John McWhorter:
YIDDISH IS ALIVE AND WELL//TNR//9,2,10
On a regular basis the media tells us that Yiddish is dying--in that there is a shrinking market for literature in the language. Alas, one cannot keep a Yiddish bookstore open even in New York City. And although there are students learning the language in college and a healthy amount of activities and programs seeking to preserve it, there are those who say that the very existence of efforts like these signals that the language will never truly live again (with the revival of Hebrew being the one true exception).
But what about the hundreds of thousands of people who use Yiddish as an everyday language in the home decade after decade--namely, Hasidic Jews?
For example, 90 percent of the 13,000-plus residents of the Hasidic town of Kiryas Joel in New York State speak Yiddish in the home. And they tend to have huge families--that is, kids are being raised in it, as I have twice seen in Hasidic families I encountered on airplanes. (To wit: My intrusive question “Excuse me, are you speaking Yiddish????? And the answer, “Oh, yes... ” with a slight perplexity that I would even find it interesting.) At last count in 2006, about 150,000 Americans alone spoke Yiddish at home. There are about 20,000 more in Canada, and many more elsewhere.
Whence the idea, then, that Yiddish is dying? The problem is a notion that a language doesn’t really exist unless it is thriving on the page. But that is, frankly, an illusion due to the invention of print just several centuries ago. There are about 6000 languages in the world, and only about 200 are written in any real way. That is, there are 5800 languages that are only spoken--and yet tell their speakers that the languages they learn on their mommies’ knee are not “real”!
Remember that New Yorker piece a few years ago about the Amazonian tribe called the Piraha who don’t really have numbers? It’s never written except by linguists, but it’s surely real. I study an English-Portuguese-Dutch-African hybrid spoken by 20,000 descendants of escaped slaves in the Surinam rain forest. It is written only by linguists and missionaries. Yet the number of its speakers stays relatively constant; it is not endangered. Saramaccan, as this language is called, is surely real--albeit spoken by a mere seventh as many people as Yiddish is.
Yiddish, then, is not dying in the least. There would seem to be a notion that if it is only being spoken casually in homes then it is not alive--but this is nonsensical. I know what a dying language is--a Native American language now spoken only by people in late middle age or older that youngsters of the culture only know some words of. That is, most Native American languages or the Aboriginal languages in Australia. Languages die, as I have commented on in this slot.
That is not Yiddish. Is Yiddish literature no longer what it once was? Obviously. Is there a strip of Yiddish-language theatres on Second Avenue in New York City? Last time I checked, no. Are there now Molly Goldbergs saying “Yoo-hoo” out of their tenement windows speaking a Yiddishe-inflected English? No--and for the record, even Gertude Berg didn’t actually talk that way in real life. But is Yiddish dying? Feh! Languages like Navajo should have it so good.
Language likely traces to the birth of our species 150,000 years ago. Writing started about 5500 years ago. Which means that if language had only existed for 24 hours, writing would only have come along after 11 PM. A language is what people speak. Any sense that its robust persistence among Hasids is somehow “not real” is, if you think about it, a claim that they are somehow not real people. Upon which they might venture “Geh kaken oifen yam!
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Gerry wrote:
ReplyDelete...Yes, Yiddish lives, and people like Dovid Katz, in his book Words on Fire, point to the Chasidim or Haredi community, as the carriers to the future of Yiddish. But, the Yiddish they speak is becoming more and more detached from the "modern" post haskala, modern Yiddish that was the language that Leibl taught. The speakers and writer base of that language is becoming thinner and thinner. Modern Yiddish, in its cultural expression was a secular language. It was the mame loshn of people like Marc Chagall, Isaac Bashevis, Irving Howe and Isak Babel. That secular, modern culture was almost destroyed by Hitler, Stalin and Zionist ideology that fought Yiddish in Israel.
The Chasidic and Haredi community never accepted the idea of a modern Yidishkayt. Their only cultural expession was that of torah learning. In that end they set up the religious publishing houses, and newspaper network that supported the idea of " toyreh iz di beste skhoyre." Sholem Aleykhem, Peretz, Isaac Bashevis, and Rivke Basman were treyf to them.
The upshot is that many modern Yiddish speakers would have difficulty followng a Chsyidish conversation. There are many religious allusions that are not part of our cultural journe anymore, they've bent the grammar in ways that would drive Leibl crazy. But, hey, they speak Yiddish. And that's good. Good for them only or also for he larger Jewish community? I don't know if that larger community will take enough notice of them to help make Yiddish a contributing part to the cultue of that larger community.
The Chasidim are publishing newspaper, childrens story books. They've even published a coupl of novels in Yiddish -- written by women. Is this the start of a more liberal cultural expression? Ver veys...