Outwitting History (2 page)

I might have dissolved into tears right then and there had I not
spied a gas station across the street. The burly mechanic on duty wasn’t much help. “I ain’t gonna leave the station to go work in the middle of no street,” he said. “I’ll tow you over here if you want, but that’s gonna cost ya.”

“How much?”

“Hundred bucks for the tow and five bucks to charge the battery.”

“How about if we bring the battery to you?”

“In that case just five bucks. But how you gonna get that battery over here?”

After what we had been through that day, I was sure we could find a way. I asked the attendant if we could borrow a wrench, but he said it was against the rules. I handed him a soggy five-dollar bill and the rules changed. Roger and I walked back across the street, managed to disconnect the cables and lift the battery out of the truck. It was a heavy-duty truck battery, weighing a good fifty pounds. Since Roger is considerably taller than I, the battery listed precipitously as we walked. By the time we put it down on the oily floor of the garage, I realized the acid had leaked out and burned a hole right through my wet canvas parka.

We waited for the battery to charge, then drove back to Roger’s apartment. I took a hot bath, ate supper, drank four cups of hot tea with honey, and fell sound asleep. At two o’clock the next afternoon I was back in Massachusetts, where a large crew of volunteers was waiting for me. Without a functional elevator it took us the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening to pass five thousand books from the back of the truck, up the stairs, and into our second-story loft, where we spread them on pallets to dry.

What had we saved? Almost two-thirds were “new”: unread publishers’ remainders printed in the 1930s and 1940s, including works on Zionist theory, history, memoirs, and at least five hundred copies of a large-format Yiddish translation of the Torah. The rest came from the
organization’s library: a solid assortment of Yiddish titles, most published in New York. Almost all of these books ended up in libraries or in the hands of students around the world.

Before I went home that night I returned the U-Haul and retrieved my unregistered pickup from the Northampton train station. Then I collapsed. For the next three days I remained in bed, my temperature spiking to 104. As I lay there, drifting in and out of fevered sleep, my thoughts turned to the tabloid reporter in the rain. Why
was
I doing this? Was it really just a matter of nostalgia? What did I hope to accomplish? And how had it all begun?

Well, it definitely wasn’t nostalgia: I was too young to have much to be nostalgic about. Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1955, I heard Yiddish when my grandparents spoke to one another or when my American-born parents, whose Yiddish was imperfect but serviceable, wanted to discuss our bedtime or allowance. No one ever spoke Yiddish to me, to my brothers, or to anyone else our age. We were, after all, American kids, and there was no reason to weigh us down with the past.

As with so much else, it wasn’t until I went off to college that all this began to change. In the fall of 1973, during my first semester at Hampshire College, I enrolled more or less by chance in a course called Thinking about the Unthinkable: An Encounter with the Holocaust. Organized the year before by a group of Hampshire students, it was, we were told, the first time a course on the Holocaust had ever been offered on an American campus. Our teachers, mostly visiting scholars, were the best in the field: Raul Hilberg, George Mosse, Eric Goldhagen, Yuri Suhl, Isaiah Trunk, and Zosa Szajkowski. As the semester progressed I found myself less interested in the Holocaust per se, in how the Germans went about murdering the Jews of Europe, and
more in the people whom they sought to destroy. If, as the historian Salo Baron once argued, anti-Semitism resulted from the “dislike of the unlike,” then in what way were the Jews of Europe “unlike,” in what way were they so different, so utterly antithetical to fascist ideology, as to seal their destruction?

I shared these questions with Leonard Glick, a physician and professor of cultural anthropology who served as the course’s faculty adviser. He told me he was becoming interested in similar questions himself, and he invited me to learn by his side. For the next three years my education progressed in exactly the way Hampshire’s founders intended: days of discovery in the library, followed by lively discussion in Len’s office or at his kitchen table. What I could not fully appreciate at the time was how revolutionary all this was, not only pedagogically but historiographically. In 1973 the field of Jewish scholarship was still called
Judaic
Studies, implying an emphasis on Judaism as a religion, as opposed to
Jewish
Studies, as the field is now widely called, the study of Jews as a people. The die was first cast in France almost two hundred years before, when Jews were permitted religious differences so long as they downplayed social, cultural, and above all, national specificity. With notable exceptions, mainstream Jewish historiography restricted itself to
Geistesgeschichte und Leidensgeschichte,
the history of spirituality and the history of suffering.

