For 40 years, this UConn group has been reading and dissecting Yiddish text
For 40 years now, a group of academics at UConn have gathered to read and dissect texts in their original Yiddish.
Yiddish, spoken by Jews of Eastern European origin is, as Avinoam Patt explained, is something of a composite language. Patt, director of UConn’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, called it “a fusion language.”
“It’s a very, very colorful language. It’s very expressive. It has amazing idioms, proverbs that you can’t say in other languages,” Patt said.
About 1,000 years old, Yiddish uses some Hebrew words, often referred to as “lashon kodesh,” or “holy language.” Many Yiddish words stem from middle German, but there are also Slavic influences.
Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., said that for native Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe, “Hebrew was like Latin, it was the language of scholarship and prayer, whereas Yiddish was the language of everyday life.”
“Something like 20 percent of all the vocabulary in Yiddish comes from Hebrew and Aramaic,” Lansky said. “So that definitely gives a very Jewish quality to the language.”
Much of the structure of the language is Germanic but when writing Yiddish, you use Hebrew letters regardless of the word’s origin, and the language varies from region to region. Those regional differences and the composite nature of the language is what makes Yiddish difficult to dissect.
“With any language, it reflects socio-cultural experiences,” said UConn sociology professor Arnold Dashefsky.
Dashefsky was part of the group, 40 years ago, that started what they call the “Yiddish tish,” literally Yiddish “table.”
“In the spring of 1979, the Board of Trustees created the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish life,” Dashefsky said. In an attempt to increase the visibility of the new center, “We started something called a faculty forum where we had different faculty members make presentations a couple of times a semester.”
One of those faculty forums focused on Yiddish and, in 1982, the Yiddish tish began regularly gathering to read and interpret Yiddish classical literature.
Over the years, the group has read many Yiddish authors, including the famed humorist Sholem Aleichem, Yud Lamed Peretz and Isaac Bashevis Singer. They’ve even read the Yiddish translation of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
“We’ve been going strong for 40 years, usually having an average attendance of eight to 10 people, which I must confess hasn’t changed that much over the years,” Dashefsky said. “Although the group has gotten younger.”
At its peak prior to World War II, there were about 11 million Yiddish speakers worldwide. That number dwindled during and after the war but Lansky said with the language remaining the primary mode of communication for Orthodox Jews of Eastern European origin, use of Yiddish has increased as those communities have grown.
There are, it is estimated, about 600,000 Yiddish speakers around the world, about 250,000 of them in the United States.
There is no shortage of Yiddish language texts, however. Lansky said the Yiddish Book Center has grown to comprise about 1.5 million volumes since it was founded in 1980.
Jews were often considered and treated as outsiders in Europe and Yiddish, Patt said, provides the “sociological function” of “maintaining difference and separation from the non-Jewish world.”
“We didn’t have a country of our own for much of our history, and that shaped the Jewish character as well,” Lansky said. “So there is a kind of marginal quality to that culture that’s very much present within the language.”
But it’s also associated with humor and, as such, a means of binding a community closer together.
“We associate Yiddish with humor and I think it’s an important vehicle for Jewish humor, but also, the Jewish humor is very often the humor of the outsider,” Patt said. “Either it was an insight or humor, you could tell jokes that only your fellow Jews would understand.”
Lansky said some Yiddish words “sound funny” to Englishspeaking ears. He recalled a professor at Columbia who used as an example the Yiddish word “farblunget,” which literally means “lost.”
“He said, ‘I don’t understand why people laugh at Yiddish words. People say farblunget, and they think that’s funny. that’s a perfectly solid Yiddish word. It has a very clearly established etymology. I don’t understand why people find this funny,’” Lansky said.
But Lansky believes that the humor in the language and in many of the published stories examined by UConn’s Yiddish group goes deeper than the sound of any word.
“I’d say the characteristic of Yiddish culture is marginality. We were people who lived on the outside for a very long time,” he said. “There’s humor in that. It’s often a sad humor, a poignant humor, tragic humor, but there is humor.”