The Ambivalence of Yiddish in Israel

 

In all the buzz and confusion and emotions and let´s say it bluntly, hate too, of accusing Israel of all the imaginable crimes in the world, sometimes just because it look intellectually trendy for some, stating how the Yiddish language was oppressed by the ´Zionists´ is one of the frequent intellectual tropes. The other one - that will approach another time - is to scream discrimination against the Jews from Arab lands and Ethiopia who moved to Israel.

As in the case of half-truths and manipulated concepts, there is a certain authenticity to those claims and there are facts that may support those assumptions. However, if done in full academic honesty, there would be many more arguments who will balance such statements, not necessarily to negate them - another ideological-driven stance that does not have anything to do with academic curiosity - but to display a diversity which, in fact, is the real face of things.

Yiddish in Israel. A History by Rachel Rojanski is an investigation into the story of acceptance of Yiddish in the land and later on, the state of Israel. Was really the mainstream Israeli culture ashamed of the its Yiddish writers, of its Yiddish roots? What about the socialist and literary culture of the ´old country´ who shaped so many of the elites - cultural, political - of the Yishuv? Was it Ben Gurion indeed so angry and enemy-like against the Yiddish culture?

The biggest merit of the book, besides using extensive sources covering both the nation-building process and the fine cultural layers covering not only literature but also theater, a chapter in my opinion not enough explored when it comes to its role in shaping Zionism as a nation building process. 

Indeed, the first years of the state of Israel were, as expected, focused on building the nation - economically, socially, internationally, politically, culturally. Part of the ´imaginary community´, both Hebrew and the projection of a citizen with a strong personality, strong enough to leave behind the centuries of persecutions and grow brave enough to not allow any other Holocaust to happen, were important elements. Until the 1980s-1990s, Yiddish - and at a lesser extent, because counting a much smaller amount of active users, Ladino - were not necessarily considered a threat to this new identity in the making, but they were rarely needed for the process. It was not automatically an open hostility towards Yiddish, but it has rather to do with a meticulous planning of nation-building. 

Interestingly, Yiddish was used in the pre-state period of time as an intellectual tool shaping Zionism but in its new revival episode it is associated with those groups and mindsets which, in fact, deny the political and especially religious availability of Zionism - particularly among the Hasidic groups in Israel and abroad, such as Satmer. 

Yiddish in Israel is an important contribution to understanding not only the history of a language - who, not surprisingly for many, is going through such a revival nowadays - but the place of the language within the national identity. Its struggle and ambivalence are part of the process and reading the different stories with a clean, curious, hate-free eye is important for fully acknowledging the phenomenon. The more people would read and know the more - hopefully - will be able to write honestly about cultural changes and phenomenon. 

Oh, and calling Yiddish an authentic language, folksy and humorous is such a promise that, in fact, this language cannot ever disappear, because it reflects a certain state of mind and humanity cannot deprive itself such genuine humanly features. 

This book is a great recommendation to anyone having an academic interest in languages, Yiddish and state-building, particularly Israel. It is well documented, written in full academic honesty and with a truth-seeking attitude, such an important academic skill unfortunately too easily abandoned for the sake of political activism of all kinds.

 

The Joys of Yiddish

On a bus in Tel Aviv, a mother was talking animatedly, in Yiddish, to her little boy - who kept answering her in Hebrew. And eatch time the mother said, "No, not talk Yiddish!". An impatient Israeli, overhearing this, exclaimed, "Lady, why do you insist the boy talk in Yiddish instead of Hebrew?"

Replied the mother, "I don't want him to forget he's a Jew".

Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish

Old Yiddish story

A traveler came into a hotel late at night and asked for a room. He was told there was only one vacant roam. And this was next to the room of a very nervous man. He was therefore cautioned against making any noise.The traveler agreed. While undressing, however, he forgot the admonition and tossed one shoe on the floor with a loud thud. Then, suddenly, remembering his promise, he gently set down the other one. About three hours later there was a thump on the wall and his neighbor called in anxiously: 'men are you going to drop the second shoe?"

from Judaism as a Religion, by Rabbi Leon Stitskin, Bloch Publishing House 1937, p. 46

A Bit of Herring, a Pinch of Salt, and a Morsel of Bread

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The dubner maged once heard a scholar get up on the bime, the platform of the synagogue, and deliver a learned discourse, citing Biblical verses, Talmudic and rabbinic commentaries, and who knows what else. In the course of his talk, he managed to heap scorn upon the folk preached who had spoken before him.

