Tag Archives: Yiddish

November 10, 2025 · 7:30 am

Collecting Languages

After White Squares by Lee Krasner (USA) 1948 *

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

I won a Hebrew contest once,

not because I understood

the text blocks reading right to left,

            although I knew zeh meant “this”

            and ha meant “the”

but because I understood the random

algorithm of standardized testing

and that I couldn’t color in

too many D choices with my No. 2 pencil.

I won Honorable Mention

in a German Declamation contest once playing

a Hausfrau in Wolfgang Borchert’s “Die Küchenuhr,”

my hair in pink curlers, wearing my mother’s housecoat

on the Rutgers stage, the only top contestant

who did not speak German at home.

As a teen, I performed “Tri Medvedya,”

the “Three Bears,” to get eighth graders

interested in taking Russian classes

at the high school.

            Odna devoshka poshlya v lecu i zablyudilas.

            A girl went into the forest and sat down.

I took Greek classes from a Rutgers professor,

            So much based on the aleph bais of Hebrew

            Even the Russian kukla for doll

Czech lessons in Prague,

            Where I recognized from Russian

            Infinitives k’ pti to drink and plakat to cry

tried French with Rosetta Stone.

            L’éléphante est dans l’avion

The elephant is on the airplane

But it was my frustration with not knowing

my grandparents’ Yiddish that led me

to formal classes, to confront what little

I knew, what little I had absorbed,

robbed of linguistic heritage

by immigrant grandparents

who died too soon.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

* Editor’s note: This poem–an ekphrastic poem–was inspired by Lee Krasner’s work, White Squares. To view Krasner’s artwork, visit: https://whitney.org/collection/works/504

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July 21, 2025 · 7:30 am

Meditations on My Yiddish Name:  Mudke Velvel ben Yankel Yisroel, ha-Levi

by Bill Siegel (Boston, MA)

1.  Mudke

They named me Mudke

          Makes me think of mud cakes, mud crawlers

          Muddy Waters

But they must mean Mordche

          which translates to Mordecai

The Latin mort, Death

          coupled with the Hebrew chai, Life

In America, they changed it to Morton

          dropping the chai, taking the life out of the name

How could you saddle a baby with a name like that?

          My aunt chided her sister

As if forgetting it was her own father’s name given to me

As if forgetting it would keep their father’s name alive

2. Velvel

A stutter, or better, a strut

One syllable with each shoulder’s swagger

          Vel~right shoulder forward and

          Vel~with the left now 

Say his name twice if you say it once:

          Vel~Vel

3. Ben

Son of,

          the rising sun of the father’s new life

The dawn of his hopes

The bend when a river changes course

          Giving birth in its time to a new flow

Ben, bene, bien

The good son

          May he not forget his ancestors

          May he remember where he comes from

          May he remember his names

          That they may carry him

Where he’s going

4. Yankel Yisroel

Who wrestled with God’s Messenger

          Or maybe God Himself

The original knock-down, drag-out, one-fall, winner-take-all

          first fixed bout, a mismatch made in Heaven

Who wrestled with the mighty Thunder King

          forcing It to reveal Its name

Jacob, who became Israel

Yankel, who became Yisroel

Yankel Yisroel

Who patrolled the Shadow of Death

          lined with the dead of Hitler’s demons

          That would boil his people

          To make soap for the armpits of strangers

Peel their skin for lampshades

Who stood, barely 20 years old,

at liberated death camps, surrounded

          by the dead, the dying and the barely surviving

Who stood between captured German officers

          And the interrogating Americans

Using his Yiddish to translate,

          to bridge the combatting languages

To make what happened perfectly clear

5.  ha-Levi

Children of Levi, the one desert clan

          To keep their name for 40 centuries

Through 400 years of slavery

          And 40 years in the desert

Temple servants and warriors

          Guardians of the faith, stationed in every city

And still the tribe with no land of our own

          4000 years and still we wash

The hands of the Cohanim

before the priestly blessing

Look now at the graves of ha-Levi, the Levites

          See the cup carved into the stone

Like all Levis before me, my stone

will honor Miriam ha-Levi

          And her well of Living Water

          that will never run dry

6.  Mudke Velvel ben Yankel Yisroel, ha-Levi

All this in one name.

