Paul Melrood kept Yiddish alive in Milwaukee
Ukrainian immigrant dies at age 99
Paul Melrood, before he died at 99 last week, was possibly one of the last remaining eastern European Jewish immigrants to arrive in Milwaukee in the early part of the 20th century, his family says.
Melrood was born in 1920 in the Jewish village of Pilyava in eastern Ukraine. He spoke Yiddish as his first language, and after immigrating to Milwaukee became a powerful voice in its preservation.
“His roots were encased in Yiddish. Life didn’t have as much meaning outside of that world,” his daughter Laurie Melrood said last week. “He was bound to keep that alive and to keep it fresh.”
His family left Pilyava, in the Podolia province, when Melrood was a baby, fleeing violent pogroms in the region. Ukrainian nationalists, Bolsheviks and Poles all at one point claimed parts of Podolia, and all targeted Jews in massacres during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921.
Had Melrood’s family not immigrated to the United States, they may have been subject in 1941 to the Einsatzgruppen, or the Nazi killing squads that systematically murdered thousands of Podolian Jews and decimated entire towns.
Melrood’s family met his father’s brother in Milwaukee after a long journey: by wagon and ship, with a stop in Montreal.
“That story of eastern European immigration was the story for thousands of Milwaukeean Jewish immigrants,” Laurie said. “But my dad, being 99 when he passed, was really one of the last that came in that wave.”
The family settled in a vibrant Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in the North Division. He spoke Yiddish until age 5, learning English once he started school, and grew up with well-known Yiddish writers fre
quently visiting his home. His father taught the language at Jewish schools in the city.
Melrood also may have been one of the last living native Yiddish speakers in Milwaukee, friends and family believe. Few American Jewish children today learn Yiddish as a first language outside the Hasidic community in New York, said Joel Berkowitz, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor of Hebrew Studies who knew Melrood.
Berkowitz recalls visiting Melrood in his later years when his memory wasn’t as crisp. The professor spoke a few words in Yiddish and Melrood’s blue eyes lit up: a spark of recognition, of a life lived in a rich cultural world of Yiddish theater and poetry.
It would’ve been rare even for most of the other Jewish residents of his nursing home to be able to have a conversation with Melrood in Yiddish, Berkowitz said. They might know the odd phrase or a few popular Yiddish songs, but the language was truly integral to Melrood’s sense of self.
“The way in which those were just so central to how his mind worked — and I would say, how his heart worked, and his soul,” Berkowitz said. “It was just completely infused with his lifelong speaking of the language, his love of the language.”
Melrood served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and went on to a career in real estate. He was a key member of the Milwaukee-based Yiddish theater troupe, Peretz Hirshbein Folk Theater, which put on works from “the most revered and admired” playwrights in the genre for 50 years, Berkowitz said.
He also wrote and performed Yiddish-language radio plays throughout his life, and for some years in the late 1940s and ’50s he hosted a Yiddish program on Milwaukee’s old WEMP radio station, his daughter Laurie said.
“He was living in a very Jewish world, but once he ventured out into the university and into the military, he started seeing another America,” Laurie said.
In 2008, Melrood became president of the International Association of Yiddish Clubs. He also served as president of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Alumni Association — Melrood attended its predecessor, the Milwaukee State Teachers College.
Laurie and her sister Elise Melrood have undertaken efforts to learn Yiddish and keep their father’s legacy alive. But many young Jews don’t know their grandparents’ stories of immigration, Berkowitz said.
The community in which Melrood grew up is markedly different than today’s world, and it’s at risk of being forgotten if families don’t talk about their pasts.
“Paul came of age where there was a Yiddish cultural and linguistic scene in Milwaukee. And there just isn’t now,” Berkowitz said. Eager for their kids to fit in in America, immigrant parents often didn’t teach their children Yiddish and didn’t share their stories.
As a professor, Berkowitz is tapped into an international community of Yiddish aficionados, but “that’s very different from people going down the street to a deli in West Milwaukee and sitting down and speaking Yiddish,” he said.
Not all from Melrood’s generation is lost, though. People around the world are immersing themselves in Yiddish music and theater and earning PhDs, Berkowitz said. They’re more interested than ever in genealogy. When her uncle died a few years ago, Laurie enrolled in Yiddish classes in New York City and found most of her classmates were nonJewish Europeans who felt that knowing Yiddish was the key to best understanding literature and history.
“One era passes and a new one comes along,” Berkowitz said.
It’s so important Yiddish is preserved, Berkowitz believes, because the wealth of cultural material created by modern eastern European Jews is best consumed in its native tongue. Yiddish culture of the past several centuries constitutes one of the “great Jewish civilizations ever,” Berkowitz said.
“If one learns Yiddish, it gives someone the keys to that kingdom.”
Melrood knew that. He often came to Yiddish cultural events Berkowitz hosted and was heartened by the new developments and connections being forged in the Yiddish world, Berkowitz could tell.
“He was part of that past and came out of it, but he wasn’t stuck in it,” Berkowitz said. “He was still very much engaged with what was happening in the Yiddish cultural world. It didn’t stand still for him.”
For Berkowitz, Melrood embodies
yiddishkayt, which is somewhat untranslatable, but essentially means Jewishness and the values embedded within that identity.
“With someone like him, you can’t separate out the native speaking of the language, the lifelong love of the language and culture, and also the other aspects of who he was as a Jew,” Berkowitz said. “His values of kindness and humanness and decency to everyone that he came across were, in his case, deeply connected to that sense of what, to him, Judaism would’ve been about.”
And a Yiddish word that represents Melrood best for his daughter Laurie?
Dankbar, she said. Grateful — he was always saying it. For his children learning the language that meant so much to him, for the vibrant life he was able to lead in America. Ikh bin zeyer dankbar, he’d say. I am very grateful.
Melrood is preceded in death by his parents, Sonia and Mordecai Melrood, and his wife Gertrude. He is survived by his second wife, Marlene, his brother Eugene, and his children Laurie, Elise and Armin.