to be honest, I don’t think you’re very good at political polemics, certainly not as good as you are in literary discussions; I feel it’s not your métier, that you force yourself to do it out of a sense of obligation (with attendant anxiety). But I don’t want [to] make it seem that it has been only my goodness of heart—though it’s there—which prompted me to refrain from public argument with you. I think you have no idea how aggressive and combative and provoking you can be, indeed were in San Francisco, and that this elicits strong responses in turn.

Admitting to “contradictory feelings in the matter,” he expressed satisfaction in our ability to remain collaborators and friends, “perhaps the best that can be done under the circumstances.” This was seductive. But though I shared some of his contradictory feelings, he did not have my number. His description of the anxious polemicist, including of her abrasiveness, seemed (then and now) truer of him than of me. In wanting to attain for the Jews the political unexceptionalism to which they were entitled, I was anxious about the outcome, not the process. As between the two of us, he was the one more often accused of harshness, while people were always saying (to my irritation) how nice I was despite my out-of-favor views.

Indeed, Irving and I drew very different conclusions from the Yiddish culture with which we were engaged together. Yiddish wit once observed that Jews had turned links (left) because they were denied their recht (rights). Irving saw some such connection between political weakness and moral strength. I, who was spared the fate of European Jewry by parents who brought me to Canada in 1940, could not romanticize the politics that had allowed my cohort to be turned into fertilizer. While I would not have chosen to be anything but a Jew, it was precisely the study of Yiddish that had taught me not only the dangers but also the corrupting potential of powerlessness. Whereas Sholem Aleichem fully recognized the deformities that poverty bred, and loved Jews despite the humiliation to which they were subject, some of his contemporaries considered weakness a sign of distinction and decried achievement and prosperity as such. I was also aware, from studying Yiddish, that prolonged repression had produced a rash of informers and converts to other faiths, who often outdid gentiles in malignity. Although Irving and I both admired Jewish resiliency, I had come to recognize Jewish political dependency—a corollary of exile—as a deeply flawed political ideal.

***

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, defining Zionism as a form of racism. I was convinced that this charge, lifted straight from the Communist playbook of the 1930s, would greatly advance the Arab war against Israel. By transposing their rhetoric from “We will crush the Jewish State” to “The imperialist Jews are despoiling us,” Arab rulers had forged an anti-liberal alliance among despotisms, autocracies, and dictatorial regimes across the political spectrum. European anti-Semitism in the 1870s had cast the Jews, the beneficiaries of liberal democracy, as its conspiratorial exploiters, so that destroying them became a necessary defense against their alleged domination. By adding the trendy indictment of “racism” to the toxicology of anti-Jewishness, Arabs and Muslims would henceforth rally to their cause Marxists who picked up Stalin’s charge of Zionist-imperialism, internationalists who insisted that Jews should transcend their particularism, and rightists who could now turn the Holocaust indictment of racism against its victims. Talk about a big tent.

Continue reading: an editorial spat, anti-Jewish ammunition, and Robert Frost. Or view as a single page.

• Aaron David Miller predicted in Tablet Magazine that Israel would fear the Egyptian uprisings; here, he explains why. [WP]

• Leon Wieseltier concedes Israeli fear of the new Egyptian government, but also indicts Israel’s government for not having made progress on the peace process during calmer times. [TNR]

• A Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson on CNN refused to confirm that his group, if in power in Egypt, would continue to respect the Israeli peace treaty. [JPost]

• How President Obama’s reaction to the Egyptian events has helped articulate the emerging “liberal realism.” [TNR]

• An additional primer on Egyptian Vice President (and likely next strongman) Omar Suleiman. [The Arabist]

• Israel depends on an Egyptian natural gas pipeline for one-fourth of its electricity. Uh oh. (For more, see my interview with James Hamilton.) [WSJ]

• Coptic Christians probably have the most indisputable case for wanting Mubarak to stay. [WSJ]

• Israeli-Arab leader and alleged Hezbollah spy Ameer Makhoul was sentenced to nine years in prison. [JPost]

• The University of Maryland’s endangered Yiddish studies department scraped together enough funds to last, for now, through 2013. Still can’t beat Duke, though. [JTA]

• Establishment-y people are standing up for foreign aid. [Laura Rozen]

• ‘Course, Sen. Patrick Leahy wants to cut Egyptian aid till this all gets sorted out. [Laura Rozen]

• “The main stumbling block is Israel,” says George Soros. Have fun in the comments, guys! [WP]

• We’re supposed to be scared of a Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt? We’re allied with Saudi Arabia, for Chrissake. [Slate]

• Solomon and Cohen out at the Times Magazine (Times critic Ariel Kaminer will be the new Ethicist). For some of our readers, this is the biggest news of the day. Here is Rachel Shteir taking Cohen down. [Daily Intel]

• Oh, by the way, none of this matters compares to Jordan. I’m exaggerating, of course, but Jordan actually is more important at this point. Will the Hashemite monarchy survive? [Goldblog]

Enjoy the Game.

Revival

And, this week, Eve Annenberg’s Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish makes its North American premiere at the New York Jewish Film Festival. It’s a new, Yiddish-language, U.S.-made, full-length feature.

Annenberg’s film places the tragic Shakespearian love story in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community, and the filmmaker, who had little previous knowledge of Yiddish, decided that a film set there must use Yiddish as its primary language. For decades, Yiddish, like most foreign languages, didn’t appear in American movies; filmmakers believed American audiences disliked subtitles and portrayed foreign language-speaking characters with actors speaking accented English. But a new trend toward authenticity and realism is returning Yiddish, like other foreign languages, to the screen. In A Serious Man, released two years ago, Joel and Ethan Coen presented a 7-minute prologue set in 19th-century Poland; the characters in it spoke Yiddish.

Yiddish is used in movies to connect with memory, particularly by European filmmakers. French filmmaker Emmanuel Finkiel focused on the lives of elderly Jews who come together on the Promenade in Cannes in his Madame Jacques sur la Croisette (1996). “The Yiddish spoken by this age group is more than a language,” Finkiel said. His Voyages (1999) followed three Holocaust survivors, each with his own narrative, searching for some unambiguous closure. Though the film did not directly relate the horrors of the Holocaust, Finkiel’s approach to the events had the Yiddish world of the past collide and engage in a struggle with the Jewish world of the present, and it was clear that Yiddish held its own. Finkiel provided the setting for a Yiddish world that was dynamic and nuanced, but that teetered as the elderly generation died.

Yiddish movies are even being made in Israel, where, for much of the country’s history, the language was anathema—in 1930, there were riots in Tel Aviv when My Yiddishe Mame was screened. But over the last decade, student filmmakers have turned to the language to either faithfully portray ultra-Orthodox Jewish life or to tackle the divide that for years forced censure of Yiddish and deprived generations of Israelis of a rich Jewish language and culture. In Nava Nussan Heifetz’s The Cohen’s Wife (2000), set in the Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox world, she dramatized a situation in which a Cohen must, according to Jewish law, divorce his wife because she has been raped. In My Father’s House (2006), Dani Rosenberg examined the birth of the state, when new immigrants, survivors of the death camps, were forced to shed their Diaspora personas in order to “properly” assimilate into the new society. “The film had to be in Yiddish,” Rosenberg said. “By Yiddish, I don’t just mean the language, but also the culture which the Israeli government tried to erase.”

Yiddish movies being made in America are set in communities where Yiddish is spoken in the home and on the street. Mendy and Yakov Kirsh shot their 2005 movie A Gesheft (“The Deal”) in the ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey, New York. Here, just as early Yiddish movie-makers saw Yiddish cinema as a way to combat the assimilationist message of mainstream American films, the Kirsh brothers were reacting to mainstream culture by creating what they called “kosher entertainment.” This is noteworthy, as for generations ultra-Orthodox Jews avoided the “corrupting influence” of Yiddish culture as too mainstream.