          All this in my name.

Bill Siegel lives in the Boston MA area, and writes both prose and poetry – about family, fishing, jazz, and more. He has two manuscripts in process: “Printed Scraps”, poems inspired by Japanese woodblock prints; and “Waiting to Go Home”, about family and memories of growing up. His work has been published in “Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” (Northwestern University Press), and “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press). His poems also appear in Blue Mesa Review, Rust+Moth, JerryJazzMusician, Brilliant Corners, and InMotion Magazine, among others.

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June 2, 2025 · 7:30 am

Displaced People

Milt Zolotow (z”l)

(with his daughter, Nina Zolotow)

Note from Nina: I want to tell you a bit about my father. He grew up in New York, the child of immigrants, with Yiddish as his first language and a fairly conventional Jewish upbringing, which meant he also learned Hebrew. During World War II, he served in the army and was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and ultimately occupied Germany, where his ability to speak Yiddish helped him understand German. Well, you can imagine that because of this background he had some interesting adventures in Europe. In his old age he outlined a memoir about his war years, which he never actually wrote. I cobbled together a one-sentence story years after his death about an experience he had in Germany. In it I use information and phrases from his outline, a kind of a posthumous collaboration, which you can read below.

During the occupation we were sent to a small German town near a camp for Displaced Persons, where all the DP’s were women, and someone had the bright idea of sending a truck down to invite any interested women to a dance we were giving—with musicians and food, too!— and when the truck filled with girls arrived, we brought out the schnapps and food, and soon there were couples making out in the bushes outside the cafe and everyone was as drunk as raw schnapps can make you, but then as I was drunkenly dancing with a pretty girl, I suddenly realized that I clearly understood every word she was saying because she was speaking to me in Yiddish, so after that I sobered up pretty quickly and listened as she explained to me that no one in the camp knew she was Jewish because she carried the identity papers of a Pole (she had jumped off the moving freight train carrying her to a death camp, found a young Polish woman who was roughly her size and coloring, and then she killed this woman, took her identity papers and lived as a Pole in a Nazi work camp) and that she had come to the dance to try some Yiddish phrases on everyone she danced with and finally succeeded in making contact with me (quite a miracle since there were only two Jews in my battalion and the other one was not at the dance), and all I could think to do was to take her back to my quarters and give her every bar of soap and carton of cigarettes I could find, however, that kind of backfired because when she returned to the DP camp laden with my gifts, she was immediately the center of hostile attention—no other girl had been so lavishly treated and suddenly suspicions rose: she was different, she was a Jew—and the officer running the camp saw the ruckus, knew she had to be separated, and phoned our HG to tell us what happened, so then I made some calls and found a quartermaster truck that was going south to a Mediterranean port, put the girl on it and got the GI driver to agree to put her on board a ship to Palestine, but later I learned that the British turned back all the Jewish refugees trying to get to Palestine, so I guessed she must have ended up stranded in some French waterfront town, and I still wonder if I did enough (I never heard another word about her because the very next day I was given a two-week pass for the French Riviera).

Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right. 

Milton Zolotow was born in New York City, the child of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Trained as a fine artist as well as a graphic designer, he enlisted in the US Army during World War II, hoping to join the map making division in New Jersey. Instead, he was assigned to a tank battalion and after training was sent to North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. Because of his drawing skills, he mainly did reconnaissance for his unit. But during the occupation of Germany, he was used as a German translator due to his knowledge of the Yiddish language, and his ability to speak Yiddish as well as some Hebrew and French also led him to have some interesting encounters with other Jewish people in Europe. After the war, he returned to New York City, where he created a body of war- and Holocaust-inspired artwork and where he met his future wife, Edith. After a couple of years of studying art in Mexico City, Milton and Edith settled down in Los Angeles, California, where they raised a family and Milton worked as a graphic designer and taught graphic design in art schools. In his retirement, he began to create black and white drawings that continued to explore imagery that evoked war and the Holocaust. 



