Crazy attitude to mamaloshen
CAN SOMEONE write a great article in the JC in response to this madness?” So read the cri de coeur from the distinguished RussianJewish singer Polina Shepherd on the Yiddish London group’s Facebook page, goaded by James Inverne’s invective against contemporary Yiddishkeit. (JC, September 27)
“How offensive”, “Fifty shades of stupid”, “khutspedike narishkeit” (impudent idiocy) were among the more printable of the responses I came across. As someone whose inner life was transformed by the muses of Yiddish literature and song, I understood their anger and pain. It felt like an attack on the very core of my Jewish being.
As Polina Shepherd then went on to assert, “Too many people think like that. Not just one. Thousands.” So it is not only against James Inverne that I have taken up arms but all those who think like him.
“A makeshift (language) that we pieced together from various countries to which we were exiled. Yiddish is the very definition of a people without a home.” Thus, Inverne dismisses, among other things, 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland.
Is Yiddish any more makeshift than his own English tongue? Almost all languages are composites of influences. Both Yiddish and English have a Germanic core enriched by other tongues: French and Latin in the case of English, Hebrew and Slavic languages in the case of Yiddish.
Whereas English spread throughout the world, thanks to Britain’s imperial past, Yiddish remained the language of one people who, until the creation of the state of Israel, lived as a minority among nations that spoke languages other than their own.
To describe as makeshift a language that has survived 1,000 years and was spoken by 10,000,000 on the eve of the khurbn (the Yiddish word for Holocaust, meaning “destruction”) is simply inaccurate. Yiddish is a language in its own right. Its literature goes back to the 14th century.
It boasts a Nobel Prize winning novelist in I B Singer and, in Abraham Sutzkever, one of the most important poets of the 20th century.
The greatness of their work is in no small part due to the glory of the Yiddish language itself, a wonderfully flexible and humane tongue, imbued with humour and passion, which, unlike Hebrew, grew out of the long and deep European Jewish experience.
Inverne, a distinguished writer who, among his many accomplishments, edited Gramophone magazine, relates that he turned off the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof after a few songs, preferring a German-language version on Spotify which was much more to his taste.
There he could “enjoy the fascinating classical undertones” that were revealed. “Quot homines, tot sententiae” (there are as many opinions as there are men) ,wrote the Afro-Roman playwright Terence, in one of the tongues that contributed to English. But, underlying Inverne’s uneasiness, does one detect the old divide between the middle-class Jews who spoke the tongues of their Gentile neighbours and the working-class Jews who spoke Yiddish? The mother of a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor friend of mine, who grew up speaking Polish but not Yiddish, couldn’t countenance garlic because she associated its smell with the Yiddish-speaking, working-class Chasidim whom she despised.
Most contentiously, Inverne links Yiddishkeit to a betrayal of the Zionist ideal embodied in the Hebrew language of Israel.
“I sense an agenda,” he writes, “… increasing numbers of diaspora — especially American — Jews do not feel the deep connection to Israel that previous generations did… some non-Zionist Jews look elsewhere for their Jewish identity. They find Yiddish, a link back to a thriving, bustling pre-Shoah culture, and they find riches there and they find pride there and they don’t have to engage with Hebrew, with its overtones of religion and Zionism.”
But contemporary lovers of Yiddish culture are no more nor less likely to be Zionists than other Jews. To quote Eli Grunfeld, director of the Tel Aviv Yiddish festival, “More and more Israelis, some of them second- and third-generation, are making an effort to learn the language and culture of their families.” Perhaps because, unlike Inverne and his ilk, they wish to celebrate rather than denigrate a past which, despite frequent persecution, was also culturally and spiritually rich.
Rather than seeing contemporary Yiddishkeit as “a threat” (Inverne’s words), it should be the duty of all Ashkhenazi Jews to honour and preserve the magnificent heritage of a language whose speakers were mercilessly exterminated within living memory.
Mark Glanville is the performer and creator of two song cycles comprised of traditional Yiddish songs: ‘A Yiddish Winterreise’ and ‘Di Sheyne Milnerin.’ His latest programme, ‘Weinberg – Citizen of Nowhere’ will be performed at the Polin Museum in Warsaw on 8 December 2019 and will be released on CD later in the year.