As an anthropologist, Len instinctively rejected this narrow view. “Jews must have been doing something more for the past two thousand years than writing books and getting killed,” he insisted. “How did they make a living? What did they teach their children? What did they eat? What did they read? What stories did they tell? What songs did they sing? What was the relationship between men and women? How did they interact with their non-Jewish neighbors?” In short, Len was interested in
culture,
the full constellation of human experience, and he intuitively embraced what the pioneering Russian Jewish historian
Simon Dubnow had characterized as “the
sociological
view of Jewish history,” the study not of Judaism but of
Jews.

Knowing that I would need to learn languages in order to handle primary historical sources, I dutifully enrolled in courses in Hebrew and German, then the prescribed curriculum for aspiring Judaic-studies students. Those languages, together with Aramaic, may have sufficed had I limited myself to the study of theology, philosophy, and sacred texts. But as I quickly discovered, for much of the last millennium Jews in central and eastern Europe had spoken not Hebrew, not German, but Yiddish. If I wanted to understand their lives, I had no choice but to learn their language.

Yiddish (the word means “Jewish”) first emerged in the tenth or eleventh century among Jews living along the banks of the Rhine River. The more distinct their communities became, the more their spoken language differentiated itself from that of their non-Jewish German-speaking neighbors. Not unlike Black English, it became the “in” language of a people on the outs, except that in the case of Yiddish, Jews brought with them a core culture rooted in Hebrew (the language of the Torah) and Aramaic (the language of the later sections of the Talmud). As a result, Yiddish, like other Jewish vernaculars—there were more than a dozen, including Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-Provençal—was written in the Hebrew alphabet and derived as much as 20 percent of its vocabulary from Hebrew and Aramaic. There were also words from Latin, French, and Italian, picked up in the course of earlier Jewish migrations. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Jews were expelled from many of the duchies and counties of western Europe, opportunity beckoned in the huge, undeveloped Polish empire. Many Jews emigrated eastward, just as they were to move westward to America centuries later. They carried Yiddish with them, picking up new influences from local Slavic languages, including Polish, Ukrainian, White Russian,
and Slovak. The East European “New World” was so welcoming that, especially at first, the Jewish population there expanded exponentially, until it comprised 75 percent of the world’s Jewish population. These Yiddish-speaking settlers are the ancestors of most of today’s American Jews.

As Max Weinreich observed, “a language is a dialect with an army.” Of course, Yiddish never had a country of its own, let alone an army or navy, and this may be one reason people have sometimes wondered whether it’s a language at all. For most of its history, Yiddish existed primarily as a spoken language, with only limited literary expression. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, though, when Enlightenment ideas and economic modernization began to shake the foundations of the traditional Jewish world, Yiddish gave rise to a vibrant modern culture. By the early twentieth century there were Yiddish newspapers and magazines, films and plays, politics, art, music—and a free-wheeling literature that marked one of the most concentrated outpourings of literary creativity in all of Jewish history.

