"Outwitting History" - preserving Yiddish

Twenty-three years ago when I and my siblings were clearing up our parents' flat in Cape Town, I asked Lillian Dubb whom I'd met 10 years before at a summer Yiddish program in Oxford, what we should do with my mother's collection of Yiddish books. I think Chava Leah (which is how I knew her because we all used our Yiddish names that summer) referred us to the Kaplan Centre at UCT. Someone came to look at the books. They took some they didn't have copies of, I kept a few, including the two volume: "Jerusalem of Lithuania" (about the Jews of Vilna) and my sister took a copy of the Rakishok (Rokiskis) Yiskor-buch, but what of the rest? The person said we pack up the rest and when we have enough to fill a container or half or whatever, we send them to a Book Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts. It seemed a bit sad that no-one would want them in South Africa (quite a few had originally come from the Western Hemisphere already - Argentina no less) but it was comforting to know that we didn't have to throw them away or bury them - something Jews do with worn out prayer books.

And that was pretty much all I knew or bothered to find out until a friend lent

me "Outwitting History", Aaron Lansky's account - both hilarious and moving - about saving a whole culture before it got thrown in the trash by hiring trucks, donning gloves and doing the hard dusty work of saving Yiddish books from attics, basements and garages all over the United States and beyond. Then subsequently setting up in a specially designed building, the  Yiddish Book Centre.

I've forgotten most of the Yiddish I learnt that summer in 1982 but the impact of what it meant to me to study it has stayed with me to this day. It was a form of cultural liberation. I wrote about the experience shortly after, in a booklet that some of us in the London Jewish Women's History Group published

ourselves - "You'd prefer me not to mention it....." The lives of four Jewish daughters of refugees. The section on learning Yiddish was also published as a separate article - "Mother's Milk" - in "New Society".

"...It has to do with a process of going back in my history, armed with better information than I had at the time, and deliberately, where I can, replacing shame with pride. Nothing could have been more shameful for me in my early years, than my parents' Yiddish accents, the excessive emotionality of the language, the sucking of tea through sugar cubes, the bursting into song at the most inappropriate moments, the telling of joke after joke by the men.

...The intention to change my attitude didn't immediately alter my feelings. People, hearing I was going to learn Yiddish, burst out laughing and I joined in. Embarrassment reigned. People are reminded of skeletons they'd hoped were forever locked in the cupboards of their childhoods: grandmothers who pinched your cheek and stank of chicken-soup, poverty, overcrowding, the struggle to be brilliant, to make it, the pressures to get married. I tried my utmost to tell people in a matter-of-fact way. Impossible. No Jew feels academic about Yiddish. Say you were learning 'Chinese' - you would get respect and curiosity as a response. Say 'French' - people would think it was high time you learnt it. But Yiddish! Hoots of laughter, put-downs, a phrase or two, the exchange of histories......and then, a glimpse of something - that those one or two people one grew up with had something one hadn't learnt to value - and so now it was lost, or at best, dying fast."

And then the course starts:

"...the beginners' class. Almost half the students are Gentiles - two language professors and the others having particular interests in the language. I am amazed - Yiddish is of some interest to academics apparently! There are only a few of us who grew up with it. How can I describe the experience of being told that if you use the diminutive, ...lakh at the end of a word, as in 'oremlakh' (kind of poor) or 'shikelakh' (kind of drunk), you have to rotate your hands at the wrist? - have to, else its not Yiddish. Or, if you say, 'Kholile!' (God forbid!), you must stamp your foot. There are Gentiles listening, delightedly eager to learn precisely this aspect of the language. They practice diligently. Would my mother ever believe it?! Exchanging shame for pride suddenly doesn't seem a very complicated process, and it doesn't take long."

Colonialism and triumphalism have destroyed many cultures on our planet and with them human languages. In the case of Yiddish, although not entirely destroyed, it was the Holocaust and in no small measure, the Stalinist excesses of Soviet communism, that very nearly wiped it out. How moving and ironic it is therefore to read about the adventures of Aaron Lansky and his merry band arriving in Lithuania with thousands of requested Yiddish schoolbooks almost 50 years to the day after the Soviets occupied the Baltic states, and 49 years after the Nazi killing spree of Eastern European Jews began in the summer of 1941.

 

A South African addendum 

You can also read Joseph Sherman's interesting account of trying to find a library in South Africa that would take an important collection of Yiddish books: "TOWARDS A ‘PROPER’ LIBRARY, OR SIX THOUSAND BOOKS IN SEARCH OF A HOME" . (Jewish Affairs, Vol. 65(1) Pesach 2010 p. 22)