When I tell people that I’m learning Yiddish, the most common response is a perplexed “Why?” I will admit that Yiddish is perhaps a less practical choice than Spanish, Mandarin or Russian, but, quite frankly, practicality can do one. Admittedly, I’ve got form when it comes to eccentric linguistic choices: I spent four wonderful years learning Italian, which, as my Italian teacher loved to tell us, is the most geographically limited of the Romance languages. Then there was the summer I spent trying and failing to teach myself Ancient Greek after reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I even had a long-cherished and inexplicable childhood desire to learn Latin, but unfortunately my school was not exactly a bastion of classical virtues: we were taught just enough French to be able to discuss the weather, describe our pets and talk smack about each other’s mums, and that was it.
In this context, learning Yiddish was an entirely appropriate
choice. I loved the idea of being able
to understand the language of my great-grandparents, of stitching the scattered
words I already knew (mainly swears and foods) into the cultural fabric of
their everyday lives. Growing up in a less than diverse neighbourhood meant
that Yiddish was a secret language that nobody outside my family knew. Calling
the class bully a ממזר right in front of your teacher
and getting away with it, obviously that was pure gold, but even the best
insults can only get you so far. A page of real Yiddish, resonant with the echoes of lives I
couldn’t live, was an invitation I couldn’t refuse.
And yet learning a new alphabet is learning to read again.
The mechanisms that we take for granted – how letters become words, words
become sentences – slow, stutter and then stall. You trip over the sounds; you confuse the
letters with one another. Language disintegrates into a chaos of disconnected
symbols whose meaning has slipped into an unreachable dimension of soundless
space. This isn’t an experience unique to learning Yiddish, but Yiddish has
some particular quirks that generate an optimum level of confusion, whilst
offering vague glimmers of understanding. Those brief moments where it all makes sense
are exciting for many reasons, not least because they give me an insight into
the point at which comprehension occurs; namely, when the little voice in my head
sounds out the words on the page. Without
that internal reader, for me, the whole mechanism of language fails.
One of the first revelations is
that Yiddish isn’t one language, it’s two. Mama-loshn
is Yiddish Yiddish, the words drawn from Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages;
loshn-koydesh, meanwhile, is Hebrew
Yiddish, words that a beginner has absolutely no hope of recognising, because
they play by their own rules with their own letters and their own, rather idiosyncratic,
rules of pronunciation. So, a “V” sound
is װ in mama-loshn but it’s בֿ in loshn-koydesh. “S” is ס but it’s
also ת. “Kh” = כ = ח. An aptitude for algebra seems helpful at such
times.
Then, you have to find your own ways of distinguishing between
individual letters and their diacritical marks. פּ (Pey) is Pacman; פֿ (Fey) is
dead Pacman. ײ makes an
“ey” sound but ײַ makes an “aye” sound, because the
line is fine. י is “i”
but, counterintuitively, יִ is “y”. It’s sometimes difficult to remember where the
letters end and the punctuation begins. Of
course, some older Yiddish texts don’t always give you the diacritical marks,
leading to further, glorious, ambiguity. Such ambiguity means that a saucepan (פֿאַן) can become
a flag (פֿאָן) can
become a lord (פּאַן). A girl (מאַד) transforms
into a maggot (מאָד), then changes back into a מאַד again
when you’re not looking. The narratives
pluralize as the words shift and flex, hovering between two possible meanings
that are, in some instances, equally plausible but radically different.
Of course, this alone would be
confusing enough, but several of the letters also have special forms if they
are used at the end of a word. Some are easy to recognize, like ף (lange
fey), the shepherd’s crook, but others resemble other letters to the point that
you can only guess which is which. ם
(shlosmem) looks a lot like ס (samakh) and both are used to
pluralize nouns. Even ט (tet) and
מ (mem) can
look alike, especially in the over-inked print of twentieth century Yiddish
novels. Not being able to tell your מאַמע (mother)
from your טאַטע (father) isn’t a good start.
I can remember a time in childhood
where longer, complex words were a challenge, but I can’t remember a time before
letters. That sounding out of a word in
my head, the pinning of it to a meaning, is a process I’ve long taken for
granted. Much of the joy of learning a new language with a new alphabet is in
the exploding of that mechanical routine, a routine so familiar that it no
longer feels like an action on my part. Without
those instantaneous connections between letters, words and meanings, you become
aware of the various acts of translation that reading requires in order for a
series of discrete symbols to result in the communication of an idea. Those curious moments of blankness when the
bodiless reader inside my head can’t sound out the words I’m seeing made me
realize that there is no truly silent reading, that all reading is the weaving
of sound, even if I’m the only one who hears it.
That, it would seem, is the moment
of comprehension, at least for me. Because the real beauty of Yiddish is that
once you have navigated the alphabet, remembered the difference between ײ and ײַ, and
worked out whether Pacman is dead or alive, the resulting chain of letters
often produces a word that you recognise as soon as you can say it in your
head. A ראָז is a roz
is a rose. A בוך is a bukh
is a book. יִידיש is Yiddish is יִידיש. And if you don’t know what a ממזר is, I’m certainly
not telling you.
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