Today Yiddish language is taught at scores of major colleges and universities throughout North America; twenty-five years ago it was taught only at Brandeis, Columbia, and perhaps a handful of others. This dearth of instruction was indicative of long-standing prejudice in mainstream Jewish scholarship, where for the most part the Jewish vernacular was either denigrated or ignored. Yiddish-speakers themselves, including some of the most prominent Yiddish writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, routinely referred to their language as
Zhargon
—Jargon. It was a bastard tongue, bad German, a linguistic
mishmash,
hardly a language at all. Jews intent on assimilation found it particularly odious. In Germany, for example, Jews tried to reduce Jewishness to a
Konfession,
a religion divorced from culture, insisting that they weren’t Jews at all, but rather “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.” Go make the case in Yiddish, where every word, every linguistic
tic, is a reminder of peoplehood. Consider, for example, Max Weinreich’s example of a more or less random Yiddish sentence:
Di bobe est tsholent af Shabes
—The grandmother eats warmed-over bean stew on the Sabbath.
Bobe,
“grandmother,” is a Slavic word that entered Yiddish in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
Est
was adopted a thousand years ago, from Middle High German.
Tsholent,
bean stew, came from Old French more than a thousand years ago, probably from
chaud,
“hot,” and
lent,
“slow”—a fitting name for a dish that Jews keep warm on the Sabbath, when cooking is not allowed. And
Shabes,
“Sabbath,” is a Hebrew word that dates back several thousand years. Quite literally, Yiddish is a living chronicle of Jews’ historical experience, proof of their peoplehood, and it therefore spills the beans on assimilationist aspirations. No wonder bourgeois Jews hated it; no wonder scholars ignored it. In 1873, for example, the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz afforded Yiddish just two paragraphs in his magisterial six-volume
History of the Jews.
Never mind that Yiddish was then the first or only language of 80 percent of the world’s Jews; for Graetz, it was
“eine halbtierische Sprache,”
a half-bestial tongue.

However, half bestial or not, Yiddish was a language I needed to know, and since no courses were offered, I set off in the spring of 1974 in search of a teacher. Hampshire College is part of a five-college consortium with Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts. I went from school to school until I finally came to Jules Piccus, a professor of medieval Spanish literature at the University of Massachusetts. A man in his early sixties with a head of snow-white hair and a full white beard, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Karl Marx—and in certain circles was almost as famous. Posted on his office wall was the front page of a 1960s Spanish newspaper with the headline piccus is in madrid!—an alarm precipitated by his having discovered and removed long-forgotten, misplaced manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci from the Spanish National Library. Jules
was not only a bibliographic sleuth but an accomplished scholar and a genuine polyglot, familiar with twenty languages. But his first love remained Yiddish, which he had spoken growing up in Brooklyn. He told me that he had taught the language from time to time in the past, and he planned to teach it again the following semester. In September of 1974 I joined twenty other students for the first day of Elementary Yiddish 110.

Our text,
College Yiddish,
was a systematic introduction to Yiddish grammar written by Max Weinreich’s son Uriel, a leading light in general linguistics until his untimely death in 1967. Jules was a demanding teacher. He gave lengthy homework assignments and was not much interested in excuses when students came to class unprepared. Most of the students, for their part, were dismayed at their teacher’s zeal: They had signed up for Yiddish because it sounded easy, and they were shocked to discover that it was as much a language as any other, with its own vocabulary, phonology, and rules of grammar.

“Just because your grandmothers spoke Yiddish, don’t think you’re going to learn the goddamned language through osmosis!” Jules warned on the first day of class. But few took his admonitions seriously, fewer still did the homework, and at the end of the first semester I was one of just two students who passed.

Clearly exasperated, Jules decided to call it quits. “If you kids don’t want to learn, then the hell with it!” he announced while handing back the final exams. Except that the two students still standing, Jack Jacobson and I, were not ready to give up so soon. Together with Roger Mummert and Kathy Singer, two friends from Hampshire College who had been studying Yiddish on their own, we went to see Jules in his office during the January intersession to ask if he’d continue to teach us privately. Jules agreed, under three conditions: We had to promise to “work like hell,” to come to class prepared, and, since Jules would be teaching us on his own time at the end of the regular school day, to
bring with us a suitable snack to tide us all over until dinner. We soon settled upon a regular menu: Roger provided a warm loaf of homemade whole wheat bread that he baked the morning of each class, and the rest of us took turns providing cheese, butter, occasional homemade cake or cookies, and, always, a bottle of red wine.