Flirting in Yiddish

Vilst geyn tantsen?

He invites me to dance, laughter in his eyes and that sardonic yearning that speaks to me of lost worlds, of self-mocking humor, of survival. Mih ken lachen a bissel, he promises. We can laugh a little, enjoy our vitality, and briefly forget the tragedy that has brought us all together.

The 1980s marked the start of International Gatherings of Survivors and Second Generation, and we, the sons and daughters, are in Washington to honor our parents and their fellow remnants of a destroyed world. We wander bewildered among faces that remind us of a home we never knew, faces that hope against hope to reclaim some buried but never fully forgotten dream of an unaccounted-for family member who might have survived, undiscovered for half a lifetime.

For the first time in our lives we’re surrounded by those who are like us, who have the same Yiddish inflections. We’re surrounded by people who remind us of our parents. It’s only now, as we’re among each other for the first time, that we realize how much we’ve missed each other all our lives.

Even as we dance, we have one foot in the world of our parents and grandparents, a world that was destroyed before our time, we who were born in DP camps and other temporary post-destruction places of transit, on the way to somewhere else, where new lives would begin.

There’s an energy among us that’s hard to define, a kind of procreative fervor; we circle each other, we who will forever be defined as children. Regardless of our personal romantic status, of whatever love and commitments we may have, here there’s a resonance of life energy that we can’t deny. Especially among those of us who haven’t yet had children, the reproductive urge is unmistakable and undeniable. There are so many lives to replace, so many souls wanting to come back and finish their work. We’re here because of a shared legacy of death; and yet the strongest feeling is of life, of an urge to life that is overpowering and even thrilling.

The cadences of Yiddish fill the hall, the corridors, the dining rooms. Yiddish, the language of the lost world. I’ve never been in a place where so many together were speaking this language, the language of my lonely childhood home, the language of my parents and their survivor friends. Yiddish is mein mamaloshen, my first language, the one I spoke as a kid, the language in which I am most myself. And it is strange to realize that I never felt fully a woman until, at the age of 33, I am invited to dance in this language from a dead world.

I remember being taught to read Yiddish in afternoon school, the teacher using the pictures of the boy and girl, the house and street, to guide us as we tried to make sense of the strange foreign letters. I had always found it easy to read in English. But these complicated dark letters that looked like pictures, that moved in the wrong direction, confused and frightened me. I saw them rarely; in the book from which my father read every spring while I sat absorbed in pictures of slaves building pyramids and Pharaoh’s men cracking whips; in the letters above the wide double doors of the old shul where I glimpsed the men, wrapped in strange white shawls, chanting and swaying.

But mostly the letters made me think of tears, large dark curly tears that curved and marched and pointed along the page, with tiny little tears under them to mark their position. Like my mother’s tears, when she covered her eyes and blessed the yahrzeit candles in memory of her dead, or when she locked herself in another room and thought that no one could hear her. I always knew when my mother had been crying, because I could see a far off look in her eyes, a softness in her face, that wasn’t there at any other time. At those moments I knew that even though my mother seemed to be with me in the room, she was really far away, across the world, in a time before my own.

He reaches his hand out, waiting for an answer with a slightly self-deprecating smile. All around us, people are dancing and laughing. He looks like those aging European men, those friends of my parents. He has the short stocky powerful build, the broad face and thick nose, the wiry, somewhat wild hair that hints at the energy barely contained by his intense gestures and rapid speech. Like me, he is North American, the product of a secular and optimistic culture. He is overachieving and successful by the world’s standards, like so many of us children of survivors. And yet underneath, betrayed by a certain sadness around the eyes and a hint of yearning in the voice, is the knowledge of tragedy, the awareness of life’s fragility, the understanding that all joy and beauty and love can be lost in an instant.

I’d resisted men like him all my life—men who reminded me of what I wanted to forget. My mother had often told me about the great love of her life. “Of course it wasn’t your tateh,” she said, dismissing the very idea with a brief wave of her hand. “He was just the one who was there, after the war.”

My mother was always careful to explain herself, to make sure I understood what had been at stake. “Who had time to think about love, then; we all just had to make a new family.” She had her own way of saying it—a nayeh fehmily—in that weird combination of Yiddish and English she spoke in those days, when we’d only been in Canada a few years. “Who had time to think about love?” And anyway, all the ones my parents had loved had been killed, they had to make do with whoever was left, whoever they could find.

I would sit in the kitchen with my mother, and she would tell me stories about the one she’d really loved. But where he was, what happened to him, whether my mother ever learned if he ended up alive or dead, these details were not the point of the story. The point was about the kind of love and romance that were only possible in her own girlhood, before the world showed its true colors. She never said so, but I understood that love and romance weren’t really possible for me, either. They belonged to the kind of life that only the innocent Canadians could have, the ones who didn’t know what life was really like. And so I gravitated to those “real Canadians,” as she called them, hoping that their innocence would rub off on me, would cover the dark knowledge at my core.

But here was this guy of my own generation, talking to me in Yiddish. Flirting. Until this moment I had only seen 60-year-olds, my parents and their friends, flirting in Yiddish. No one younger used the language—only a handful of Hasidim who would never flirt, or at least not in public, and certainly not with anyone but their wife. These were the phrases of my childhood, of my parents and their lost world, the language I had to leave behind if I were to make a new life in a new place. And yet today they were touching my woman’s heart in a new way, a part of my heart that I’d learned to keep hidden, that had no place to reveal itself. I could feel a soft fluttering in my chest, an odd combination of excitement, fear, and sadness. A memory of life yearning inside the knowledge of destruction.

Sometimes I imagine I’m back there again, talking Yiddish. Answering the man with the long-forgotten features who evoked the vanished world. Trying to picture a different life trajectory. What if I’d followed the language of my secret heart, allowed myself to respond to the cadences of ghosts? At the time it seemed like the past, a step back into a world that was no longer, that could not be. And yet, I felt most alive in the stirrings of that moment, felt that the familiar words I heard and answered were unmediated experience, language echoing the energy of life.

I imagine the uninflected letters—the powerful letters of creation—floating in the air above us. I see the black letters rising, colliding with the ashes, watched over by the spirits who have no resting place. My partner and I dance below.

But in fact I declined the offer years ago. Played at the flirtation a bit, but continued on my path of make-believe, the performance of a modern Jewish life—a life in English. I left the deepest reality behind, in fleeting moments of flirting in Yiddish.