Eve Annenberg made Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish with exiles from the ultra-Orthodox community. Lazer Weiss and his wife, Malky, the actors who play the star-crossed lovers, spoke only Yiddish until they left the Satmar Hasidic community in their teens; neither had seen a movie when they left. The three are now developing ideas for a second Yiddish film. Meanwhile, there are reports that Topol, best known as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, will star next year in a Yiddish-language Golem, and blogs are even suggesting Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union might be filmed in Yiddish.

It’s not just new projects. Old Yiddish films are being restored, Yiddish-cinema courses are being taught on campus, DVDs of the Yiddish film classics are easily found, and Yiddish short films can be seen on the Internet. Yiddish is not only a vibrant language but also a culture and lifestyle. Finally, its cinema is being introduced to a whole new generation of cineastes.

Eric A. Goldman teaches cinema at Yeshiva University. A new edition of his Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present was recently published by Holmes and Meier.

• Hummus controversy at Princeton. Read the whole thing. [NYT]

• A shark killed an Egyptian woman in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. This was clearly a Mossad plot, much like the Amity Attacks of 1975. [JPost]

• Ron Kampeas argues that, as of now, there is no reason to be concerned about Tea Party members agitating to alter America’s Israel policy. [Capital J]

• Yiddish in Brooklyn! The Times should write more articles like this. [NYT]

• Iran’s new soccer coach might be one Diego Maradona. [CNN]

Maradona is a terrible soccer coach, but the guy could play alright.

• How American billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has created Israel’s Fox News. [Politico]

• Deli expert David Sax travels to Eastern Europe, his subject’s ancestral homeland. [Saveur]

• So does this mean Arab leaders are neocons? Shattered paradigms are hard to cope with! [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• The HinJew trend becomes real as Israel and India ink a free-trade deal. [Ynet]

• Director Irvin Kershner, whose films included The Empire Strikes Back, died at 87. Like Han to Boba Fett, he was worth the most to us alive. [Arts Beat]

• “No Need To Kvetch, Yiddish Lives on in Catskills.” Some of these headlines are unimprovable. [NYT]

Frank Black of the Pixies wrote the score to the silent film The Golem. Below: My favorite Pixies song, “Debaser.”

Lead with acknowledgment that everyone knows and writes about the fact that Yiddish is dying: Check.

Superimpose cultural connotations of Yiddish onto subject of article, with a phrase like “flinty Yiddish contrarianism”: Check.

Name-drop Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer: Check.

Note that language is actually on the rise in Hasidic communities: Check.

Name-drop a Gentile Yiddish enthusiast (in this case, Shane Baker, whom Tablet Magazine has profiled): Check.

Mention the Lower East Side and a particular Brooklyn neighborhood (Brownsville, in this instance): Check.

End on mournful note: Check.

I’ll be honest: I could read a new one every week.

Shop That Speaks Yiddish Needs a Rich Man’s Help [NYT]
Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Amid Dying Languages, Yiddish Lives On

עס האָט זיך אויסגעלאָזט אַז קאַראָלייַן זשוּליאַני האָט זיך ניט אויסגעלערנט איר טאַטנס “תורה”

Transliteration: Es hot zikh oysegelozt az Karolayn Djuliani hot zikh nit oysgelernt ir tatns “toyre”

Meaning: It turns out that the daughter hasn’t really internalized the father’s “Torah”

מיר האָבן געהאַט פּרעזידענט רעגאַן, אוּן איצט ווײַקלעף זשאַן. איז וואָס קען עס שאַטן? (אין האַייטי, פּאָליטיקערס זינגען ניט אוּן זײַנען אויך ניט קײַן מנהיגים).

Transliteration: Mir hobn gehat prezident regan, un itst vayklif zhan iz vis ken es shatn? in hayti, politikers zingn nit un zaynen okh nit keyn minhagim).

Meaning: We had president Reagan, and now Wyclef Jean. What can go wrong? In Haiti, politicians can neither sing nor lead.

צוּפֿיל געפּלאַפּלט אָבער אַ וואָרטס-מענטש: ער איז טאַקע אַרויסגעקוּמען ווי אדם הראשון.

Transliteration: Tsufil geplaplet ober a vort-mentsh: er iz take aroysgekumen vi odm harishn

Meaning: He blabbered but he is a man of his word: he came out wearing his birthday suit.

אויס שידוּך! אַ פֿלעקעלע אַרייַן, אַ פֿלעקעלע אַרויס, אוּן די מעשה איז אויס!

Transliteration: Oys shidukh! a flekele arayn, a flekele aroys, un di mayse iz oys!

Meaning: The shidduch is over! Some drama was in, some drama was out, and now, nothing to talk about!

איצט וועלן מיר האָבן צוּריק פּאוּלאַס נאַרישקייַטן אַנשטאָט עלענס חכמות.

Transliteration: Itst veln mir hobn tsurik paulas narishkaytn anshtot elens khokhmes.

Meaning: Now we’ll have Paula’s silliness instead of Ellen’s clever jokes.

LESSON:

Modal verbs in Yiddish are formed with an auxiliary verb, and another verb in the infinitive. Some common auxiliary verbs are מוּזן (must), קענען (can), טאָרן (ought), דאַרפֿן (should), and זאָלן (should). With that in mind:

ענריקע דאַרף אַרומגיין אָנגעטאָן – Enrique should put on his clothes
קאַראָלייַן וועט מוּזן זיך מסתמא שעמען – Caroline will feel ashamed
בריסטאָל טאָר ניט צעמישן איר קליין קינדס קאָפּ – Bristol should stop confusing her kid
עלען דאַרף אוּנדז דערקלערן פֿאַרוואָס זי איז אַוועק – Ellen should tell us why she’s leaving

Also, in Yiddish, like in several other languages, we address the issue of someone’s name either by using the verbs הייסן or רוּפֿן. The first roughly translates to “my name is…” and the second roughly translates to “I’m called…” For example, with Wyclef Jean’s future political career in mind, he may say:

איך הייס ווייַקליף זשאַן, אָבער מען וועט מיר רוּפֿן אין גיכן פּרעזידענט זשאַן. – My name is Wyclef Jean, but soon I’ll be called President Jean.

For a bit of homework, why not practice some Yiddish with your family and friends? You can begin by asking them ווי הייסט איר, and when they reply, introduce yourself right back. Shabbat shalom!

This week’s installment is about curse words, countdowns, and criminal behavior. Let’s get right to it:

חנעוודיק ווען ער איז אין טעלעוויזיע, אוּן ברוּטאַל אין פּריוואַטן לעבן. אין 36 שעה ווערט ער אַ מענטש? אַן אַקטיאָר!

Transliteration: Kheynevdik ven er iz in televizye, un brutal in privatn lebn. In 36 sho vert er a mentsh? An aktyor!

Meaning: Charming on TV, and brutal in private life. He’ll become a mentsh in 36 hours? It’s an act!

דאָס איז יידיש? אַרויסגעוואָרפֿן דעם הוּמאָר אוּן געבליבן מיט אַ פּראָסטן וואָרט: אוי אַ שאַנדע, אַ שמוּץ, אַ בוּשה, אוּן אַ זילזוּל. שעמען מעג ער זיך.

Transliteration: Dos iz yidish? Aroysgevorfn dem humor un geblibn mit a prostn vort: oy a shande, a shmuts, a bushe, un a zilzul. Shemen meg er zikh.

Meaning: This is Yiddish? They left out the humor and kept the bad word: shameful, dirty, and disrespectful. Shame on you!

אַ בוּך — אַ מתנה פֿוּן אַנדרוּ מאָרטאָן פֿאַר אַנדשעלינקע. אַנדשי גיט אַ גרויסן נאָס, אַנדי כאַפּט אוּן זאָגט, אַ שאָס!