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April 10, 2023 · 6:30 am

The Baba

by Mark Russ (Larchmont, NY)

The Baba, as she was called, was not my baba, nor was she my bube nor my bobe.  I must have first set eyes on her when I was two and a half on a frigid February day, my first in Philadelphia, having been carried in tow by my parents from Cuba, my birthplace, along with my older sister.  I don’t remember the Baba at that first meeting, but the image of her that grew in my mind in the ensuing years was indelible.  Short, wiry, sporting a stern, weathered face, and piercing green eyes, her gray hair in a bun, she was a force to be reckoned with. A look from her was enough. 

Like I said, she was not my Baba.  She belonged to my six-year-old cousin, or better put, he belonged to her.  She watched over him intently, such that no evil, and, no evil eye, should befall him. Pu pu pu! As doting as she was to him, that’s how nasty she was to me.  Why?  What had I done to deserve such treatment?  For him, she tolerated his fondling her soft dangling earlobes with his fingers.  For me, a cold stare.  The Baba, doubtless, regarded me as an intruder.  Truth be told, my entire family was the intruder.  The four of us moved into my aunt and uncle’s already crowded row house for several months until my father could find work and we could rent a house of our own. Doubling and tripling up in bedrooms, competing for the single bathroom, and accommodating Cuban cuisine, were only some of the tensions. For the Baba, I became the focus of her displeasure.  

The Baba, I later learned, actually had a name.  Khave.  She was the youngest of nineteen children, and the only person of that generation that I had encountered in my early life.  I had assumed all in her generation, the generation of grandparents, had died before the war or were murdered in the calamity.  The Baba, in sharp contrast to my parents, was tied to traditions against which many in my parents’ generation rebelled.  She lit candles on Shabbes, wearing a delicate white lace on her head when she did so, and recited the brokhe in an undertone.  Unlike my parents, aunt and uncle who were “modern” Jews despite their Eastern European roots, she was a relic from the old country.   

She also happened to be a terrific cook and literally made everything from scratch.  No dish more so than the gefilte fish she prepared for Peysakh.  I learned this in dramatic fashion when I wandered into the bathroom of my aunt’s house and saw several very large fish swimming in the bathtub.  They moved in the tub, ever so slightly, suggesting they were not dead, yet.  I was startled, a bit disgusted, but asked no questions.  I imagined the fish ended up in Baba’s kitchen but did not dwell on the thought.  And I certainly never dared poke my head into the Baba’s command center.  Entrance was strictly forbidden, lest I risk meeting the same fate as the fish. 

As may seem obvious by now, I found life with the Baba frightening.  Her demeanor toward me was unkind.  She was harsh and uncaring.  In one instance, she barred me from riding my cousin’s tricycle, even though he was at school.  Of course, I was a bit of an antikl (a rare piece of work, a “pistol”) myself.  Once, when she proclaimed I was not permitted to sit on the sofa in the living room for fear I might soil it, I decided to pee on it out of spite.  To finish the story, my father, in what I still regard as among the greatest acts of kindness I have been blessed to receive, bought me my own tricycle with his very first paycheck.   

These early years in Philadelphia were difficult for my family and I recall them as being somewhat dark.  But Peysakh, and the seders we shared with my aunt and uncle, my cousins, and yes, the Baba, were bright spots of those years.  The Baba would start things off with candle lighting.  My father and uncle, both lifelong Bundists, Jewish socialists who abandoned religion in favor of a Yiddish cultural milieu, took turns chanting from the Haggadah in fluent Hebrew at lightning speed.  They had attended kheyder in Poland as boys, and the words and trops returned each year as reliably as monarch butterflies.  The effect was hypnotic, albeit strange and out of character.  They stopped reading when they got tired, or when the rest of us clamored that it was time to eat.  Whatever commentary accompanied the seder was in Yiddish, the lingua franca of our families.  There were nine of us sitting around the table; five in my aunt and uncle’s family, and four in ours.  These were the survivors, and these were their children.  Except for my father’s sister and her family in New York, there were no others.  As a boy, I was both aware and not aware of the smallness of our group.  They were the only family I knew, and no one spoke of those who were absent.  What was the point? 

But there were other unseen spirits at our seder.  My cousin took pleasure in secretly shaking the table, causing the wine within Eliyohu’s kos to lap the insides of the cup.  This was presented as evidence that the prophet’s spirit was among us.  I was taken in by the deception which made me anxious.  I was already fearful of a prophet-ghost who wandered from seder to seder.   My angst reached a climax when we opened the door to allow him to enter.  I hid, terrified he might actually show up.  