When the learned man was done, the dubner maged said to him "Let me tell you a parable that may prove useful".

In a certain town there once lived a great merchant, very clever man. A very, very clever man. He observed that there were many rich and powerful people in his town, so he opened a jewelry store and had many customers. But some while later, he moved to a smaller town whose inhabitants, sad to say, were poor and threadbare.

Seeing that, the clever merchant opened a store - no, not a store, a little shop, in which he sold herring, salt, kerosene, and other ordinary things. And with the same hands that once handled diamonds, he now served up herrings and kerosene. And just as the merchand had been satisfied with the jewelry store, so now he was pleased with the poor little shop. No - he was actually more pleased with it; everything he did delighted him.

Thins went on like this until one day a friend from the larger town came to visit him and said "I don't understand. How is it fitting for a man who once sold diamonds and gems to be selling herring and salt and other such stuff?"

The good and the clever merchand replies, "I am sorry to say that you don't get the point. Let me tell you something: The people who live in the large city are rich. They own many jewels and they are great connoisseurs of jewelry. But in this little town, the poor are poor. They work with their hands and struggle to make ends meet. They don't need diamonds, nor do they understand them. Indeed, what they need...yes! - they need a bit of herring, a pinch of salt, and a morsel of bread".

from Yiddish Folktales, ed. by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, Translated by Leonard Wolf, 1988, YIVO, pp.8-9

Naked Truth and Resplendent Parable

The great scholar known as the Vilna Gaon once asked the Preacher of Dubno, "Help me to understand. What makes a parable so influential? If I recite Torah, there's a small audience, but let me tell a parable and the synagogue is full. Why is that?"

The dubner maged replied,"I'll explain it to you by means of a parable".

"Once upon a time Truth went about the streets as naked as the day he was born. As a result, no one would let him into their homes. Whenever people caught sight of him, they turned away or fled. One day when Truth was sadly wandering about, he came upon Parable. Parable, seeing Truth, said, "Tell me, neighbor, what makes you look so sad? Truth replied bitterly, ´Ah, brother, things are bad. Very bad. I´m old, very old, and no one wants to acknowledge me. No one wants anything to do with me´.

"Hearing that, Parable said, "People don´t run away from you because you are old. I too am old. Very old. But the older I get,the better people like me. I´ll tell you a secret: Everyone likes things to be disguised and perttied up a bit. Let me lend you some splendid clothes like mine, and you´ll see that the very people who pushed you aside will invite you into their homes and be glad of your company.

"Truth took Parable´s advice and put on the borrowed clothes. And from that time on, Truth and Parable have gone hand in had together and everyone loves them. They make a happy pair".

Yiddish Folktales, ed. by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, transl. Leonard Wolf, First Shocken Paperback Edition, 1997, p. 7

From the History of the Yiddish Presss

and of Hasidic fights.

Partisan or Parasite?

Daniel Kahn and the New Jewish Questions

courtesy of daniel kahn and the painted bird

Voice of Protest: From the Wall to the world.

By Rokhl Kafrissen

May 13, 2009, issue of May 22, 2009.

Forward.com

Earlier this month, the 90th birthday of folk legend Pete Seeger drew 15,000 people to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The sold-out show demonstrated the legacy, and continuing vitality, of the American protest-song tradition, a tradition that was born in the Great Depression and gave rise to some of the fiercest critiques of modern capitalism and imperialism in any discourse. Daniel Kahn, a Detroit-born singer-songwriter now living in Berlin, is part of that tradition, while at the same time creating a new musical idiom blending American-folk and Yiddish-protest song. Kahn, 30, is a post-modern folkie just as likely to quote from the Industrial Workers of the World songbook as to cite Marxist critic Slavoj Zizek. But his political sympathies and artistic creations are very much reminiscent of those of Seeger and his progeny.