Transliteration: A bukh–a matone fun Andru Morton far Angelinke. Angie git a groysn nos, Andy khapt un zogt, a shos!

Meaning: A book — a gift from Andrew Morton to Angelin’ke. Angie sneezes, and Andy makes a fuss!

קויפֿערס וועלן זיך מחיה זייַן — אַ ביכעלע, 16 זייַטלעך מעשהלעך, וועגן אַ יינגעלע, אַ זינגערל, אוּן מיידעלעך אָן אַ סוף!

Transliteration: Koyfers veln zikh mekhaye zayn–a bikhele, 16 zaytelekh mayselekh, vegn a yingele, a zingerl, un meydelekh on a sof!

Meaning: Book buyers will have a field day — 16 little tales about the little boy, the little singer, and his endless stream of girls.

נאָך אַ חתונה! עס איז דאָ אַ חתן, אַ כלה, אוּן עס באַקט זיך אַ קינד. אַ מאָדע צוּ מאַכן אַ מוציא פֿאַר דער ברכה!

Transliteration: Nokh a khasene! Es iz do a khosn, a kale, un es bakt zikh a kind. A mode tsu makhn a moytse far der brokhe!

Meaning: Another wedding! A groom, a bride, and a baby in the oven. A new trend, having the meal before saying the blessing.

This week, it seems, was all about numbers, from Charlie’s rehab sentence to Justin Bieber’s book advance. The following numbers are used as nouns and adjectives in Yiddish:

איינס / איין — 1
צוויי — 2
דרייַ — 3
פֿיר — 4
פֿינף — 5
זעקס — 6
זיבן — 7
אַכט — 8
נייַן — 9
צען — 10
עלף — 11
צוועלף — 12
דרייַצן — 13
פֿערצן — 14
פֿוּפֿצן — 15
זעכצן — 16
זיבעצן — 17
אַכצן — 18
נייַנצן — 19
צוואַנציק — 20

The number one declines as a noun. For example, in relation to Steve Carell’s new film:

אויב איר נוּצט אַ יידיש וואָרט, גיט אוּנדז כאָטש איינס אַ רעכטן – If you’re going to use a Yiddish word, use a proper one

To pronounce compound numbers in Yiddish, just reverse the digits. Looking at Andrew Morton’s previous book, for example, a biography of Princess Diana, we can say:

מען האָט עס איבערגעזעצט אין נייַן אוּן צוואַנציק שפּראַכן – The book was translated into 29 languages

Or, looking at James Van Der Beek’s pregnant wife, we wonder how far along she may be:

וויפֿל וואָכן דאַרף זי נאָך טראָגן, פֿינף אוּוֹ דרייַסיק‪?‬– How many weeks, 35?

And Charlie Sheen, as we’ve learned this week, has time on his mind. Counting down his sentence, he may ask:

וויפֿל איז דער זייגער‪?‬ – What time is it?

Last week, in observance of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, we gave you no homework. This week, catching up, here are two assignments. First, read the captions once again, and find the different uses of the word נאָך, which means still, or after. Then, practice numbers by telling us how old you are. We’re looking forward to it…

Chelsea Clinton’s wedding is this weekend, and gossips the world over will be gawking at the famous guests. We at A Yidisher Pop are no different. This week’s installment, then, is dedicated to the Wedding of the Year; what, we wonder, might each of the event’s famous guests bring the young couple as a gift?

אָפּראַ זאָגט אַלע געלאַדענע חתונה געסט: “קוּקט אונטער אייַערע געזעסן… דער לעצטער מאָדעל אויטאָ!!!”

Transliteration: Opra zogt ale geladene khasene gest: “kukt unter ayere gezesn… der letster model oyto!!!”

Meaning: Oprah tells the wedding guests: “Look under your seats… It’s a brand new car!!!”

פּרעזידענט אָבאַמאַ שענקט אַ צוויי וואָכעדיקע חתונה-נסיעה מיט אַ שיפֿל אין דעם מעקסיקאַנער גאָלף.

Transliteration: Prezident Obama shenkt a tsvey vokhedike khasene-nesie mit a shifl in dem meksikaner golf.

Meaning: President Obama gives a two-week honeymoon on a small boat in the Gulf of Mexico.

טעד טערנער גיט אַוועק לאַרי קינגס מעמוּאַר, “ווי באַנייַט מען אַ ווייַב: ליב האָבן אוּן צוּזאָגן קאָסט ניט (קייַן סַך) געלט.”

Transliteration: Ted Terner git avek Lari Kings memuar, “vi banayt men a vayb:  lib hobn un tsuzogn kost nit (kayn sakh) gelt.”

Meaning: Ted Turner brings Larry King’s memoir, “How to renew your wife: Love and promises shouldn’t cost you (too much) money.”

באַרבראַ סטרייַסאַנד לאַד אַלעמען אייַן צוּ איר לעצטן, לעצטן, לעצטן — באמת איר לעצטן — קאָנצערט.

Transliteration: Barbra Straisand lad alemen ayn tsu ir letstn, letstn, letstn — be’emes ir letstn — kontsert.

Meaning: Barbra Streisand invites everybody to her last, last, last — really her last — concert.

Future and Past tense, and good wishes to the couple!

The future tense in Yiddish is built with the verb Veln וועלן + the infinitive. For example, if we were invited to Chelsea’s wedding (it’s not too late!), then:

איך וועל עסן — I will eat
דוּ וועסט טרינקען — You will drink
ער וועט לייענען די כתובה — He will read the Ketubah
מיר וועלן זינגען — We will sing
איר וועט דאַווענען — You will pray
זיי וועלן זיך אַרוּמנעמען – They will hug

The past tense is constructed with one of two auxiliary verbs, conjugated in the present tense: Hobn האָבן , to have, or Zayn זייַן, to  be, + past participle. Verbs that take Zayn are mostly motion verbs (to go, to travel); most of the rest take Hobn. The past participle of verbs often requires the prefix Ge גע. For example:

איך האָב געשיקט אַ ליבעסבריוו – I sent a love letter
דוּ האָסט עס באַקוּמען – You got it
ער האָט עס געפֿוּנען – He found it
זי האָט אים געקוּשט – She kissed him
מיר האָבן געוווּסט – We knew it
איר האָט עס איבערגעלייענט – You read it through
זיי האָבן חתונה געהאַט – They got married

איך בין געפֿאָרן צוּ דער חתונה – I traveled to the wedding
דוּ ביסט געלאָפֿן מיט שמחה – You ran happily
ער איז געבליבן פֿאַרחלומט – He remained dreamy
זי איז געווען גליקלעך – She was very happy
מיר זייַנען געגאַנגען צוּזאַמען – We walked together
איר זייַט געשטאַנען בייַ דער חופה – You were standing by the Chupah
זיי זייַנען אַלע געווען פֿריילעך – They were all very happy

So even though we’re probably not going to get an invite from the Clintons, here’s our bit of advice for the newlyweds:

אַז איר קריגט זיך, קריגט זיך אַזוי אַז איר זאָלט זיך קענען איבערבעטן

Az ir krigt zikh, krigt zikh azoy az ir zolt zikh kenen iberbetn

When you fight, fight in a way that lets you make up.

Mazl tov!

זי איז שיין, זי איז קלוג, און אַ ביסעלע מעוברת. וואָס איז אַזוי שלעכט, פֿאָקס?

Transliteration: Zi iz sheyn, zi iz klug, un a bisele meuveres. Vos iz azoy shlekht, Fox?

Meaning: She is beautiful, she is smart, and she is a little pregnant. What’s the problem, Fox?

זיי טרינקען, רייכערן, ברענען זיך — אַ מלאכה! פֿאַר געלט באַקוּמט מען אַלץ אַָבער ניט קיין שכל.

Transliteration: Zey trinken, reykhern, brenen zikh–a melokhe! Far gelt bakumt men alts ober nit keyn seykhl.