Later in the seder, after the meal consisting of kharoyses, an egg with salt water, gefilte fish, with roe, carrots, jellied fish yokh, and khreyn, chicken soup with kneydlekh (the small, hard kind), some version of gray meat, a peysekhdike kugl, and tzimmes, I felt comforted.  This feeling of well-being only increased after we broke out in Yiddish Peysakh songs: Tayere Malke, gezunt zolstu zayn, a Peysakh drinking song.   

As Peysakhs came and went, I grew less afraid of the Baba, and less afraid of Eliyohu.  My fear was replaced by an empty sadness, a yearning for the ghosts who might have distracted me from the smallness of our seder table.  It was a longing, perhaps, for even more than a brand-new tricycle, a Baba of my own.     

Mark Russ is a psychiatrist in Westchester County, New York.  He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Russ was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States at the age of 2 with his parents and sister. He was the first in his family to achieve a baccalaureate degree and attend medical school. Dr. Russ has contributed to the scientific psychiatric literature throughout his career and his short fiction pieces have appeared or will soon appear in The Minison Project, Sortes, Jewishfiction.net and The Concrete Dessert Review.  

Click on the link to read Mark’s previous story on The Jewish Writing Project: https://jewishwritingproject.com/2022/03/07/yosl-and-henekh/

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September 19, 2022 · 6:30 am

Bubbe and Zayde Take Me to the Ice Capades

by Judith Sanders (Pittsburgh, PA)

On their Bronx subway platform,

they hold my hands.

She with her hatpin and cloth coat.  

He in a button-down and tie clip, 

worn for this holiday 

from cashiering at a newsstand.

We wait for the train to Manhattan,

where they never go, except today, 

for me, their scrubbed, chubby grandchild, 

who can’t speak their language

and has her own room.  

She was never yanked from school. 

Would never know, God willing, 

the soldiers, the nightmare of ripping 

and smashing, the mother’s screams.  

My parents don’t care about the Ice Capades, 

the ladies in sequins, twirled by men in tights. 

They are going to the symphony.  

Bubbe and Zayde guard me, one on each side, 

from the clatter of the oncoming train.

They do not ask why I want to go 

to the Ice Capades, when my whole life 

is one glide down smooth ice, an escapade, 

a frolic.

Judith Sanders’ poetry collection In Deep was recently published by Kelsay Books.  Her work appears in numerous journals, including Pleiades, The American Scholar, Modern Language Studies, Der Pakn Treger, and Poetica, and on the websites Vox Populi and Full Grown People.  She lives with her family in Pittsburgh.

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August 24, 2020 · 6:39 am

One-two-three

by Rita Plush (New York, NY)

A short muscular man, Adler elevator shoes his footwear of choice, my father liked to have the last word. Actually, he liked to have every word, not only with my mother and me, but with the world at large; he dispensed his unsolicited opinions at will and with abandon. Boundaries? My father? 

It gets around that a relative is contemplating a divorce. He’s on the phone in a heartbeat speechifying that marriage takes work (ask my mother about that!). A neighbor is trying for a baby. He holds forth on everything from birth deformities to breastfeeding. Doesn’t matter who, give him half a chance to interfere, he’s on it like a smile on Liberace. 

Enter his mother, my grandmother—the only person who could zip his lip, the one he took advice from, instead of giving to. 

Short like my father, feet so small she bought her shoes in the children’s department. A pint-sized woman, she spoke mostly Yiddish, and when she talked to my father in that furious pitch and rhythm of the mother tongue, she was an Amazon in Mary Janes. Yes, mommy; yes, mommy, to whatever she said, my father became a six-year old boy. 

That six-year old was worried big-time when my brother was getting married and my father learned shrimp was on the wedding menu (shell fish is verboten under Jewish law). My grandmother kept kosher in her home and outside of it; if she got wind her grandson’s wedding was serving non-kosher food, Oy vey! wouldn’t begin to tell it. 

His solution: hightail it to the caterer and offer him money on the sly to make the big event kosher. It did not occur to my father that his visit was unseemly, and that the caterer would refuse his bribe, and the in-laws who were hosting the affair would find out. 

