When I started learning Yiddish, pretty much the first loshn-koydesh word I encountered was משפּחה (mishpokhe), which means “family”. As you might expect, family is a pretty fundamental concept in Yiddish, and not just in the literal sense of your own blood relatives. משפּחה has an additional meaning that is much broader and more inclusive, signifying a cultural and familial fellowship amongst Jews that transcends nationality, religious conviction, and pretty much any other means of categorising people.
Yiddish used to be the key to this aspect of משפּחה since it was the language that all Ashkenazi held in common, but it is
by no means essential. In fact, long
before I started to learn Yiddish I knew what משפּחה meant, even though I still
find it difficult to put into words. משפּחה was that unexpected connection when you realised that the person you
were speaking to in the supermarket queue or at the bus stop was also Jewish, a
rare experience for me when I was growing up, and so all the more wonderful
when it did occur. It’s the sudden awareness of commonality, that our family
histories may not intersect, but they are bound to be similar to one another.
For me, learning Yiddish has been a way of
amplifying that connection, not because I encounter many other people who can
speak it, but because it reveals those threads of the past that run through the
fabric of the present. It’s not just
about continuity – being able to understand the language that my ancestors
spoke – it’s also about being able to hear those ancestors in their own words. Thanks to the generosity of my wider משפּחה, I can read my great, great-uncle’s first book in Yiddish, since it was
preserved for di Gantze Mishpochah by
the Elovitz family’s donation to the Yiddish Book Center. However, although משפּחה has that more open, tribal meaning, learning Yiddish has illuminated
elements of my own family in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.
One crucial person in this regard is a woman called
Miriam Shumik. She was my great,
great-aunt, married to my mother’s crazy revolutionary great-uncle,
Hersh-Mendel. Actually, Hersh-Mendel was
the reason that my grandfather’s family ended up in London: my
great-grandfather got tired of the Warsaw police turning up on the doorstep in
search of his brother. Hersh-Mendel’s
life was improbably adventurous and bleakly tragic, and his many unexpected
exploits certainly deserve further discussion, but while I’ve known about him
since I was a teenager, I knew absolutely nothing about Miriam. This was at least partly because, unlike
Hersh-Mendel, she didn’t survive the Nazi occupation. Hersh-Mendel didn’t talk about Miriam and they
had no children, so she was absent from the story of our family. In fact, until recently I didn’t even know her
name. All we knew was that she and Hersh-Mendel
had been betrayed by a neighbour in wartime Paris. He escaped; she did not. We didn’t even know what had happened to her. Then I learnt Yiddish. This meant that when my mum turned up a Yizkor
book entry[1]
for Miriam during one of her frequent family history Google searches, I was
able to translate it. Of all the gifts
Yiddish has given me, this one remains the greatest.
Miriam’s eulogy was written by one of her childhood
friends, a woman listed only as M. P. We
will never know who she was but because of this unknown member of my extended Jewish
משפּחה, Miriam’s actual משפּחה can remember her. It’s thanks to M. P. that we know Miriam was
tall and clever, that she organised the first Communist cell in her home town,
and that she had a way with words. It’s
also thanks to M. P. that we know Miriam was the eldest of four sisters, and
that the family home was three bare rooms with three beds, three chairs and a table.
We know that Miriam was אַ רױז צװישן געװײנלעכע בלומען (a rose amongst weeds), and that she loved to talk about books. We know that Miriam had read the first volume
of The Count of Monte Cristo and been
captivated by it, but the library didn’t have the rest of the book. We know that M. P. found the second volume and
brought it to Miriam, causing her to dance for joy and immediately start
reading it aloud. And, of course, we now
know that Miriam died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, possibly in the uprising
but equally possibly from the heart condition she developed after she was
tortured whilst a political prisoner in the 1920s.
Miriam may not be my blood relative, but she is
part of the משפּחה in both senses. I can recognise in her my family’s obsession with
reading books, talking about books and, of course, talking in general. More importantly, perhaps, I can recognise that
my admiration for her courage and her capacity to stand up for what she thought
was right means something, whether we are related or not. At least now I can remember her not just as
my great, great-uncle’s wife but as a brave, principled woman who risked her
own life trying to improve the lives of others. Our משפּחה is the greater for her presence.
[1] A Yizkor
book is a record of a Jewish communities lost in the Holocaust, written by the
survivors of that community.
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