Meaning: They drink, smoke, and tan–what a job! For money you get anything, except for brains.

קענט איר אויסזען ווי איך? ניין, זאָגט ער. קענט איר שמעקן ווי איך? יאָ, זאָגט ער. אָבער, מיר פֿרעגן אייַך: ווער וויל טאַקע שמעקן ווי אַלטע געווירצן?

Transliteration: Kent ir oyszen vi ikh? Neyn, zogt er. Kent ir shmekn vi ikh? Yo, zogt er. Ober, mir fregn aykh: ver vil take shmekn vi alte gevirtsn?

Meaning: Can you look like me? No. Can you smell like me? Yes. But we ask you: Who wants to smell like old spices?

סוף-כל-סוף, אַ פֿייַנע משפּחהלע! ליוואַי, געדענק אַז דייַן באַוווּסטע שוויגער האַלט אַ ביקס אין האַנט.

Transliteration: Sof-kol-sof, a fayne mishpokhele! Levi, gedenk az dayn bavuste shviger halt a biks in hant.

Meaning: Finally, a nice little family! Levi, remember your famous mother-in-law has a shotgun.

אין סכּנה… אָבער אַז מען לעבט דערלעבט מען! געטראָפֿן דעם שלאַנקן-פּיצעלע-לאָריס. קוּקט אויף זייַנע אויגן: ער וווּנדערט זיך מער אויף אוּנדז.

Transliteration: In sakone…ober az men lebt derlebt men! Getrofn dem shlankn-pitsele-loris. Kukt af zayne oygn: er vundert zikh mer oif undz.

Meaning: Endangered…but eventually one sees it all. We found the slender, little Loris. Look at his eyes: he’s more surprised than we are.

Lesson:

Two basic verbs that will come in handy when we learn past tense next week: to have האָבן and to be זייַן.

With the Jersey Shore girls in mind:

I have clothes — איך האָב קליידער
You have cigarettes – דוּ האסָט פּאַפּיראָסן
She has jewelry – זי האָט צירוּנג
We dislike them – מיר האָבן זיי פֿייַנט
You love them – איר האָט זיי ליב
They have made fools of themselves – זיי האָבן זיך באַנאַרעשט

And the verb “to be”? As Mr. Old Spice may put it:

I am handsome – איך בין שיין
You are jealous – דוּ ביסט מיר מקנא
He is half-naked – ער איז האַלב-נאַקעט
We are taken – מיר זייַנען פֿאַרכאַפּט
You are not modest – איר זייַט ניט באַשיידן
They sell Old Spice and they’re happy – זיי פֿאַרקויפֿן אָלד ספּייַס אוּן זייַנען צוּפֿרידן

Want a bit of homework? Look for Yiddish words borrowed from Hebrew; they’re pronounced a bit differently, but you can easily find them…

Join us, then, at this new educational feature on The Scroll, a recurring lesson we’re calling—in a pun on the Yiddish term literally meaning “a Jewish head”—“A Yidisher Pop.”

“A Yidisher Pop” will caption gossipy photos of politicians, athletes, and celebrities, giving readers a vibrant taste of Yiddish. Though the lessons embedded in these captions are progressive in the way of any beginner course, this feature is intended, of course, as an introduction, not a comprehensive class. The Yivo Institute; Tel Aviv University’s Goldreich Family Institute; the Vilnius Yiddish Institute; and the Medem Institute all provide more resources.

And, in the meantime, if you need to brush up on your Yiddish alphabet, Yivo can help you with that, too. Finally, for excellent online Yiddish dictionaries, click here or here.

Week One: The sounds of Yiddish

Week Two: Pronouns and present tense

Week Three: Present tense

Week Four: Past and future tense

Week Five: Numbers

Week Six: Modal verbs

Week Seven: Uncommon usages

Week Eight: Articles, Nouns and Adjectives

לינדזי ווייַזט אוּנדז אירע געפֿילן – אויב ניט מיט אַ גראָבן פֿינגער, איז עס מיט איר נאָגל!

Transliteration:Lindzi vayzt undz ire gefiln—oyb nit mit a grobn finger, iz es mit ir nogl!

Meaning: Lindsay expresses herself—if not by giving the finger, then with her nail!

מעל גיבסאָן … אַזאַ צרה! דוּ באַווייַזט ניט דייַן “מעכטיקע האַרץ” נאָר דייַן שמוּציקע, פּראָסטע צוּנג.

Transliteration: Mel Gibson… Aza tsore! Du bavayzt nit dayn “mekhtike harts” nor dayn shmutsike, proste tsung.

Meaning: Mel Gibson… what troubles! You show not your “Brave Heart” but your dirty, crude tongue.

פּאָל, דער אַכט-פֿיסיקער מאָלוּסק: געווינט אוּן געווינט. ער גיט כשרע עצות, אָבער ער אַליין איז טרייף.

Transliteration: Pol, der akht-fisiker molusk: gevint un gevint. Er git koshere eytses, ober er aleyn iz trayf.

Meaning: Paul, the octopus: he wins and wins again. He gives kosher advice, but he himself is trayf.

ניט שוּלדיק??? אַזאַ אויסוווּרף בלייַבט ווי אַ לייַטישער מענטש?

Transliteration: Nit shuldik??? Aza oysvurf blaybt vi a laytisher mentsh?

Meaning: Not guilty? Such a low-life remains a respectable man?

רינגאָ, ווי צוּ 64, אַזוי צוּ 70. מזל טוב ביז 120!

ווען כ’ווער שוין עלטער פֿאַרלירן די האָר
יאָרן פֿון איצט, הייַנט
וועסטוּ מיר נאָך שיקן אַ קליין וואַלענטייַן
געבוּרטסטאָג קאַרטל, פֿלעשעלע ווייַן?

Transliteration: Ringo, vi tsu 64, azoy tsu 70. Mazl tov biz 120!

Ven kh’ver shoyn elter farlirn di hor
yorn fun itst, haynt
vestu mir nokh shikn a kleyn valentayn
geburtstog kartl, fleshele vayn?

Meaning: Ringo, in 70 as in 64, may you live to 120!

When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

Join us, then, at this new educational feature on The Scroll, a recurring lesson we’re calling—in a pun on the Yiddish term meaning “a Jewish brain”—“A Yidisher Pop.” Each Friday for the next eight weeks, “A Yidisher Pop” will caption gossipy photos of politicians, athletes, and celebrities, giving readers a vibrant taste of Yiddish.

Though the lessons embedded in these captions are progressive in the way of any beginner course, this feature is intended, of course, as an introduction, not a comprehensive class. The Yivo Institue, Tel Aviv University’s Goldreich Family Institute, and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute all provide more resources.

And, in the meantime, if you need to brush up on your Yiddish alphabet, Yivo can help you with that, too.

יונגע… שיינע… און אַזאַ אוּמגעלוּמפּערטן פֿילם!

Transliteration:Yunge… Sheyne… un aza umgelumpertn film!

Meaning: Young… Beautiful… and such a clumsy film!

אוי וויי! זייַן טאָג איז געוואָרן נאַכט. קען עס זייַן אַז טאָם קרוּזעס לעצטער פֿילם איז טאַקע זייַן לעצטער?

Transliteration: Oy vey! Zayn tog iz gevorn nakht. Ken es zayn az Tom Cruise’s letster film iz take zayn letster?

Meaning: His day has turned into night. Could it be that Tom Cruise’s last film is really his last?

קלערן, קלערט זי… רעדן, רעדט זי… און וואָס וועגן אַרויסרעדַן וואָס זי קלערט?

Transliteration: Klern… klert zi… Redn, redt zi… un vos vegn aroysredn vos zi klert?

Meaning: She thinks. She speaks. But what about saying what she thinks?