The big day arrived. Some fancy footwork was in order.  

“Let’s dance, Ma,” he said, and waltzed her tiny feet far from the seafood table. One-two-three, one-two-three. “Vau iz der lox,” she said. Where’s the lox? “Later, Ma.” One-two-three. But try as he might to shift her away from the crustaceous creatures, he was no match for my grandmother. 

“Dos iz nisht keyn kehshr.” This is not a kosher affair, she said and pulled a knowing face. 

“It isn’t?!” my father said, all innocence, sweating in his rented tuxedo. 

Rita Plush is the author of the novels, Lily Steps Out and Feminine Products, and the short story collection, Alterations. She is the book reviewer for Fire Island News, and teaches memoir, Continuing Education, Queensborough Community College. If you’d like to learn more about Rita and her work, visit: https://ritaplush.com

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February 4, 2019 · 7:33 am

I’m Teaching My Phone To Speak Yiddish

by Roz Warren (Bala Cynwyd, PA)

“Dad’s Yartzeit is next week,” I texted my sister recently.

Her response came back immediately:

“?????”

When I checked the text I’d just sent, it was easy to see why. Spellcheck had “corrected” the word Yartzeit to Yahtzee.

No wonder she was confused. There’s a world of difference between Yartzeit and Yahtzee.

I changed the word back and resent the message, reminding myself, once again, to proof my texts before letting them fly.

I was amused but not surprised by this little spelling snafu.  We’ve all experienced Spellcheck “correcting” words with odd and/or funny results. My own favorite example of this is the friend whose mom once texted her, “You are adored.”

Spellcheck changed this message to “you are adopted.”

Quite a notification to get from mom out of the blue.

Nor was I shocked that Spellcheck wasn’t fluent in Yiddish. Why would I assume that my phone was Jewish just because I was?

Still, I noticed that when I texted my son later to tell him about his grandpa’s upcoming Yartzeit, Spellcheck didn’t change Yartzeit to Yatzee again.  It now recognized the word and left it alone.  My smartphone was learning from its mistakes!

Over the next few weeks, I made a game of seeing what my phone did with the Yiddish words I used when I texted. It changed Shabbat to “shabby,” Mensch to “menswear” and “bisel” to “bisexual.”

“Bubbe” became “bubble.”

“Putz” became “puts.”

And “Oy Vey” became “It Vetoed.”

Every time Spellcheck changed a Yiddish word to the English word it assumed I meant to say, I’d change it back again. And the next time I used that word?  Spellcheck left it alone.

I was teaching my phone to speak Yiddish!

It soon became clear that my phone already knew some Yiddish. For instance? I didn’t have to teach it klutz or schlep. But my phone still had a lot to learn. It thought, for instance, that both “schmooze” and “schmuck” meant “schedule.”

It turned “mishegoss”  into “mushroom”  and “mishpocheh” into “mishap ox.”

Spellcheck turned “shmatte”  into “shattered” and “tuchis” into “tux history.”

It also corrected “Zayde.”  to “day dreaming.” My practical grandpa would have plotzed.  (Or as Spellcheck would have it, “plots.”)

I’ve enjoyed exploring the interaction between an ancient language and 21st century technology. And the more I use my smartphone, the more Jewish it becomes. Soon I expect it to start nagging me to dress more warmly and make sure to have a little nosh before I leave the house.

By the next time dad’s Yartzeit rolls around, I expect my phone to be fluent.  But while I’m pleased and proud that my phone now knows the word Yartzeit, let’s hope that it rarely needs to use it.

Roz Warren writes for everyone, from The Funny Times to The New York Times, and has been featured on both the Today Show and Morning Edition. You can learn more about her and her work at https://muckrack.com/roz-warren.

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November 26, 2018 · 10:28 am

I Was the Dreidel 

by Madlynn Haber (Northampton, MA)

I was the dreidel, which was the starring role in the play called “The Dreidel That Wouldn’t Spin,” when I was 11 years old.  I can’t remember having any lines to say. But I do remember the costume. It was made of four pieces of cardboard, which formed a square, with elastic bands holding the cardboard up on my shoulders.

