Longing for Yiddish

"Appeal of Yiddish was connected with a sense of yearning and longing for that being Jewish as well as identifying yourself with no longer large roots of Yiddish in Jewish culture. But like Alterman said she died but continued to go."

Speech of the Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Jerusalem literary forum on 06/24/2010.

In 1945 Maroushka Korczak, a Holocaust survivor, a leader of Jewish resistance in Vilna, was speaking on Histadrut convention and told to the shocked audience about the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry. She spoke in Yiddish. After her speech David Ben Gurion get to the podium and angrily joked to her with disregard to content of the speech, "a foreign and harsh language."



A storm arose in a audience and someone called out: "It's language that speak two-thirds of the Jewish people in recent times", but Ben-Gurion did not give up and continue to repeat: "strange and harsh, strange and harsh."

Ben Gurion was not a single sharp opposition to Yiddish. When the Hebrew University was founded there were those, who offered to establish a faculty of Yiddish Literature. The "Stars of the Hebrew language Battalion”, led by Ussishkin, David Yellin and Joseph Klausner, announced that if the faculty of Yiddish will be established at University, they will shatter the windows of school with stones.

This excitement comes at a time when Yiddish still seemed a competitor to Hebrew. University won. Yiddish is dying, but it still has a mystery in our hearts and hidden between the pages of wonderful history of the Jewish people.

Today Yiddish language is a longing for more. It is a unique cultural phenomenon. Yiddish is classic of the wanderer, who captured hearts of many. Its Beauty is not dull, its smell is not faded. Its wit has no equal. Since the beginning of the ninth century when the Jews moved to the areas of the German language domination, Yiddish was the language of European Jews, who defined their identity and maintained their uniqueness. Yiddish is spoken and written language, therefore, have a history of twelve hundred years. And we have to remember, Jews in a Middle Ages, unlike most nations around them, were literate. They also were certainly literate in Hebrew, the language of the Torah.

Yiddish has become a system of bridges between the German language, and the Hebrew letters; the Holy Tongue, in which we praise the Creator, and the daily language in which argue with him; the link between the prophetic dream and the daily routine reality; the Aramaic lexicon and an eternity. There are layers and layers of Yiddish literature were created during for many generations - from Jewish scripts, literary education and literature which went to modernity.

In the late 19th and early 20th century Yiddish was stronger and more powerful than the Hebrew. But the fate of the language likes a fate of the nation. In the words of Zhitlovsky: "Both (the people and language) have to prove that they were genuine. Jews must demonstrate that they are really a nation and Yiddish must prove that it is indeed a language." Destruction of the largest Yiddish-speaking concentration in Eastern Europe, which was done by the Nazis, periodic cultural oppression of the Jews in the Soviet Union, cultural assimilation of the descendants of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the new world - threatened to cut a kidney on Yiddish culture, the literature, the press of its speech.

Intense gravity of Yiddish culture was associated with yearning and longing for that sense of being Jewish. Yiddish being on his deathbed, still its appeal has not expired. Alterman ones said, "She died but kept walking."

The language steeped in memories and landscapes, shrouded in warmth of parent’s home, full of total simplicity, joy and sorrow, difficulties and hardships as well as life wisdom and wit, which is rich and poor at the same time.

Being the reality of Jewish life in many vibrant situations gave Yiddish its mischief, winking humor. Speech and language facial expressions were accompanied by - a body. Songs for its taste, its tongue did original art. Yiddish is a family language as well as global. Queue of laughter and tears, sad love and jokes, embroidering tales, fables is a Yiddish. Sometimes it brings tears to our eyes.

No Eastern European Jew can remain indifferent to Yiddish. I myself, absorbed the wonders of the Yiddish language, and its culture got a secret place full warmth and loving in my heart. Jacob Glatstein poet once said: "Mir Order tremor Yiddish, Yiddish Maine End, On How to Order Deir Talk and Hebrew anyway."



Interesting to see how Jewish writers and poets conquered the world, as far as United States and Mainland China. Artists like Shalom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Heinrich Heine, Brodski, Isaac Babel, Kafka, are all came from the old epoch called Yiddish.

Isaac Bashevis Singer once told me that he was sure his books are going to be bestsellers forever. I asked him, How come? And he answered "well how about resurrection." According to tradition, the first to rise again are certainly Jews of Jerusalem. And ask you, - what books are they going to buy, when they left the graves? Yiddish books, of cause.