אַ נייַע שטעלע… מאַק-קריסטאַלס עצה פאַר פּאַטרעוּס: רעדן איז זילבער… און שטילקייַט איז גאָלד.

Transliteration: A naye shtele… McChrystal’s eytse far Petraeus: redn iz zilber… un shtilkayt iz gold.

Meaning: A new position… McChrystal’s advice for Petraeus: Speech is silver… and silence is gold.

זיי שטערן אין פֿוּס-באָל שפּילן! אָבער … וווּנדערבאַר ווען מען לייענט די מגילה. המן, וועסט אוּנדז הערן!

Transliteration: Zey shtern in fusbol shpiln; ober kenen zayn vunderbar ven men leyent di megileh. Homon, vest undz hern!

Meaning: They annoy during football games! But perfect for megile-reading. Haman, you will hear us!

The Sounds of Yiddish יידישער קלאַנג

The letter aleph א signals two sounds in Yiddish: the komets aleph אָ sounds like o as in gold and the aleph with a pasakh אַ sounds like a. The name “Obama,” for instance, is spelled with both alephs: אָבאַמאַ. The tsvey (two) yudn with a pasakh ײַ makes the sound AY like zayn זײַן (meaning his) or nay נײַ (new), and without the pasakh makes the sound EY like sheyn שײן (beautiful) or like leyenen לײענען (to read). In Yiddish, the only sound the letter ayin ע makes is E as in עלעמענט (element) or as in klern קלערן (to think) or redn רעדן (to speak). The V sounds is represented by tsvey vovn װ, as in vey iz mir װײ איז מיר (woe is me) or vos װאָס (what). Finally, there is Yiddish’s OY as in froy פֿרוי (woman).

For now: Here is David Mandelbaum, of the New Yiddish Repertory Theater, and Alyssa Quint, who teaches Yiddish at Columbia, performing, first in English and then in Yiddish (translated by Caraid O’Brien), a scene between Leopold Bloom and an ex-girlfriend of his, Mrs. Breen.

Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry joins Gordon, Winograd, and Fruchter in Winograd’s bedroom-turned-studio to talk about their debut eponymous EP, out this week, and to play a little music on the fly.

The show is produced by the National Yiddish Theater, or Folksbiene, and arrives as that 95-year-old troupe faces real competition from the New Yiddish Rep, which started three years ago partly in reaction to what its founders saw as a certain stuffiness in the older company. The New Yiddish Rep has been stealing a good deal of the very small limelight for Yiddish theater, and the companies have had their public spats. But Hershele seems to mark a reconciliation of sorts—New Yiddish Rep director Shane Baker (whom I profiled last year) appears in the new show. And Hershele is silly, but it’s not stuffy.

The Folksbiene’s program describes the Yiddish folk hero Hershele Ostropolyer as a Robin Hood figure, and it’s true that, as played by Broadway actor Mike Burstyn, he spends much of the show stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. But, unlike his noble English counterpart, he’s a mischievous, peripatetic bum, more Merry Prankster than Merry Man.

At the outset of the show, he bumbles into a shtetl controlled by Kalmen, a greedy pawnbroker. Kalmen’s the kind of guy who, when confronted by a sweet young couple begging to get an heirloom ring out of hock so they can get married, tells them they can have it … for 30 gülden! (Apparently, a lot of money.) Hershele, who’s had an unpleasant run-in with Kalmen himself, makes it his business to drive the miser crazy until he parts with some of his own stash of gold. This involves a range of implausible disguises and accents, some vaudevillian swagger, and a lot of singing.

It wasn’t quite Molière (though Hershele’s characters seemed similarly willing to believe that a person wearing a different hat is a different person), but it was energetic and charming and often very funny. One interesting thing: Kalmen, strutting around in his waistcoat singing an ode to his wife—yes, her name is money—sometimes felt a teeny bit uncomfortably like an anti-Semitic caricature. I’m not sure, however, that this was the fault of Itsy Firestone, the actor who played Kalmen, or of the show’s director, Eleanor Reissa. Instead, I’m going to have to blame this one on anti-Semitism itself. Yiddish folklore is rife with cartoonish greedy businessmen. They are known as rich men. Other European folklores are also rife with cartoonish greedy businessmen. They are known as Jews. The problem isn’t that our ancestors made fun of the Kalmens in their midst. The problem is that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.

Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]

Inna Grade was the 85-year-old widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade. She was best known in Yiddish literary circles as a somewhat miserable person who spent three decades after her husband’s death blocking scholars and translators from coming anywhere near his work. Many of those scholars and translators started chomping at the bit when Grade died earlier this month, seemingly without a will—and thus no clear inheritor of Chaim’s literary estate.

But a New York attorney is now claiming that Grade composed a will, back in 1992, and that he has a copy. The lawyer told the Times that Grade wanted her husband’s papers to go to a Hebrew University professor of Yiddish named Yehiel Szeintuch and his wife. If valid, the will is a blow to organizations like the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring Chaim Grade’s papers. Additionally, the Times reports that two septuagenarians who say they are Inna Grade’s first cousins have come forward as well, but have not expressed interest in her husband’s estate.

One thing is for sure: There’s a great sultry jazz number missing from Fiddler on the Roof. “If Inna’s got a will, baby, Inna’s got a way.”

New Twists in the Tale of Chaim Grade [NYT]
Related: Keeper of the Flame [Tablet Magazine]

Yiddish is like many of these languages in that it is spoken more in New York City than in its historic areas—central and eastern Europe, and Russia. But unlike, say, the Istro-Romanian language of Vlashki, or Chamorro of the Mariana Islands (who knew they existed?), Yiddish is actually thriving in New York City, and elsewhere—among ultra-Orthodox communities. CUNY Professor David Kaufman, prominently featured in the article, told me yesterday, “I mentioned Yiddish as an example of a language spoken more in New York than in its places of origin—that’s all I meant by putting Yiddish in there.” He added, “It used to be a language of literature, but now it’s being kept alive by the Hasidic community—which views literature as competition to Torah.” In other words, fear not: Yiddish is nowhere near extinction. For the record, he said, his Endangered Language Alliance has not worked with Yiddish yet.

Hebrew Union College Professor Sarah Bunin Benor agreed that, whatever the status of some of the languages mentioned in the article, Yiddish, while certainly diminished from its heyday, is not going to disappear any time soon. “I think there is a sense that it’s diminishing because a lot of the speakers were killed in the Holocaust, and others moved to America and Israel and assimilated to the local languages,” she explained. But, directing me to the Modern Language Association’s interactive language map—warning, it has massive time-suck potential—she pointed out that “Yiddish is alive and well.” In fact, she added, “It’s changing. It’s becoming Americanized. It’s picking up words and grammatical structures.” Which is kind of cool, especially when you consider that American English has adopted certain aspects of Yiddish.

What, I should have to give an example?

Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages [NYT]

• A columnist argued that Syrian President Bashar Assad is cozying up to Iran not out of rational self-interest and power politics but because he’s an anti-Israel ideologue. [JPost]

• Iran announced plans to seek election to the U.N. Human Rights Council in May. Germany’s foreign minister promptly urged countries to oppose the ascension. [Arutz Sheva]

• Crazy story about the Israeli widow of a thief who stole artifacts from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem; her attempts to sell these back to the museum; and, now, her sentencing in California on a charge of receiving stolen property. [LAT]

• A woman tells how she met her husband because they both liked going to and performing at the same Yiddish theater in London. [Guardian]

• An Israeli tourism ad that … you just have to watch it. [Forecast Highs]

• The Israeli government launched a new P.R. campaign designed to empower Israel’s fans around the world to win converts to the country’s cause. The campaign’s (Hebrew-language) Website generally puts a conservative gloss on political issues. [NYT]

• Ruth R. Wisse—author of Nextbook Press’s Jews and Power–celebrates the English language’s debt to Yiddish and worries about Yiddish’s future in the academy. [Minding the Campus]

• Martin Grossman, the convicted murderer whose death sentence was protested by many ultra-Orthodox groups around the world, was put to death yesterday in Florida. [Arutz Sheva]

• A former AIPAC official argues that, contra what some on the right say, President Obama has actually been more of an AIPAC president than a J Street one; and this is so, the official adds, because of domestic politics. [Foreign Policy]

• How they remember the six million in Texas. Or how The Onion imagines they do, anyway. [The Onion]

How?

