Rediscovering my Yiddish

Yiddish was my first language. My Bubba, Devorah, was born in Poland, and lived with my family in Brooklyn since before I was born. She was almost 50 years old when she left Poland in 1933. She never learned English, so Yiddish was the language spoken at home. Bubba was a loving, caring presence, and a great comfort to me, especially cherished during a childhood where there was little emotional support or expressions of caring from my mother. Bubba entered a nursing facility when I was 13, and died a year later. Once she was gone from the household, English became the only language spoken at home. My mother, Tillie, came to the U.S. at the age of 15, and was very proud of being in America and eager to speak only English.  When any of her friends who had also come from Eastern Europe started speaking Yiddish, especially outside of the home environment, my mother seemed embarrassed and said “speak English” “what are you, a greenhorn?” She enjoyed learning English, and got her 8^th grade diploma when she was in her 60s.

As I grew older, there was little opportunity for me to speak Yiddish, except for when I visited my sister, Anita, 13 years older than me. Like me, she had learned her Yiddish from Bubba, but as a child she also attended the Workmen’s Circle school (Der Arbiter Ring), a Jewish nonprofit organization set up in 1900 by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe to promote Jewish education and adaptation to life in America. She thus had more formal education in speaking Yiddish. After she retired and moved to Florida, whenever I visited her we would set aside a little time, usually just 15-20 minutes, to speak in Yiddish. I think this common language from our childhood helped bring us closer, bridging the gap created by our large age difference. Given her more school-based Yiddish education, she would sometimes correct what I said. I never minded this, and we often laughed together over some of the old expressions we remembered. Anita often said that Yiddish had certain words or idioms that were unique and couldn’t be meaningfully translated into English. I think we both enjoyed forming words that had sounds that English didn’t have. One of my favorite expressions was “nisht geshtoygun, nisht gefloygen”- which literally means “it didn’t climb, it didn’t fly” and is used to identify something that is nonsense, never happened. Yiddish conversations continued with Anita in my 2-3 times/year visits to Florida, even for a while after she entered a memory care facility. But sadly, her loss of memory soon encompassed the Yiddish she had known, as well as the English.

I thought my chances of speaking Yiddish were now over. Even though there are groups of Hasidic and ultra-orthodox Jewish people who speak Yiddish in daily language in New York, as a non-religious, very secular woman, I didn’t see this as a possible route for practicing my Yiddish.

After I retired, I began identifying activities I would like to do now that I had more time available. I decided that I wanted an opportunity to again speak Yiddish. I recalled my son telling me about “Meet Up” – an online service where you can find people with similar interests, and I located a Yiddish conversation group. Once a month we meet on zoom, usually there are about 8-10, mostly males, mostly older adults, and we speak Yiddish. Most are US-born, with some having learned their Yiddish from family members, as I did, and others with more formal education. What a pleasure these meetings have been!  We speak in Yiddish of many things: foods we remember growing up with, literary works of Jewish writers like Sholom Aleichem, upcoming Yiddish events in NYC, and other topics.

In a recent zoom call, one of our members was in Chile, visiting family. He was with his mother, who also spoke Yiddish, and she joined our meeting. At one point we were discussing Yiddish words for parts of the face, and the word “bekelekh”– which means little cheeks- came up. I recalled a song with that word in it that my Bubba sang to me when I was a child, and that I have sung to my own grandchildren. The title is “ Patche patche, kikhelekh” which means “Clap, clap, little cookies.” It has some similarity to Pat-a-Cake, and goes like this:

Patche, patche, kikhelekh

Tateh’t koyfen shikhelekh

Mama’t shtricken zekelekh

A gezundt en dayne bekelekh

Translation:

Clap, clap, little cookies (the “cookies” refer to the baby’s hands, the singer takes the baby ‘s hands and claps them together)

Daddy will buy little shoes

Mama will knit little socks

Health to your little cheeks (the singer pats the baby’s cheeks)

As I began singing in Yiddish, the mother of our group member in Chile joined in, and sang it through the end with me. What a wonderful feeling. I was filled with warmth, remembering my Bubba’s singing, and realized that what we were doing  transcended our little meeting, and reached across countries and across time. After the song we returned to the discussion about words for parts of the face. I later contacted the group member to ask about his mother, and learned that she was 96 years old, and had been born in Romania in 1930. She left Romania with her family in the 1940s and first went to Ukraine, eventually brought by uncles to Chile in 1949.

Several days after this session I began thinking about why it had been so meaningful to me. First, singing the song brought me in connection with my beloved Bubba. But what I think affected me even more, was that my Bubba and this Chilean Jewish woman had brought pieces of their life and their culture with them when they fled the Holocaust in Eastern Europe almost a century ago. And as now one of the older people in my family, I realized that I wanted to do more to keep my family memories and Yiddish words and songs alive by sharing them with my children and grandchildren.  They have already survived so long, I want them to live on.