The Mishpacha of Language: Yiddish and Belonging

ABSTRACT

Exploring the Yiddish language of my father, grandmother, her grandmother, and beyond, this autobiographical article frames language as an ever-changing space where identities are negotiated, formed, and contested. Placing the history of Yiddish alongside my own familial relationship to the language, I explore how the stories of individual lives and the histories of people are created through their relationship with and negotiation of language. Through my own personal experience, this article posits language as a both a space of alienation and belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Yiddish
• language
• identity
• history
• culture

‘You’ll be fine,’ my partner says. ‘You’ve got the ch-channukah? No. Chatspe? Uh, Chuptsa?’ What he’s trying to say is chutzpah. That I’ve got the chutzpah to become an English teacher. I’ve got the guts, the balls, the stubbornness, the ‘supreme self-confidence’ to stand in front of a class and teach them Shakespeare. What he doesn’t know (and what I only had a sense of before writing this) is that chutzpah really means ‘breath-taking audacity,’ a quality that might be highly valued in the United States but that in the original Hebrew was considered insolent, impudent, and outside the norms of good behaviour. Or that in Yiddish, chutzpah is a purely negative term: a chutzpahnick is thought of as someone who, ‘believes that other people have been put on earth only to do their will’ (Wex 2011, n.p.).

Yiddish is a superb example of Vološinov’s (1973, 66) definition of language: ‘From a truly objective viewpoint, one that attempts to see language in a way completely apart from how it appears to any given individual … language presents the picture of a ceaseless flow of becoming.’ Words accumulate meaning with use, and Yiddish seems to constantly change like the flow of a steam.

From its very origins, Yiddish words have always been ‘half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin 1981, 293). Yiddish ‘is forged through contact between Jews and their neighbors, and its speakers have always known and used other languages. Therefore, the criteria for what might be considered manifestations of the beginnings of Yiddish as a discrete language are anything but straightforward’ (Shandler 2020, 7). When tracing the birth of Yiddish, Jeffrey Shandler argues that linguists fall into two camps: those who consider Yiddish as a deviation from Mediaeval German and those who trace Yiddish back further to the Ashkenazic migration to Germany from France and Italy, situating Yiddish as indigenous to the German region and developing alongside Mediaeval German. Either way, Yiddish was created by the proximity of other people, developing through this mesh and appropriation of words and cultures. And Yiddish as a ‘proper’ language is even still a contested notion. ‘Yiddish has frequently been assigned a lower status as a dialect, creole, or patois. Some of its detractors have disparaged Yiddish as a jargon or dismissed it altogether as a “non-language”’ (Shandler 2020, 8).

My grandmother calls my version of Yiddish ‘Yinglish’. Words that meant one thing when she was growing up mean the opposite now. She engages with the language in small chunks, phrases easily rolling off her tongue, but sentences stuttering and struggling to come out. The phrases that her grandmother used, the strong Polish accent she maintained, the sentences her grandmother spoke to communicate with her family, are lost in the ether. My grandmother feels about Yiddish the way I feel about Yiddish, both alienated and comforted by it. Her father spoke Yiddish, but after he died, Yiddish felt like his language, not hers:

I really never spoke it. I understood it. To a degree. My mother’s mother spoke Yiddish at home, and she’s the one I spent the most time with. So I picked it up … When they got together the sisters [aunts] kept speaking Yiddish. And that bothered me because I wasn’t sure if they didn’t want me to understand … I didn’t understand why they always lapsed into Yiddish. I wanted to learn to write Hebrew, but I never got there. I never had a formal Hebrew education. When my dad died, and we moved to Patterson, we never joined a temple. And girls, they didn’t do that much then. (R. Guzy, interview, 10 October 2021)

For my grandmother, like for me (and unlike for other Jews), Yiddish is the language of our fathers. We are part of this strange group, our Jewishness passed down paternally rather than from mother to mother. Yiddish, to us, signals both difference and belonging:

I had a very Jewish last name, from my father – Ginsburg – so people knew I was Jewish. But most of my classmates were not Jewish. But I remember my junior high school was right next to a big country club, which was not Jewish. And I was very aware that Jews were not permitted there. ‘We’re going swimming, and you can’t go.’ And when I would walk past, I would feel like if I had put a foot on the sidewalk past where their club began, I would feel like someone was going to get me. I was so afraid all the time, walking past that country club. Isn’t that crazy? But that’s the way I felt. (R. Guzy, interview, 10 October 2021)

Yiddish – like every other language and word but perhaps in a more obvious, overt way – does not exist as a ‘neutral and impersonal language’ but rather ‘exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions’ (Bakhtin 1981, 294). The Yiddish-Yinglish that I use is layered with meaning: my contemporaries’, my grandmother’s, her grandmother’s, the Torah’s, the Germans’, the Country Club’s. And with those layers of meaning come feeling and tone and history. When I use the word chutzpah, I am wrestling, maybe unknowingly, with all of this.