How will you fill your goblet
On the day of liberation? And with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark keeing you have heard
Where skulls of days glitter
In a bottomless pit?

You will search for a key to fit
You jammed locks. You will bite
The sidewalks like bread,
Thinking: It used to be better.
And time will gnaw at you like a cricket
Caught in a fist.

Then your memory will resemble
And ancient buried town
And your estranged eyes will burrow down
Like a mole, a mole….

Vilna Ghetto, February 14, 1943
Translated by Chana Bloch

***

The Lead Plates at the Rom Press

Arrayed at night, like fingers stretch through bars
To clutch the lit air of freedom,
We made for the press plates, to seize
The lead plates at the Rom printing works.
We were dreamers, we had to be soliders,
And melt down, for our bullets, the spirit of the lead.

At some timeless native lair
We unlocked the seal once more.
Shrouded in shadow, by the glow of a lamp,
Like Temple ancients dipping oil
Into candelabrums of festal gold,
So, pouring out line after lettered line, did we.

Letter by melting letter the lead,
Liquefied bullets, gleamed with thoughts:
A verse from Babylon, a verse from Poland,
Seething, flowing into the one mold.
Now must Jewish grit, long concealed in words,
Detonate the world in a shot!

Who in Vilna Ghetto has beheld the hands
Of Jewish heroes clasping weapons
Has beheld Jerusalem in its throes,
The crumbling of those granite walls;
Grasping the words smelted into lead,
Conning their sounds by heart.

Vilna Ghetto, September 12, 1943
Translated by Neal Kozodoy

***

1981

A letter arrived from the town of my birth
from one still sustained by the grace of her youth.
Enclosed between torment and fondness she pressed
a blade of grass from Ponar.

This grass and moribund cloud with its flicker
once kindled the alphabet, letter by letter.
And on the face of the letters, in murmuring ash,
the blade of grass from Ponar.

The grass is my doll’s house, my snug little world
where children play fiddles in rows as they burn.
The maestro’s a legend, they lift up their bows
for the blade of grass from Ponar.

I won’t part with this stemlet that yields up my home.
The good earth I long for makes room for us both.
And I’ll bring to the Lord my oblation at last:
the blade of grass from Ponar.

Translated by Cynthia Ozick

MORE: Read Zackary Sholem Berger’s tribute to Sutzkever here.

In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to a couple from Russia who’d moved to the Bronx, created a cast of tenement dwellers who spoke a heavily accented English, full of malapropisms and Yiddish grammatical constructions, which Gross rendered in inimitable, and sometimes almost indecipherable, phonetic spelling. His work, which included large helpings of the ethnic caricature and vaudeville-style slapstick popular in the 1920s and ’30s, had a popular following, and he ultimately published several collections of his comics and book-length cartoons. The journalist H.L. Mencken was a fan, and The New York Times ran glowing reviews of his work.

Some Yiddish-speakers who wanted to present their community in a more respectable light—including Gertrude Berg, creator of the radio show The Goldbergs—found Gross’s hapless greenhorns offensive. It’s easy to see why. Here’s a recurring character, Mrs. Feitlebaum, complaining about a quarrelsome couple in her building: “By dem is going on a lengwidge?? I tut wot dey lookin to be sotch a idill copple!” The Feitlebaums aren’t so perfect either; in the next scene, her husband, Mr. Mow-riss Feitlebaum is beating their son Isadore again.

Gross also parodied a number of American classics, including Poe’s poem “The Raven” and Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha,” in the diction of the Feitelbaums. (The Yiddish-accented Native Americans in his “Hiawatta” predate Mel Brooks’ version of the same joke by almost 50 years.) Much of his work has now been reissued in Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Reader edited by Gross enthusiast Ari Y. Kelman, who wrote the book’s introduction. Here, we present Gross’s take on “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas” (1927)—narrated by the New Yiddish Repertory’s Allen Lewis Rickman.

The current Yiddish revival movement, spurred by institutions like KlezKamp and artists like DJ Socalled, has attracted a small but devoted following among young Jews, largely through its ability to provide a cultural home for those who feel an affiliation with a secular, politically progressive, haimish—and slightly anachronistic—version of Jewishness. One of the most interesting things about the movement, though, is that it’s also swept up some non-Jews for whom Yiddish has no connection to a real or imagined ancestral past. No one exemplifies this better than Baker, who grew up Episcopalian and stumbled, apparently by intuition and chance, into New York City’s Yiddish scene, where he’s risen to the helm of not one but two Yiddish organizations: the Congress for Jewish Culture and the New Yiddish Rep, a theater company. The unlikely arc of his life so far is the subject of Baker’s new one-man-show, The Big Bupkis, which opens tonight at the New Yiddish Rep.

“I’m from the Midwest, and I was born just 20 miles outside of Peculiar, Missouri. It wasn’t at all clear that I was destined to stand before you here tonight,” says Baker, who is tall, thin, elegant, and prematurely graying at 41, at the start of the show. “Gosh, when I was a child, I was an acolyte in Saint Andrew’s Episcopal church in Kansas City…. But I remember even then, as I’d walk down the aisle carrying the crucifix, or wash the priest’s hands before he administered Holy Communion, I would daydream about Yiddish vaudeville.”

The reality was a little bit different, though no less bizarre. Baker really was an acolyte at Saint Andrew’s, where his father, a judge, and mother, a romance novelist, were active members. He was also, on a local level, a professional performer as a child, doing magic routines in ad-hoc neighborhood variety shows and occasional other gigs. (“I don’t know how this was arranged,” he said, “but when the circus came to town, I would ride the elephants.”) On Saturday mornings, as he notes in the show, he would visit Claude Enslow, an aging former vaudevillian and carny.

In the Big Bupkis version of the story—which is frequently interrupted by magic tricks, ventriloquism, rubber chickens being shot out of canons, and audience members being sawed in half—Baker left Kansas City after summoning the ghost of Yiddish vaudevillian Ludwig Zats in a séance. “I found out that Ludwig Zats was buried in New York, so naturally I packed my bags and hopped the fastest train to New York City, where I knew there was Yiddish vaudeville on every corner,” he deadpans. “This was in 1993.”

This is, once again, not entirely untrue. Baker came to New York a few years after college to pursue theater (he still performs regularly as a magician and has acted and directed off-Broadway and in regional theaters). He also became close with two octogenarian actresses, Luba Kadison Buloff and Mina Bern. Both were one-time stars of the Yiddish stage, which had been, in its heyday, a site of exciting theater not only for Yiddish speakers but for sophisticated non-Jewish audiences. Baker began studying Yiddish himself, and, he bragged, quickly excelled at it. Often, though, Yiddish speakers he met didn’t quite know what to make of him.

“I would go to an event—like, they would have a mock shtetl wedding at the Workmen’s Circle”—a fraternal organization devoted to promoting Yiddish—“and I would stand by the side and wait to run into somebody I knew,” he said. “Always, a pair of older women would come over: ‘So, are you Jewish?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have a Jewish girlfriend?’ ‘No.’ ‘Converting?’ ‘No.’ And they would shake their heads.”

The easiest solution to the riddle—how did this Midwestern goy wind up in the Yiddish theater?—is that Baker is gay. Gay and thus a likely candidate to leave Kansas City to pursue theater in New York; gay and thus attracted to the campy elements of vaudeville, of Yiddish culture, and indeed, of speaking a “dead” language at all; gay and thus at home in the contemporary secular Yiddish scene, which itself has been shaped extensively by young gay Jews seeking to create an alternative Jewish culture.