I can’t remember the story either. What was the plot? Why didn’t the dreidel spin? How did it resolve? I assume the dreidel found a way to spin. I like to picture myself twirling around on the stage—a swirling, tap-dancing dreidel in a great Broadway musical. But  that’s not what happened. There wasn’t even a stage. Just chairs set up in rows in a dingy basement.

It was a poor Jewish neighborhood after-school program, unaffiliated with any synagogue or congregation. That’s one of the parts that stayed with me, the lack of affiliation. Also the immobile dreidel, boxed in, unable to spin, stubbornly refusing to go along.

After the play, the cast gathered together around a menorah. We each said something as we lit a candle. It couldn’t have been the traditional blessings. It wasn’t a traditional Hebrew school. We learned Yiddish instead of Hebrew and believed in socialism instead of God.

I had asked to go to Hebrew school when I was in the fourth grade and after I found myself drifting into churches, kneeling and staring at the statues of Mary and Jesus. My parents couldn’t afford the price of joining a synagogue where I could go to Hebrew school and learn how to pray. Instead, they sent me to this secular Jewish school where I learned to play bingo in Yiddish.

I remember very clearly the image of my father’s face as I looked out into the audience above the light of those Chanukah candles. It may have been the last time I saw him in my childhood. Shortly after, he moved away and wasn’t heard from again. (As an adult, I tracked him down, found the rooming house where he lived, and visited him at the taxi company where he worked.)

On the day of the play, my father came to pick us up in a long, black Plymouth. It must have been shortly after my parents’ separation. We didn’t have a car when he lived with us, and he acquired the Plymouth right after he left. Coming down the front stoop with the screen door slamming behind us, my mother and I got our first glimpse of that car with its high fins. My father was smiling, a proud grin on his face as he opened the car door to let us in.

I slid into the front seat, positioned between him and my mother.  She shut the door and made a tight fist with her right hand.  Then, she sharply tapped on the top of the dashboard. With a slight sneer, she said, “Kind of tinny isn’t it?” My father’s smile faded. None of us spoke after that comment as we drove to the Jewish School.

Years later I learned the traditional Chanukah blessings in Hebrew. Memories of starring in that play return when I light the menorah. I remember the silence in the car.  I can see my father’s grinning face. I can hear my mother’s sarcastic voice. And I can remember myself when I was eleven and I was an immobile dreidel, unable to spin.

Madlynn Haber is a writer living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in the anthologies Letters from Daughters to Fathers and Word of Mouth, Volume Two, and in Anchor Magazine and a forthcoming issue of Exit 13 Magazine.

 

 

 

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August 28, 2017 · 8:05 am

A Proper Home

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

While growing up in a Yiddish speaking home, I was often witness to the respect and adoration given to the Yiddish books that once graced our small bookcase. It goes without saying that prayer books, bibles and other holy texts were held in high esteem, but books written in Yiddish, the mameloshen (mother tongue), came in a close second. Like many Eastern European Jews, my parents had a particularly strong attachment to books written in Yiddish. Whatever the theme or intended message, these books were often afforded special status not only because they were written in Yiddish but because Yiddish utilizes Hebrew script, the very same letters found in all of our sacred texts.

More often than not, many of these Yiddish books were passed on to my parents by either aged or sickly friends and neighbors who simply wanted their treasured books to take up residence in a proper home. Yiddish books, after all, were like beloved relatives who detailed our long and often difficult history. I remember how we always removed and replaced these books with the utmost care so as not to injure their often spindly, dilapidated spines and worn bodies. In our home, we read these books primarily on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays when there was ample opportunity to lay on the couch, close one’s eyes and perhaps take a solemn journey back in time.

History has a way of repeating itself and perhaps is meant to do so. A short while back, I was approached by a few acquaintances and patients asking if I would be willing to take possession of their Yiddish books. Some followed my advice and sent their books to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts while others would not hear of it. This latter group wanted their books to reside in a warm loving home rather than in an “orphanage for Yiddish books”.

I remember an elderly gentleman who, only recently, was seated in my examination room. He began speaking as soon as I entered. “I have to talk to you about my Yiddish books,” he began. “I know you speak and read Yiddish. So, doesn’t it make sense for them to be with you? They mean so much to me. I can’t just throw them out. Please, come to my home. The books will be waiting for you.”

