Yiddish Is a Supposedly Dying Language That’s Thrillingly Alive

If I tell you that there are languages other than English that someone in America could live a whole life in, which would come to mind? Spanish, maybe? Chinese? Both are spoken in (among many other settings) tight-knit communities that are continually refreshed by new immigration. Pondering a little further, you might think of rural Amish communities that speak dialects of German.

I doubt that many people would think of Yiddish.

In mainstream American culture Yiddish — an Eastern European blend of German with a great many Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic words — is these days either a punchline (a “chutzpah” or a “klutz” in a comic’s monologue) or a historic footnote, a vanishing artifact of a long-gone era. Rueful tales of the days when New York supported a dozen Yiddish-language newspapers, or articles about the last of the Yiddish bookstores, always gave the language a twilight air. Even the stated intention of some younger people to revive Yiddish implies that the language requires some kind of resuscitation.

That would be a surprise to people who live in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities such as Kiryas Joel and Monsey, N.Y., where Yiddish is the dominant language. Despite supposedly vanishing into history, it has 250,000 speakers in America alone, the majority of them in settings like these.

I have had the pleasure and privilege of getting to know one such family during my summer stays at an old Jewish bungalow colony. That family — a husband and wife, along with two of their grown daughters and a grandchild — have taught me a great deal about the language and what it means to them.

Yiddish is written with Hebrew letters, but as for the Hebrew language as a whole, these communities use it only for prayer. For everything else, they use Yiddish. They speak it day in and day out, like characters in the Sholem Aleichem stories that were later adapted as “Fiddler on the Roof.” Because their culture frowns on using the internet, they read the news in Yiddish newspapers — thick, bustling newspaper newspapers of the kind disappearing in so many American locales. As for English, it’s something taught in school for the second half of the day. People’s competence in it varies considerably according to interest, knack for languages and exposure outside of class.

Chaya, one of the family’s daughters (who asked me not to use their last name in this very public setting), told me that her first memory is lying on her mother’s lap listening to Yiddish. Now Chaya is a mother. Her daughter, 2 years and a good bit when I last saw her, was beginning to know English, but her language, thoughts and sense of normal communication were still Yiddish. When I spoke with her, she could only fitfully understand what I said.