Ghosts Love Yiddish
Tomorrow I am flying to Cluj-Napoca in Romania to participate in a week-long advanced Yiddish course. I believe this is the first time that so many people (upwards of 60) have spoken Yiddish in that region since the Holocaust. Participating in this is extremely meaningful to me, and, I hope, important beyond what it means to anyone personally. I hope to make the most of the opportunity by clarifying some questions I bring with me into the experience, here in the newsletter this week.
First: where are the Yiddish ghosts in Romania? Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in his Nobel Prize banquet speech that “nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish, and as far as I know, they all speak it.” He also said “Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead.” This is a very concise explanation of something I have also found to be true. Yiddish is not my mother language, but it isn’t dead to me either. I give a lot of my time to studying it and it connects me with past generations who died long before I was born. It’s interesting how Bashevis Singer says in his speech that Yiddish is “a dying language,” and then later that as his mother language, it “is never really dead.” Dying, but never dead is an accurate description of Yiddish language since the Holocaust. It hovers in that bardo, in between living and no longer.
Second: how much can I improve my Yiddish? I read Yiddish fairly fluently but I make grammatical mistakes when I speak or write, and I often struggle to make complicated statements, for example when talking about literature. It’s nothing like my experience of speaking English, my first language and one which I love very deeply. English is a potent language that expresses many things other languages can’t. I like to read Victorian novels and mine them for witty anglicisms, or just talk to some of my elderly friends who still say things like “by hook or by crook” and “right as rain.” I have a lot of work to do with Yiddish and I want to see where it gets me.
Third: what can I find by speaking Yiddish with others in Romania that I couldn’t find when I was there alone? If you have been reading the newsletter devotedly, you might remember that in August, I was also in Romania, on a solo trip to begin the first stages of a long-term research project there. I visited the Jewish cemetery, but outside of those gates I struggled to find evidence of anything Jewish there, dead or alive. I wondered what I was missing because surely the ghosts must be somewhere. I wonder if speaking Yiddish will make it easier for them to reveal themselves to us.
Fourth: why is everyone else there, studying Yiddish in Romania? I may be interested in ghosts but probably most of them are not, at least not in those terms. People don’t like to talk about ghosts for understandable reasons. I think a good question to have is always: what other questions are there? What questions am I not asking?
