By Ronald H. Linden (Pittsburgh, PA)
Among the basic tools we carry with us in life are our personal language experiences; what we heard first as infants, conversations around the dinner table, the cacophony of our larger communities. If we pay attention and are good mimics, we can connect with people outside and inside our families and homes using the building blocks of these languages.
But language does more than allow our comprehension and expression; it marks us and links us to our past—to “the old country” and the old places. This is especially true if we were fortunate enough to have experienced an environment suffused with Yiddish, which Leo Rosten called “The language of the heart.”
For most of us Yiddish flowed from our grandparents. They brought this language with them from all over Europe and the Middle East. But their intermediaries—our own parents—often walled us out of their conversations, preferring to keep an adults-only method of kibbitzing with the rest of the mishpochah.
Still, the expressive power of Yiddish could not really be contained; for example, when a bubbe held a grandchild’s face in her hands and gushed over a shayna punim. Or when that same bubbe wondered why you were leaving so soon, “What, have you got shpilkes?”
For my father and many of his generation, the first born here, Yiddish was their mama loshen. It was the language of mother and home certainly, but it was to be confined there as part of a fierce struggle to be as American as possible, to be part of the new–not the old–world. And he succeeded.
Yet the staying power of his Yiddish, relegated to a minor chord, never left him. I had the opportunity to see this close up in an ironic and surprising way. Near the end of the Cold War my family and I were living in Munich, Germany as I had a position with Radio Free Europe. My parents came to visit. My father had fought in World War II and my mother had lost her first husband in the Battle of the Bulge. For these reasons and because they were Jews, a trip to Germany was not a casual undertaking. My father demonstrably stomped the ground in Hitler’s favorite city to announce his—and our people’s–presence.
An outgoing person with Yiddish in his pocket, my father wanted to communicate with the Germans, but he was understandably hesitant. Unexpectedly—and ironically–the opportunity came through a casual meeting with a policeman on the street. The officer’s youth, openness and interest in America pushed the right buttons. In response, and perhaps unexpectedly even to him, my father’s ancestral language rose to the surface. The distance between them closed. I could see his excitement grow in the exchange and for the first time in ages, I saw him use expressions and deploy the language’s natural rhythm. In this most unlikely of places he made a cross-generational, cross-cultural human connection. Yiddish made that possible. (As a bonus for me, learning German, I was now included.)
I learned from this encounter that your mama loshen is always with you. I saw this even more vividly some years later with my wife’s grandmother, whom everyone called, of course, Bubbe. As an orphan from a tiny shtetl in the Russian empire, she was matched to an older man, whose wife had died, and moved to western Ukraine. With her husband soon gone to America, she and her family of four children were engulfed by WWI, the Russian Revolution and Civil War. She survived by trading across fluid territories and borders, adding Russian and Polish to her native Yiddish.
When her moment came to flee with her family, she and thousands of Jews took up residence in the new state of Poland and soon after left for America. Still unable to read or write, she nevertheless learned English and embraced her new country with deep gratitude. More than her businessman husband, she plunged into American life; she shopped, went to the movies and travelled. The orphan girl from a village without electricity who once spoke only Yiddish watched a man land on the moon on American television in English.
Then the mama loshen, which had never really left her, returned. As she grew older, Bubbe began to converse more and more in Yiddish only. Her physical infirmities grew but her brain remained sharp—it just reverted back to its earliest tools for communication. Even when she thought she was speaking English, out came Yiddish. By then we had gained enough understanding of Yiddish ourselves to be with her and never let on. We entered her world as she was leaving it. The power of Yiddish was displayed once again in the form of a precious gift: the chance to create in America a meaningful and sweet goodbye to the orphan girl from the shtetl.
Ronald H. Linden is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directed the Center for European Studies and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. He served as Director of Research for Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany during the extraordinary changes ending the Cold War in Europe. In addition to his scholarly publications and international commentary (see his professional profile here) Ron has authored essays on “The Night The Berlin Wall Came Down,”; “Changing the rules — in life as in baseball”; “Finding Boba Fett: The Pandemic Leaves a Gift,” “The New Pogroms.”
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