Chutzpah is not a neutral word for me. Nor is schvitzing, or klutz, or schlep, or schtick, or kibitz. Each time I use these words I feel at once that sense of belonging and alienation. ‘Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ (Bakhtin 1981, 293). The clash of consonants, the back-of-the-throat rumble, calls to mind long days in synagogue pulling down my skirt to cover my knees, licking the wine off my pinkie finger at Passover, the smell of frying oil and latke tastings, bagels and lox, the evening light as I throw small bits of bread into the river to wash away my sins, my dad at my side. I am not religious, I don’t believe in god, I don’t support the state of Israel. But I am Jewish. I grasp these small bits of language that have permeated my vocabulary as proof that I belong to this culture. That I know the secret passwords of entry to these shared moments of faith, healing, and eating. I call to mind the word chutzpah when I find myself thinking, ‘but your mom’s not Jewish.’ I think of schvitzing when I realise I have forgotten the tune to the Mourner’s Kaddish. The word goy swirls in my head when I remember I never grew up with Shabbat dinner, only went to service on the High Holy Days, can’t read any words in Hebrew. I have always struggled with this part of my identity. How much ‘Jewishness’ can I rightfully claim? These words are both proof of my belonging and demonstrative of my alienness. I understand some of them and am lost when I hear others:

We never say or hear words, we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unimportant, pleasant or unpleasant, and so on. Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from behavior or ideology. That is the way we understand words, and we can respond only to words that engage us behaviorally or ideologically. (Vološinov 1973, 70)

The behaviour and ideology of being Jewish, of inhabiting this Yiddish-Yinglish world, suffuses me subtly. Just as I learned English through osmosis – it trickled through the air around me, out of my parents’ tongues and into my ears – I picked up Jewish beliefs, traditions, words, and behaviours like a sponge. Now, living abroad, with different words ringing in my ears, I find myself grasping for these words and traditions that feel like home. Jews are storytellers at heart, our traditions based on reading the same words over and over again, saying them out loud and finding new meaning. We are world builders and interpreters. Maybe I write poems and make theatre because I am infused with this need to tell stories out loud, to interpret the world. We are also eaters. This is a well-known fact and a true one. We love a good meal. Maybe I bake bread, find comfort in sticky dough and the sharp tang of sourdough starter, because I have been raised to understand bread as a source of both ritual and love. We perform Tashlik by walking down to the river and throwing breadcrumbs into the flowing water. We forgo bread during Passover as a reminder of our suffering. We eat bagels in that first moment of Break Fast on Yom Kippur. Bread is tradition, and I immerse myself in the dough. We are also travellers. We fled Egypt for the Promised Land, Russia for the new world, Germany for Israel. We take gap years and make Aliyah. Maybe I travel so much because the ability to feel comfortable as an outsider has been built into my bones, because through osmosis I have inherited the need to explore. How much of me is shaped by these Yiddish words I embrace and yet feel excluded by?

It is strange how the further I go from home, the more tightly I grip my Jewish heritage. The words that felt alienating in the States suddenly become beacons of belonging over here in the UK. Here, where I regulate my volume so that I don’t stand out in a crowd, or exchange the word trash for bin, discard the word sweater for jumper, I find myself clinging to the small amount of Yiddish I know. Sometimes it’s on purpose. I search for a Yiddish word when a British one will do because part of me feels a need to keep this language alive. Sometimes it’s because no other word really fits. If my partner is looking over my shoulder as I chop an onion and says, ‘maybe you should chop it finer,’ what else can I say other than, ‘stop kibbutzing!’ Can I really call cream cheese anything other than the great word schmear, that thick word that calls to mind slopping on layer after layer of delicious dairy?

These words are both useful and meaningful, funny and sentimental. When I say chutzpah, which I do a lot, I think of my grandparents. Not because my grandmother uses it all the time – she’s more prone to words like verklempt and schmuck, shmo, shlomozzle – but because chutzpah (my definition of it, the modern American one, the non-ironic one) reminds me of my family’s story. The Ashkenazi Jewish side and the Irish Catholic side. Both came to America with the guts, the balls, the stubbornness, the supreme self-confidence to make better lives for themselves. Over generations, with lots of chutzpah, they achieved it. And here I am. Having left the States, travelled back over the ocean that they worked so hard to cross, bringing with me the word chutzpah with all of its layers and meanings, my partner (British, not remotely Jewish) struggling to get the word with its tricky, guttural ‘ch’ to form on his tongue.

Perhaps it is this sense of the palimpsest of language that I will bring with me into a classroom. When my students write or speak in the language of their fathers and mothers, perhaps I will be able to hear that language and think of the history behind it. I will understand that the meaning of a word for them may not be the same as the meaning for their grandmothers. I will feel intimately that their language’s ‘center of gravity lies not in the identity of the form but in that new and concrete meaning it acquires in the particular context’ (Vološinov 1973, 67–68). And I will appreciate that the language my students use is a site of meaning making, where real work and struggle and learning can take place.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoë Guzy-Sprague

Zoë Guzy-Sprague is currently a Secondary English PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) student at the Institute of Education, UCL. As a theatre-maker, teacher, and writer, she works to create platforms that elevate unheard voices and make space for social change. She is interested in the ways language creates, explores, and communicates belonging.