Thursday, July 17, 2014

The Sound Of Music

When I was a teenager I spent time with my older sister who lived in Greenwich Village with her new husband who was a dark eyed, long lashed, swarthy exotic with antecedents in Eastern Europe.  He was moreover "a Jew," as my mother always pointed out when he came up in conversation (I can't of course create the tone in which that midwestern lady pronounced the phrase).  At home in the Bronx his family spoke Yiddish, and I with my three years of high school German fell in love with  the language, adoring it from the periphery and hoping somehow that the constant phrases he threw out would by osmosis sink into my consciousness.  Over the years I have lamented the decline of Yiddish speaking persons, applauded when institutions such as Brandeis University offered formal courses in the language.  Today I was saddened to read in the Times that the small Congress for Jewish Culture had lost its funding and would close its doors, thereby closing off a source of Yiddishkeit.  Of course, Yiddish is not synonymus with Jewish. I remember reading a memoir of a Hungarian who as a teenager was a forced laborer in Buchenwald toward the close of the war and found that none of his fellow inmates considered him a Jew because he could not speak Yiddish, and on another occasion when I humorously attributed a Yiddish saying to a woman whose daughter quite firmly insisted that her Sephardic mother would never have let Yiddish pass her lips.  Two years ago in Sarasota I took an adult education course in the Yiddish language; it was a marvelous review of all kinds of Yiddish from songs to jokes to stories and the teacher was a wonderful woman who had been a professional entertainer, she was perfect.  But as it turned out, every person enrolled in the class except myself had grown up in a household where the adults spoke Yiddish among themselves and these students wanted to retrieve what they had so nonchalantly  discarded years ago.  Very soon the class was ratcheting up their Yiddish to a fabulous degree and the teacher more and more omitted the helpful hints in English until this old goy was left in the dust.  I will always love the sound of it, and perhaps that is as close as I will get just as after my adult education course in Arabic script I could write out the opening lines of the Koran in a series of very inventive and beautiful specimens of calligraphy.

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