For example, Kahn was back in the United States, performing, and saw President Obama’s March 24 press conference, at which the president was pointedly asked about the problem of growing homelessness and tent cities springing up around the United States. Disturbed by these images reminiscent of the Great Depression, Kahn woke in the middle of the night and set to work writing original English lyrics for an old Yiddish song about the anger of the unemployed, “Arbetloze Marsh” (“The March of the Unemployed”), originally written by Mordecai Gebirtig.

one, two, three, four

join the marching jobless corps

no work in the factory

no more manufacturing

every tool is broke and rusted

every wheel and window busted

through the city streets we go

idle as a CEO

idle as a CEO

one, two, three, four

join the marching jobless corps

we don’t have to pay no rent

sleeping in a camping tent

dumpster diving don’t take money

every bite is shared with twenty

let the yuppies have their wine

bread and water suit us fine

bread and water suit us fine

The next day, The New York Times featured Fresno, Calif.’s, tent cities on the front page.

Since then, Kahn has been performing “Arbetloze Marsh,” in Yiddish and English for eager listeners, many of whom are unemployed or holding on to whatever employment they have. As the crowd at Barbès in Brooklyn’s Park Slope saw at a recent show, for Kahn and his band, The Painted Bird, there’s nothing fuzzy or nostalgic about Yiddish song. Indeed, Yiddish song is the perfect idiom in which Kahn can create his highly political and timely art. The songs that Kahn chooses are political in themselves, but at the same time, the choice of Yiddish, the maligned tongue of the exile, is an act of cultural and political resistance.

Over the past few years, Kahn has gained a following in Europe, and now in the United States, for his uncanny ability to connect history, politics and current events in a variety of languages, including German, English and especially Yiddish. In concert, and with his new album, “Partisans and Parasites,” Kahn establishes himself as a high-art folk troubadour, the rebellious Jewish son of Woody Guthrie and Bertolt Brecht.

Kahn, who started acting professionally at 11 and studied drama in college, decided to move to Berlin in 2005 not because of the city’s vibrant Jewish music scene, but because it was the home of Brecht.

Kahn’s music reflects his love for Brechtian drama. Kahn even created his own genre of music, called “Verfremdungsklezmer,” or alienated klezmer, in an overt nod to Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt, which seeks to highlight the artifice of theater. Verfremdungsklezmer, like its namesake, prods its audience to action through humor and questioning. With The Painted Bird (named after Jerzy Kosin´ski’s grotesque novel of World War II), Kahn often appears onstage in papier-mâché bird masks, alternately playing an accordion, cigar box ukulele, harmonica and electronic bullhorn.

His original songs evoke a Brechtian level of discomfort by problematizing heroes and making the grotesque sympathetic. For example, “Six Million Germans/Nakam” recounts the story of the hero of the Vilnius (known in Yiddish as Vilna) partisans, Abba Kovner, who was among the brave men and women who fought, with few weapons and terrible odds, against the Nazis and their collaborators. Less discussed is Kovner’s decision, with a group of friends, to take revenge on the Germans after the war. Calling themselves Nakam (revenge), they concocted a plan to poison German water supplies and take millions of German victims in retribution. The song, performed as an upbeat klezmer polka, jarringly juxtaposes subject and tone to bring up two of Kahn’s favorite themes, violence and revenge, and forces the listener to question the nature of heroism and justice.

Reworking and re-imagining Yiddish songs, Kahn decries the excesses of modern-day capitalism and sings of contemporary tragedies. Although “Arbetloze Marsh” was written too recently to make it onto the CD, another song on “Partisans and Parasites” voices a similarly fiery populist outrage. “Khurbn Katrina/The Destruction of New Orleans” is perhaps the most compelling moment on the CD. It is based on the 1912 Yiddish song “Dos Lid fun Titanik,” written about the sinking of the Titanic. The inspiration for “Khurbn Katrina” was, of course, Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s disastrous failure to respond to the suffering of the people of New Orleans.

