It’s how they spoke. Who was I to kvetch?
English, Yiddish, Polish, Russian and French: my parents spoke many languages — sometimes many at once
“Vau geystu? Es kelt?” “Where are you going? It’s freezing cold!” my mother asked, mixing Yiddish with English as 9-year-old me was about to go out the door. “To Fay’s. We’re going to the variety store. The new Millie the Model comic book is in.” I’d reply in English only.
My parents had a natural ability with languages and slipped in and out of English and Yiddish to the extent that I always considered this perfectly normal.
I couldn’t hear the switch. To me, it was all just one language. I only became conscious it was different when my bewildered friends would whisper, “What are your parents saying?”
In grade school, I would speak that same hybrid, but not having inherited what my father called the “easy come” with languages, I merely threw in a word or two in Yiddish, about my kop (head) hurting or my tsop (braid) needing to be retied. When asked by my teacher what the word meant, I often didn’t know what word she was referring to because I didn’t know which of the words I had spoken was in Yiddish.
Even as an adult, I never managed to reply in a full sentence in Yiddish to my parents’ Yiddish/English hybrid as much as I wished I could, for I loved Yiddish — its lively idioms, slang and proverbs, and most of all, its pizzazz. While I never managed to speak fluent Yiddish, I did, however, acquire the prosody of Yiddish in my English speech. Strangers I met frequently assumed I was New York born because of my “sing-song” intonation.
My parents grew up in Poland where Yiddish was the mame-loshn (mother tongue) for Jews. It was the language of heym (home), spoken among relatives and friends. Since anti-Semitism was on the rise in the years before the Second World War, they were both cautioned by their parents not to speak Yiddish among strangers. They knew this without speaking Yiddish, as taunts of Zyd (Polish for Jew) trailed them on their way to school. Polish was the public language — of school, the marketplace and business, and Hebrew, of shul. They were fluent in both. When the German army occupied the town of Ostrowek in 1939, my father Irving and his brother Jack rapidly picked up German, selling cigarettes to the soldiers. Later, when being hidden by Polish farmers, a Russian-born farmer’s wife taught them Russian.
My mother Dora learned Russian following the arrest of her family by Russian soldiers at the beginning of the war as they fled their burning village of
Krasnobrod. They were imprisoned in a Siberian Labour Camp and, on their release, settled in the Russian republic of Tajikistan where my mother attended a Russian school.
My parents learned English after the war while in German displaced-persons camps — my father in Leipheim, my mother in Pocking. My mother’s English was so good that when her family emigrated to Toronto in 1949, the family’s sponsor, her uncle Benny, the proud owner of the Chicken King Restaurant, wanted her to work there as a hostess.
My father picked up French while working in a textile store in Nancy, France, before he arrived in Toronto. Once here, he enrolled in night school English classes at Harbord Collegiate, honing his writing skills there, his reading with the Toronto Star, and speaking with coworkers at the mattress factory where he was employed.
My parents met on Centre Island and married in Toronto in 1952. Some of their friends — especially those who had mar- ried native-born Canadians — and not greenies (immigrant Jews) — refused to speak Yiddish and implored my parents to do likewise so they would lose their accented English. These friends believed they would fit in faster and more invisibly if they assimilated.
But my parents ignored their pleas whenever those friends hissed “speak English!” They were not embarrassed by their accents, and in fact pointed with pride to famous comedians like Sid Caesar and shows like Phil Silver’s Sgt. Bilko where the Yiddish intonations and syntax were evident. Besides, they had no intention of hiding who they were and where they came from. For them, that was the great attraction of living in Canada, “this new country” as my father called it. So what if they were greenies with accents? Many of our neighbours were just like them — immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe — all speaking accented English, all eager to be Canadian citizens.
And so, while I didn’t learn the variety of languages my parents did, during the evenings when they hosted the korten shpilers ( card players) I would weave in and out of the kitchen picking up bit and pieces of Yiddish that would blend into the hybrid mother tongue of my own.
Everyone seems labelled with a descriptor right from a tale by Yiddish authors I.B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem: by character from — mentsch (good person) to paskudnyak ( scoundrel); by place of birth — Galitizianer (Galicia, now Ukraine), Litvak (Lithuania), Yekke (Germany); by appearance — the langer loksh ( tall, skinny person, literally, long noodle), the ferd (strong as a horse), the prost mentsch ( common person). Two Yiddish words were particularly familiar: shlimazel (clumsy person) and nudnik (noodge or pest). I was habitually called both by my parents with the command, considering what a shlimazel I was, “Loyf nit!” ( Don’t hurry, literally, don’t run!) and “Klap mir nit kop!” (Stop talking so much! literally, Don’t bang me in the head!) in the midst of one of my ceaseless, noodge soliloquies.
I never managed to completely break the code of why certain sentences demanded Yiddish, while others English. But I did find that Yiddish curses were so much more colourful and cutting than blunt one-word ones in English, like the deadly Gey in drerd, arayn! ( Go into the ground, and die already!).
Exclamations, of course, like Oy gevalt! (Good grief!), Genug! (Enough!) and descriptive catchphrases like bobe mayse (a grandmother’s tall tale) and bobe’s tam ( grandmother’s terrible taste) were extra dramatic and vivid in Yiddish.
And philosophical observations such as Yeder mentsch hot zayne eygene peckel (Every person has their burden); the Vonnegut-like Azoy geyt es (So it goes) and Es vet helfn vi toytn bankes (It will help like putting healing, heated cups on a dead person) were most aptly expressed by Yiddish aphorisms.
Two codes, though, were easily broken.
Since my parents usually called me by my Yiddish nickname, Sherilah, if I heard them say Sherie, I knew I was in the doghouse.
And when they were talking about something they didn’t want me to know about, they spoke Polish, which I labelled the secret language.
Wherever they went, they were pleased to find someone who spoke Polish or Russian and French, in my father’s case. They enjoyed drawing on those languages to chat.
Gradually over the years, their Yiddish/English hybrid became more and more English. As old friends moved away or abandoned Yiddish because their children didn’t understand the language, and new friends didn’t speak it, they found themselves speaking English most of the time.
Yet near their deaths, both my parents reverted back to only speaking Yiddish, the comforting language of heym. We resumed the old pattern of my mother or my father speaking Yiddish to me, while I responded as I had as a child in a patchwork of mostly English with Yiddish words and phrases thrown in.
When I remember their voices, it is Yiddish I hear them speaking to me, for Yiddish said it best.
I loved Yiddish — its lively idioms, slang and proverbs, and most of all, its pizzazz