Yiddish Class: a Forshpeis

I taught my “one-shot Introduction to Yiddish” Sunday, billed as a “forshpeis” -- an appetizer.  13 people showed up, mostly friends from book club or the women’s Rosh Chodesh group or the Hebrew reading course I taught a couple times.  But there were also two new faces, including one of two whole men, allowing us to demonstrate that Yiddish, like other respectable European languages, has gendered verbs and nouns.

My Sholem Aleichem
Bobble Head Doll

Me teaching Yiddish is something of a chutzpeh; I took all of one year of Yiddish in college, all of thirty-something years ago. I’ve tried to keep it fresh since then with the occasional Sholem Aleichem story, song, conversation, class, or the occasional Folksbeine show on the upper west side.  But in my shul, this makes me resident mayven; me with my tattered/tserisseneh Uriel Weinreich College Yiddish text book and dictionary.  Maybe -- efsher -- there’s someone in the congregation who’s more fluent. But they don’t have my compulsion to do stand-up. Or they literally can’t stand up that long. In any case, it’s an easy, friendly audience and on Sunday we laughed and learned a lot.   

No classroom rows for my students and no textbook; they sat in a circle with their names written at their feet, so they could spend the two hours talking to each other, cultivating their seedling vocabularies.  I prepared sheets with a couple of verbs and phrases, pronouns, who-what-when and some nouns, using my old Hebrew word processor. DavkaWriter, circa Windows 95, conveniently includes a keyboard with the subtle Yiddish variations on the Alephbet:  the paired yuds that say “ay” (no line beneath) and “ei” (little flat line vowel beneath); the paired vovs that read as “v.”  Reclaim your Ashkenazic “aw” vowel -- the one modern Israeli Hebrew turned to “ah” -- change ayin from dumb silent letter to “e” as in egg, and you’re mostly good to go. 

Used only for reference -
but it's good.

Under my prodding, my students asked and told each other their names, what they did for a living, what they and others were or were not (mothers, fathers, aunts, daughters, sons, Jews, students, teachers, nurses, doctors). 

Also nudniks, goniffs, bubbes and zaydes.  That’s the fun thing about teaching Yiddish to over-fifties;  when they tickle the right neurons, even those who can’t read Hebrew letters -- even those who might not have grown up Jewish but merely lived near New York -- realize they have vestigial vocabulary to draw on; enough to recognize words and phrases I throw out without introduction or warning.  Those who haven’t been pretty little girls for 40 years remember “Shayne maydl.”  They remember being told to eat, my child; to go to sleep, to come here, to come home, by doting grandparents using little bits of Yiddish for extra sweetness or intimacy.

Then we have two students -- bright professional women, in their eighties and nineties -- who can actually take off in whole if imperfect, grammar-free sentences.  My Yiddish was artificially induced at Rutgers; theirs was born at home in Brooklyn. These two enjoy the class as much as anyone, hearing the language of their long-gone parents.  And we love to have them with us, reminding us how authentic the language can sound.  They thank me profusely and encourage us to continue with a course.  And most participants say they agree.  We’ll see…