Baker gamely discussed these connections, but refused to wrap things up quite so neatly; instead, he seemed more inclined to telegraph his sexuality and its relation to his adopted culture the old-fashioned way, through broad hints and knowing looks.

This is even more true in The Big Bupkis, which comes very close to making the gay/Yiddish equation explicit but never quite does. In the first gag of the show, Baker sings a Yiddish version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” When he gets to a line that means, “I say that as a Jew,” he gives the audience a huge wink, as though letting them in on the joke: that what’s really funny about the show is watching a young gay goy channel an old straight Jew. The play ends with Baker in drag as the Yiddish actress Annie Hoffman, who is having a catfight with Sophie Tucker (“No one sings that song but me, you little oysvurf !”) Whole books have been written about the connection between queerness and Yiddish, but Baker doesn’t talk about it, he performs it.

Baker earned a Master’s degree in Yiddish from the University of Texas in 2002, and when he returned to New York he became the director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, which hosts Yiddish-related events and publishes Yiddish books. More recently, he became a director of the New Yiddish Rep, which was founded two years ago by a group of Yiddish theater folk who wanted to produce shows that were too off-beat for the Folksbiene, New York’s long-established Yiddish theater. (The cadre includes Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson, who play the shtetl couple at the beginning of A Serious Man.) They have taken an unusually aggressive approach to the goal that almost every Yiddish organization shares: attracting younger audiences. A page about the Rep in the Big Bupkis program, for instance, all but directly targets other Yiddish organizations: “The days when Yiddish theater could depend on audiences coming for the language itself are over. Nowadays the theater that we present must be the selling point, not the language that we present it in. We must present Theater That Happens to Be in Yiddish, not Yiddish That Happens to Be On Stage.” As a publicity stunt for the show, the Rep also announced that no one over 65 would be admitted into the theater. (When they’ve occasionally “enforced” this rule during previews of the show, audience members who appear to be over-age are sold fake IDs for a quarter. No one was “carded” on the evening this reporter attended, but the entire audience of 15 could have been.) This approach has exacerbated the Rep’s already strained relationship with the Folksbiene; in an offended response to the no-one-over-65 stunt, Folksbiene director Zalmen Mlotek told the New York Post, “I would hardly call them a theater company.”

Despite this rivalry and the generally argumentative culture of the remaining Yiddish organizations, Baker said he’s rarely felt marginalized or resented in the Yiddish scene for not being Jewish. In fact, “I’d say sometimes I get more respect than I necessarily deserve,” he said wryly. “Oscar Wilde said of women writers that they’re like a dog who speaks English: it doesn’t matter what they say. It’s the same with a gentile who speaks Yiddish.” Others simply assume he’s a member of the tribe, thanks to his ambiguous last name. “I get a lot of mail addressed to ‘Miss Sheyna Baker,’” he said.

Baker’s not in Kansas City anymore, but does the Yiddish world remind him at all of home? His answer was, as usual, satisfyingly odd. “I happen to like a little tongue with my pastrami, and I prefer the tip of the tongue,” he said. “That was something I learned from Mina and Luba. My mother used to serve tongue but I didn’t know what the parts were. Was it exotic or uncannily familiar? Both.”

Discussions included what the Jewish Telegraphic Agency calls the “almost erotic idealization of the comradeship and intimacy of the all-male worlds of the yeshiva, the bathhouse and the rebbe’s court”; Molly Picon’s cross-dressing; and the shame of single motherhood that led to the creation of a Jewish “baby-farming operation” in 19th century Vilna where mothers “acted as wet nurses for wealthier matrons while their own babies were spirited away and killed.” Also, Tablet Magazine contributing editor Eddy Portnoy, who recently wrote about a grisly sex crime culled from the 19th Century Yiddish press, spoke at the conference about “‘dowry farmers,’ Jewish men who married young women for their dowries, then left for the New World.” And Cantor Sharon Bernstein sang this dirty ditty: “I had a sister named Esther, her ____ was as deep as the Dniester, and when she ____ she’d say, ‘fester, fester.’” (To fill in JTA’s blanks, check out Tablet Magazine’s article on the myriad Yiddish terms for the female reproductive organs).

The three-day extravaganza ran in concert with a Yiddish film festival featuring screenings of films based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl and S.Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk. Naomi Seidman, director of the Center for Jewish Studies, pointed out the sexual politics inherent to each: “The fact that no one notices Yentl is a woman shows how effeminate Jewish men were considered compared to the Western European ideal of masculinity,” Seidman said. “Demonic possession of a woman by a man is a transgender dream we haven’t even begun to enact here in the Bay Area.”

Conference Explores Steamier Side of Shtetl Life [JTA]

As a child, I thought this was a personal tic. Then, thanks to Chaim Potok, Robby Benson, and The Chosen, I learned that non-Hasidic Jews have long looked askance at their bearded, furry-hatted brethren. Still, I was surprised to find an example of musical Hasid-baiting dating back to 1929 on Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners 1905-1953: Classic Yiddish 78s from the Mayrent Collection, a new 3-CD box set on the JSP label.

That track, “Yidden, Loift Tzum Rebbin” (“Jews, Run to the Rabbi”), is one of 69 culled from the more than 17,000 sides owned by Sherry Mayrent, a klezmer clarinetist and associate director of Living Traditions, the organization behind KlezKamp and various other projects devoted to the dissemination of Yiddish culture. One of the vast number of “ethnic recordings” made for and marketed to everyone from blacks to hillbillies during the prewar period, it skewers the stereotypically sheep-like deference that Hasidic Jews show towards their miraculously endowed rebbes (“Bring it Jews, Hasidim/Hand the rebbe all your money/Come on women, don’t ask questions/He will brighten up your world”). The humor of “Chasidic in America,” recorded in 1938, is more subtle, as Moishe Oysher and Florence Weiss punctuate their jazz-inflected vocals with “oy veys” and “chiri biri bim boms.” It’s a wonder that the box set includes either, however, given that most reissues of archival Jewish material tend to focus on klezmer music, or cantorial singing, or some other institutionally recognized, “serious” cultural artifact.

Which is not to say that Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners—or the larger collection from which it is drawn (currently the largest accumulation of Jewish 78s in private hands)—doesn’t contain plenty of that, too. The CDs feature but a tiny fraction of what’s buried in the 9,000-odd discs that Mayrent has acquired on eBay (she picked up the first 100 for a mere $40) and from dealers around the world, and which Living Traditions is now cataloging, digitizing, and documenting. But it’s enough to give you some sense of the tremendous diversity of Jewish cultural expression during the 78 era, which stretched from the late 19th century—a full 25 years before the advent of radio—to the early 1950s, a span that saw the efflorescence of Yiddish theater, the rise of “hebe” dialect humor, and the eager engagement of a rapidly assimilating immigrant community with American culture at large.

Alongside the expected tracks by klezmer legends like clarinetist Naftule Brandwein and Kandel’s Orchestra and Jewish pop stars such as Sophie Tucker and the Barry Sisters, we find gems like a 1915 pressing of Sholom Aleichem reading from “If I Were Rothschild”; the first recording of Kol Nidre from 1924; and a cut from 1912 featuring Joe Hayman doing his “Cohen on the Telephone” routine, a surprisingly gentle bit of dialect humor in which a Yiddish speaker with a heavy accent has his first English phone conversation. The cantorial performances trace a clear arc from traditional Orthodox practice through modern Reform stylings, but they also include a couple of sui generis outliers like a recording of “Mi Sheoso Nisim” by Cantor Berele Chagy from 1919, which had me marveling, open-mouthed, at his melismatic ululations and eerie falsetto.

