The Unbearable Tweeness of Yiddish

I don't speak Yiddish. I know a fair number of words but I don't really speak the language and I have no desire to. To the extent that my Jewish identity is expressed linguistically, it is through Hebrew, the modern version resurrected from the ancient language of prayer and spoken by almost six million Jews in the modern state of Israel. Yiddish makes me wince when I hear it, which I acknowledge is unfair in some ways and a huge slap in the face to my own heritage. And it makes me sound like I have a massive chip on my shoulder, which of course I do.

Yiddish was the mother tongue of millions of European Jews well into the twentieth century. Although written with Hebrew characters, its semantic backbone is German, with dialects incorporating various proportions of Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Romanian, other east and central European tongues, and even English in small amounts. Jews, being the archetypal wandering people, relied on Yiddish as a means of communication with their coreligionists in other lands, a means often less than intelligible to gentiles, which was not only useful, it was life-saving. Similar Jewish languages and dialects evolved from Morocco to Bukhara in central Asia, including unique forms of Arabic, Spanish and Italian (Ladino), Turkish, Farsi and several other languages.

But Yiddish had by far the most speakers, including the vast majority of the 3.5 million Jews of Poland, the 5 million of the Soviet Union, the 850,000 of Romania, the 800,000 of Hungary, and millions in smaller communities from Amsterdam to Tallinn. Yiddish was not only the language of everyday life, it was a language of literature and song, the means of expression of countless intellectuals and poets. It was even the basis of vibrant theatre and film scenes, in the twilight years between the world wars. Only a small remnant of these communities survived World War II: Yiddish virtually disappeared as a mother tongue, and for decades few bothered even to study it.

This gives you some idea of the emotional power of Yiddish in the Jewish consciousness and its formative influences on modern Jewish life.

But I can't stand to hear it.

The evil Chucky doll in Child's Play has nothing on my ultimate nightmare: A broad-faced gray-haired female doll dressed in a fur coat that when you pull the string says "abi gezunt" (to your health in Yiddish) and then makes a noise like it's sucking on a hard candy, followed by a deep sigh to the accompaniment of klezmer music.

Yiddish, to me, is the language of the disapora ('exile' - go figure), the language of powerlessness, rootlessness, self-abnegation, self-renunciation, superstition and interminable waiting. It is to me what Euro-American names are to a lot of African-Americans - a reminder of a time of subjugation and permanent second-class status. Hebrew, in contrast, is to me the language of self-determination, of assertion and restoration. And it generally avoids the tweeness of Yiddish words and expressions that I don't care to repeat here. The kitsch and saccharine factors are so high I'm surprised Celine Dion doesn't sing in Yiddish, at least as far as I know.

The latter-day revival of Yiddish in university departments, Jewish cultural activities and even literary works is remarkable, given the completeness of the destruction just six decades ago. But it is often creepy, particularly in the hands of non-Jews in places like Germany, who increasingly wallow in echoes of pre-war Jewish culture. Euros in their twenties watch Yiddish films and listen to klezmer bands ... it not only smacks of appropriation, it is positively ghoulish, given the history. It is as if such people are not comfortable with Hebrew and other more current manifestations of Jewish culture - they have to reach back to something far less threatening, less threatening because it is dead.

North American Jewish politicians and community leaders will often throw in Yiddish terms when it's "just us," which is annoying enough, but now even non-Jews do it sometimes with Jewish audiences, and I find it difficult to stomach. I assume they don't break into negro spirituals in front of Black audiences, so please spare us, or learn a few choice words in Hebrew.

I don't know how to reconcile any of this with the fact that I enjoy Fiddler on the Roof, but sometimes we just have to live with inconsistencies. I imagine most Jews reading what I've written here would be furious, but I'm OK with that.