PT40 shopping for yiddish - Yiddish Book Center

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tive tales and fables, which strove to locatea place for this innovative literature in theJewish world. These books occupied anew middle ground in what the linguistMax Weinreich described as the “levelsof holiness” that codify traditionalAshkenazic culture. As works of vernacularculture, Yiddish books were lower instatus than canonical sforim written inloshn-koydesh, yet they ranked abovebooks by gentiles written in German and other Christian vernaculars.Pious Yiddish books, then as well as now, offer theJewish reader texts whose contents are culturally familiar andmorally appropriate within the appealing form of popularentertainment genres.Another contemporary rendering of the traditional use ofYiddish to create works that entertain as well as edify is foundon the shelves in Eichler’s media section, which sells bothaudio and audio-visual recordings of recent performances inHasidim value Yiddishas a traditional vehicleof Hasidic lore andfor its new role ofdistinguishing Hasidimfrom other Jews.keeping with Hasidic notions of femalemodesty in public, and includes dramatizationsof episodes from Jewish history inwhich Jews triumphed over persecutionby anti-Semites, as well as Mekires Yoysef,the classic purim-shpil recounting the biblicalstory of the selling of Joseph intoslavery by his brothers and ending withtheir reunion in Egypt.The beginning Yiddish reader of any agewill find plenty of Yiddish titles among Eichler’s sizableinventory of children’s books. Most are designed to introduceyoung readers to the mores of a traditionally pious life,describing daily routines or holiday observance; other children’sbooks relate stories of Hasidic sages of the past. Thereare a few Yiddish titles that deal with the secular world,notably a multivolume Entsiklopedye far yugnt (Encyclopediafor Young People), printed in Israel in 1999. Especially interestingare the readers and workbooks for the young studentYiddish “durkh heymishe yingelayt,” “by our own youngpeople.” These purim-shpiln and other plays are performed toamuse the rebbe (and, secondarily, his community of followers)on special occasions during the year when such activitiesare permitted. The repertoire features all-male casts, inof Yiddish, most published by Hasidic girls’ schools, such asthe Satmar community’s Beys Rokhl schools. The incorporationof Yiddish into American Hasidic school curricula,which began about a generation ago, is a telling sign of whatsociolinguist Miriam Isaacs sees as a shift in the character of26 FALL 2002
Yiddish among postwar Hasidim from an “immigrantlanguage” to a “minority language.” Today, Yiddish primers,activity books, and even stickers (teachers can rewardstudents with a colorful “Zeyer gut!” or “Gevaldig!” or“Geshmak!”) both teach the language to haredi children andimbue it with meaning as a signifier of piety in daily life.Eichler’s also sells a variety of games and puzzles thatincorporate Yiddish into children’s play activities. Among themore elaborate games is Handl erlikh (“Deal honestly”),a knock-off of Monopoly that replaces the streets of AtlanticCity with place names of importance to the Hasidic world,past (Cracow and Lublin) and present (London, Montreal,and, of course, Boro Park). As players work their way aroundthe board, buying and renting properties, they are taughtlessons in piety as well as proper social and business conduct.The game’s instruction booklet explains in Yiddish thatHandl erlikh will “implant in children good character andreverence for God. Whoever deals honestly will have muchsuccess.” Players must tithe all their income, and khezhbnhanefesh(personal reckoning) cards penalize players for disobeyingone’s parents, forgetting to recite a brokhe, watchingtelevision – or for speaking either English or modern Hebrew.The Meaning of Yiddish in Boro ParkThis implicit endorsement of Yiddish as the Hasidic vernacularof choice should not be mistaken for Yiddishism,which the haredi community typically regards with greatsuspicion. In fact, a recent letter to the editor in Mayles, amonthly Yiddish magazine for Hasidic families publishedin Monsey, New York, criticizes the journal for what thereader considers a tendency toward Yiddishism, evinced byits efforts to explain Yiddish grammar and provide glossariesof Yiddish terminology. (“Who says that there has tobe a Yiddish word for everything?” asks the letter’s author.“Not all languages are equally rich.”) Indeed, Hasidim whospeak Yiddish do not celebrate the language as the fountainheadof a wide-ranging, thousand-year-old Ashkenazicheritage that embraces labor movements and avant-gardepoetry as well as Hasidism, and they are suspicious ofefforts to cultivate Yiddish for its own sake. Instead, theyvalue Yiddish both as a traditional vehicle of Hasidic loreand for its new role – one that has emerged in the post-Holocaust era – of distinguishing Hasidim from other Jews.Not surprising, then, that the non-Hasid who goes to BoroPark hoping to try out his or her Yiddish on the locals mayfind such efforts frustrated. Some Hasidim will refuse torespond to an outsider’s Yiddish in the language but willanswer in English instead. Literary scholar Richard Fein wroteof his largely unsuccessful efforts to engage LubavitcherHasidim in Yiddish, when he visited the community in CrownHeights, another Brooklyn neighborhood, in the late 1970s:Only later did I realize that the members of the familydid not speak to me in Yiddish because Hasidim don’twant to advance the presence of a secular Jew whospeaks Yiddish....Yiddish, for the Hasidic family, is thedaily part and parcel of a religious way of life. It is not alanguage that one cultivates for personal or intellectualor cultural reasons, as they correctly saw me doing.Yiddish was certainly not simply a language like anyother that one might help someone else to learn. WhileYiddish was basic to me, they saw it as merely incidentalin my life, merely “an interest.” Yiddish was basic tothem, but in a completely different way.Like Fein, many devotees of Yiddish have come to it as a“discovery” (or, in Fein’s case, a rediscovery of a language hehad heard and even briefly studied as a child, as he explains inhis memoir, The Dance of Leah). They encounter Yiddish inclassrooms, festivals, and other venues where lovers of the languageconvene – places removed from their daily routines, inwhich they generally use other languages. For Fein and manyother Yiddishists, the appeal of seeing Yiddish in situ, materializedin an environment in which the language is indigenous– the desire to pay a visit to Yiddishland – cannot be underestimated.Boro Park isn’t Yiddishland; indeed, some Yiddishistsdeplore the state of Yiddish among contemporary Hasidim,complaining that it isn’t regarded as a full or “pure” languageand that Hasidim regularly flout linguistic standards, or eventhe idea of standards. Nevertheless, the neighborhood offersan encounter with Yiddish that other settings cannot provide.Whatever their religious convictions, Yiddish enthusiastsshould not shrink from visiting Boro Park or other Hasidicneighborhoods in New York and elsewhere, but they shouldbear in mind that their attraction to places where Yiddishthrives in the marketplace does not conform to the communities’own commitments, including their commitment toYiddish. Such encounters can not only pose challenges; theycan enrich one’s awareness of cultural creativity among Jewstoday, and expand one’s concept of the possibilities of Yiddishin its second millennium. PTJeffrey Shandler is an assistant professor in the Department ofJewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author ofWhile America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (OxfordUniversity Press, 1999) and the editor of Awakening Lives:Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before theHolocaust (Yale University Press, 2002). He is currentlyworking on a study of Yiddish culture after World War II.27 PAKN TREGER
Page 1 and 2: y Jeffrey Shandlerphotographs by St
Page 3 and 4: in Russian, for the benefit of rece

PT40 shopping for yiddish - Yiddish Book Center

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