According to Henry Sapoznik, the executive director of Living Traditions and the man who got Mayrent hooked on 78s, the very scope of the larger collection distinguishes it from other archival holdings of Jewish material, as does the care with which the recordings have been transferred to digital form—a process that has resulted in some stunningly clear reproductions, like the 1913 side by Belf’s Roumanian Orchestra, a European klezmer outfit that enjoys iconic status among contemporary scholars of Jewish music but which has rarely, if ever, sounded so good to contemporary ears. A serious collector of Jewish material himself—he produced the first reissue of klezmer 78s in 1982, and his collection of Yiddish radio programs was recently acquired by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress—Sapoznik explains that Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners is not an end unto itself. Rather, it’s meant to draw attention to the parent collection, which Mayrent hopes to make available online in its entirety, and to KlezKamp, which helped pioneer the use of archival recordings as a learning tool for aspiring performers of Jewish music.

Whether Mayrent and Living Traditions are ultimately able to make the whole thing free and open to the public online remains to be seen. Mayrent is currently negotiating with the University of Wisconsin at Madison to establish an institute of Yiddish culture that would serve as a permanent home for her discs, maintaining a searchable online database through which music-seekers could download every single recording. But the deal has yet to be sealed, and there remain tricky issues of copyright: the 78s were originally released by commercial labels such as Columbia and Victor whose catalogs have since been acquired by companies like Sony and Bertelsmann—companies that have become increasingly paranoid about online access to their property.

Still, Sapoznik is optimistic. Living Traditions has already transferred over 3,000 discs, and the first batch could go online within a year or two. In the meantime, we must content ourselves with the box set. It might fall far short of the wonder that is the full collection, but when it comes to legacy material that reveals the popular tastes of the Jewish community at a time of great cultural ferment, it is far better than anything else out there.

Listen to “Chasidic in America”

Listen to “Cohen on the Telephone”

Listen to “Mi Sheoso Nisim”

These are just a few findings of the Survey of American Jewish Language and Identity, the results of which were published online late last month by linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and sociologist Steven M. Cohen. (The researchers will be giving a webinar on their study tonight; they’re also publishing a more academic version of their report in a linguistics journal later this year.) Dozens of surveys about American Jews have come out the past few decades—most famously, perhaps, the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey that caused alarm in some quarters with its claim that 52 percent of Jews were intermarried—but this is a rare one that shows rather than tells. Instead of asking respondents how religious they are or whether their grandchildren will be Jewish, Benor and Cohen asked questions like, “When you say ‘Mary’ and ‘merry’ in regular speech, do they sound the same or different?” and “How do you refer to the Jewish skullcap?” By hitting the question of Jewish identity at a slant rather than head-on, the researchers have come up with an unusually nuanced portrait of contemporary American Jews.

“Patterns of language use can tell us things about identities and communities that might not even be known to the actors themselves,” said Cohen, who has been conducting Jewish identity surveys of the more direct variety for some four decades. “There are things we can see through the side door that we can’t see through the front door.”

Benor and Cohen’s survey technique, like the questions they asked, was untraditional. Instead of using a random survey sample, they employed a “snowball technique,” emailing the survey to 600 friends in July 2008 and asking respondents to forward it in turn. They make clear in the introduction to their report that this approach has both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand, 41,696 people completed the survey just in the first few weeks of its life on the internet. (You can still take the survey online, though only data from those first 41,696 respondents has already been analyzed.) By contrast, the National Jewish Population Survey, conducted every 10 years by United Jewish Communities (the umbrella group of local Jewish Federations), has a sample size of about 5,000. On the other hand, Benor and Cohen acknowledge, “we know it over-represents Jews with strong Jewish engagement and social ties”—the kind of people most likely to take such a survey of their own volition.

As Benor expected from her previous scholarship (like Cohen, she teaches at Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s seminary, which sponsored the survey), the data suggests that for the most part, American Jews across the religious spectrum draw from the same “repertoire” of distinctive speech elements—that is, they are English speakers who use varying amounts of Yiddish or Hebrew phrasing and grammar to distinguish themselves both from non-Jews and from Jews elsewhere on the spectrum. With the exception of those ultra-Orthodox Jews who use Yiddish as their primary language, Benor said, American Jews fall somewhere on this “continuum of distinctiveness” rather than being separable into different dialect groups.

“My favorite example is ‘gmar cha-tee-MAH to-VAH,’” she said, enunciating each syllable of the traditional Yom Kippur greeting: in English, “may you be inscribed in the book of life.” “That’s the most modern Hebrew pronunciation you can get. Then there’s ‘gmar cha-TEE-mah TO-vah,’ ‘gmar cha-SEE-mah TO-vah,’ and then ‘gmar ch’SEE-mah TOY-vah.” For those in the know, each pronunciation signifies a different spot on the religious continuum: a non-Orthodox Jew would probably use the modern Hebrew pronunciation; as you move along the spectrum of observance, the greeting becomes more Yiddish-inflected.

One of the key findings of the survey was what Benor and Cohen call “the growth of linguistic distinctiveness among the Orthodox.” Distinctive strains of Yiddish-inflected English are not only still in everyday use among younger generations of Orthodox American Jews, their prevalence is growing. Take the phrase, “She’s staying by us,” which borrows a Yiddish grammatical construction to mean, “She’s staying at our place.” Fifty-three percent of Orthodox Jews who took the survey use the phrase (versus 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews). But a full three quarters of Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 24 use it, compared to 12 percent of Orthodox respondents 75 or older. According to the report, “such words and phrases are so important for Orthodox identity that many baalei teshuva (newly Orthodox Jews) make a conscious effort to incorporate them into their speech, even when some people consider them to be incorrect English.” Observant Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews—whose ancestors never spoke Yiddish in the first place—have adopted Yiddish religious terminology as well.

Benor attributes this to the fact that Orthodox communities have in general become more conservative, politically and culturally, in recent years. “Part of that shift to the right is a linguistic shift: some Jews who used to use less distinct English are now incorporating more Yiddishisms into their English,” she said.

In non-Orthodox Jewish communities, two trends are happening concurrently, the survey found: as members of an older generation die and takes certain language patterns with them, younger Jews are using more Yiddish and Hebrew than before (and certainly more than their more assimilationist parents’ generation did). But the words disappearing and those reappearing aren’t necessarily the same words. Though Jews (and non-Jews) of all ages still say “shmutz” and “mazel tov,” seniors are more likely than their grandchildren to use Yiddishisms like “haimish” (homey), “macher” (big shot), “nu?” (so?), “naches” (pride), and “bashert” (predestined). Where the younger generation is overtaking their grandparents is with religious terminology—Yiddish words like “shul,” “daven,” and “bentch” (for the blessing after meals).

“You see more Jews now identifying as a religious rather than as an ethnic group,” Benor said. “Those Yiddish words that are increasing [in use] have to do with religious life.” Thus, the phenomenon one survey respondent reported: “When I was growing up, I called it Temple. When my children went to Day School, I called it synagogue. I now call it shul. I am not sure why.”

Though Jews across the religious spectrum said they would be likely to consider Hebrew names for their children, baby names are “an important resource for Jews to indicate intra-Jewish differences.” Less observant Jews, they found, are most likely to prefer anglicized biblical names, like Jacob, Ethan, Hannah, or Abigail. Modern Orthodox Jews were most likely to choose modern Hebrew names, like Ezra, Ari, Talia, or Eliana, often substituting them for the equivalent Yiddish names of deceased relatives (so, for example, they might name a daughter Tova, meaning “good” in Hebrew, after a grandmother named Gittel). For the most part, only ultra-Orthodox Jews said they would consider giving a child a Yiddish name like Moyshe, Mendy, or Basya. In one of the survey’s least surprising findings, only two percent of Jews said they’d consider naming their baby Christopher.

Israel Joshua Singer Appreciation Society [Facebook]