To Kahn, New Orleans is of more than just theoretical interest. He spent a year there after college as a labor organizer working with nurses. And New Orleans is where he was first introduced to contemporary Jewish music. The destruction of New Orleans is personal for Kahn, and he directs his anger at an administration that seemed to do little to prevent the devastation of one of America’s oldest cities. “Khurbn Katrina/The Destruction of New Orleans” is in two parts; the first verses were written collaboratively in Yiddish, and the second, written solely by Kahn, is completely in English. The song begins mournfully, staying close to the Yiddish original, and then transforms into a raucous, New Orleans funeral march in English, with Kahn not so much singing as crying out in mourning:

two lovers they are peacefully lying

in a peace not a soul could disturb

they cried out ‘my dear God we are dying’

but the President seems not to have heard

just imagine, good people, the ruin

how terrible is the wrath of the Lord

with the water from the lake down to Bourbon

from Canal to the Lower 9th Ward

oh my Lord…

Kahn has been touring Europe nonstop with a brilliant band of pan-European collaborators, Jewish and non-Jewish, such as Russian singer/journalist/academic Psoy Korolenko and Moscow-based blues guitar hero Vanya Zhuk. “Nakam/Six Million Germans” is one of Kahn’s most popular songs and already has been translated into German by a German fan of the song. In Europe, where history is never too far away, Jews and non-Jews are hungry to talk about the complicated legacy left by the slaughter of World War II.

The contemporary Jewish drive to recover a broken past doesn’t exist in isolation, but is accompanied by a larger European desire to heal other cultures also devastated by the losses of World War II, including, but not limited to, the loss of Jewish culture. For Kahn, using old Jewish songs and musical traditions makes sense, not because of their peculiar qualities, indeed, but because of their universality. As Kahn told me a few months ago: “Every people’s story is unique. I’m not sure that it is the unique qualities to the Jewish experience that give it its meaning… it might be the qualities that Jews share with other people: oppression, poverty, isolation, otherness.…” With “Partisans and Parasites,” Kahn and his collaborators force us to question the unique, and the universal, for ourselves and for our neighbors, and for our shared future.

Rokhl Kafrissen is working on a book called “The Myth of the Yiddish Atlantis” and writes for Jewish Currents magazine.

Novel delivers Yiddish intellectual world with zest

Chauncey Mabe
Sun Sentinel

Reviewing each new book by Curt Leviant, I open with some variant of the same line: "Curt Leviant is the best unknown novelist in America." His latest gives no cause to change that practice.

Set in New York in the early 1970s, "A Novel of Klass" takes place in the overlapping realms of Manhattan's art scene and the fading Yiddish intellectual world, once centered on The Jewish Daily Forward, which produced such talents as Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Ayzik Klass, Holocaust survivor and self-styled "Yiddish painter," has worked in obscurity for decades, known only to a small coterie of fellow Jewish intellectuals, when by chance he meets a gallery owner named Breslauer at a bookstore.

Breslauer, visiting Klass' small apartment, is impressed to learn the old painter was a friend of Marc Chagall's. Looking at Klass' own pictures - all with Holocaust themes - he's amazed to see they are works of real artistic value.

But Breslauer's efforts to mount a show and gain Klass the attention he deserves (and make some money in the process) are complicated by the artist's wife, Griselda, a homely woman with the figure of a goddess. She's also paranoid, scheming, endlessly argumentative. She takes an instant dislike to Breslauer.

Further barriers arise in the form of Gimpl Englander, a Yiddish poet in a long-running feud with Klass; a gentile Holocaust expert who turns up embarrassing information about Griselda, and Klass' own eccentricities.

Writing with verve and wit, Leviant mines his story for sly comedy. He writes with great affection of his characters and their foibles, yet avoids sentimentality. Here, for example, is the Yiddish speaker Englander struggling with English: "A good thing is worth repeating. Like Emerson said, 'A hobgoblin is the inconsistency of little minds.' "

Leviant's use of Yiddish words and phrases, and the layering of Yiddish rhythms into the English prose, recalls Junot Diaz's use of Spanglish in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

Indeed, if Diaz were a retired Jewish scholar and translator, instead of a young, Latin, English professor, this is the kind of novel he might write.

For all of its comic brio, "A Novel of Klass" is about the Holocaust and the price exacted from its survivors. Leviant shows it can be refreshed by the application of talent, sensibility and energy.