His pleas were repeated with ever increasing urgency. How could I possibly refuse this clearly distraught gentleman? He was concerned about the fate of his beloved Yiddish books now that he had sold his house and was about to move to a small apartment where there was simply no room for his books. Aware of how much this request meant to him, I agreed to come by that very night and take possession of the box of Yiddish books that, I was told, was silently awaiting my arrival. As I left his home carrying the box, I heard a long tremulous sigh follow me to the door. It was an unmistakable declaration of sadness at seeing his beloved friends leave, accompanied by a sense of relief that they would at least have a proper home.

Since then, in addition to a few books that once belonged to my parents, I have accumulated a fair number of Yiddish books as I found it difficult to refuse those pleading on behalf of their loved ones. And so, just about every Sabbath and Jewish holiday, I’ve gotten into the habit of carefully taking one of these aged volumes in hand to reacquaint myself with many of the words and phrases that no longer see the light of day.

Much like aged relatives, these books speak volumes of survival and adaptation and give voice, as well, to immense pride and joy. Each time I’m done and get ready to close one of these books, I start to wonder who will be next in line? Who will be willing to accept books that are written in a strange language dealing with topics that have little or no relevance to most people? I’ll ask around when the time comes, but, apart from the praiseworthy mission of the Yiddish Book Center, I fear there will be no takers.

Sheldon P. Hersh, an Ear, Nose and Throat Physician with a practice in the New York metropolitan area, is the author of Our Frozen Tears (http://tinyurl.com/kuzlscb), as well as the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust.

 

 

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January 9, 2017 · 10:13 am

Shabbat in Rehab

Janice L. Booker (Malibu, CA)

“Shalom” I called through the open door. 

The couple stopped and turned toward the door in one movement.  I beckoned to them and invited them to come into my room.

It was my first day in a rehab center following orthopedic surgery. 

The couple was clearly Chabad.  I could be sure of that from the man’s worn but pressed and clean black jacket, shtreimel hat, and the ubiquitous payes – grey sidelocks cascading over his ears.  The tzitzit were clearly visible below the hem of a starched white shirt. 

His wife, a fading beauty, wore a long sleeved print dress and a brown curly sheytel (wig.)  It was late afternoon on a Friday and I assumed they were making loving kindness visits to Jewish patients.

After a few moments of friendly conversation, the woman offered me a miniature challah from a bag which sagged with many more.  Her husband told me proudly that she rose early Friday mornings and baked one hundred of them to distribute to patients in hospitals and nursing homes.  He examined the lighting in the room and explained how I could use the switches to simulate Shabbat candle lighting and gave me the exact time.  I don’t know if this was a Chabad pilpul decision or if our creative Talmud makes these allowances, notwithstanding the lack of electricity.  We are clearly a people who make it possible to adapt ritual under any circumstances.

I was in the rehab center six weeks. They arrived punctually every Friday afternoon with the challah and the time to light Shabbat candles.  I had asked on their first visit if they spoke Yiddish as it is always a source of great pleasure for me to converse in that artful and descriptive language, so he and I had very satisfactory conversations in Yiddish.

On my last Friday night in rehab I told them I would not be seeing them again as I was going home the next day.  My husband was in the room and the Chabad gentleman asked him if he would put on tefillin (phylacteries) in thankfulness for my recovery.  My husband replied, somewhat embarrassed, that he had never done that.  The man answered, “Well, then, it will be a double mitzvah,” and my husband, much to my surprise, said “of course.”

The gentleman put a kippah on my husband’s head and wound the phylacteries around his fingers, his arm, all in the prescribed ritualistic process, and placed the box that contained bible verses on his forehead in the centuries old appropriate manner.  My husband repeated the prayers and the tefillin were removed.

After the couple left with many good wishes, I turned to my husband and said, “I’m shocked that you, a lifelong skeptic, agreed to put on phylacteries.”

“How could I refuse,” my husband said in a soft voice.  “They were so gentle and sincere.”

Janice L. Booker is a journalist, author of four books, including The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths, an instructor in creative non-fiction writing at University of Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia radio talk show host, and a free lance writer for national publications.

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