A Lifelong Attachment To Yiddish

or

“THE SHTETL WITHIN”

by Chaim Pevner

Considering that I had a most unfortunate childhood, which led to some terrible lifelong neuroses, stemming directly from the collective and individual neuroses endemic in the Jewish family which raised me -- it would not have been at all strange if I had totally rejected the language in which the basis of these neuroses was formed – Yiddish. There was, in fact, a period in my life when I very self-consciously attempted to reject everything Jewish – not only the religion, which had always seemed stupid to me – but every other aspect of being Jewish, even down to the use of the language. This was particularly true when I moved out to the West Coast in 1956 at the age of 24 to enroll at UCLA -- a period during which I gradually began to realize that a continued attachment to “Jewishness” had nothing to offer me … nothing to contribute to my further intellectual or moral development. Nevertheless, since I literally grew up with Yiddish and in Yiddish, it was so much a part of me that the language, at least, I could not slough off so easily. A native language is, after all, a basic part of any person’s makeup. In fact, even after I left the family circle in which Yiddish was the normal daily language of discourse, I still found that using Yiddish whenever I could, even 3000 miles away from home, always gave me a certain pleasure – even a certain kind of comfort and solace -- and provided me with an internal emotional refuge I could always “come home to” in moments of severe alienation. Therefore, even when far from my original Philadelphia “shtetl”, and having rejected all forms of “yiddishkeit” as a personal code of behavior, I still continued to seek out opportunities to speak Yiddish, which automatically implied seeking out older people -- usually people a whole generation or more older than myself – with whom I felt comfortable speaking Yiddish. I never felt comfortable speaking Yiddish with people who spoke half-assed, out-of-tune, or highly Americanized Yiddish, which was inevitably the case with the few American-born Yiddish speakers of my own generation. Moreover, whenever I would start speaking Yiddish with these older, old-country speakers of Yiddish, they would always marvel at the fact that I -- a non-religious American–born youngster -- spoke such an authentic Yiddish without the slightest trace of an American accent -- with, in fact, totally untainted Ukrainian shtetl cadences and the rich idiomatic vocabulary associated with that territory. The fact that I always got such positive feedback whenever I engaged in Yiddish conversations with these older speakers is undoubtedly one of the main reasons that I continued to make a point of using the language long after the rest of the “yiddishkeit” culture had rubbed off or otherwise outlived its usefulness for me.

During my California Yiddish years (roughly 1957 to 1969) – I was always the youngest person in my Yiddish speaking circle of friends in L. A. There were a few other fluent Yiddish speakers of my own generation around -- Henry Shlutzky, for example, but, since English was by far the dominant language of these younger people, I never spoke Yiddish with anybody my own age – only with older people, all of them, in fact, immigrants from Eastern Europe who still spoke English with a definite Yiddish accent even after years and years of residence in America, and many of whom still spoke other languages such as Russian, better than English. ( I am thinking here of people such as Ezra Stein, Manya Schrogin, Joe Schrogin, the Russian-Jewish singer Manya “di Tzigaynerte’ and many others, most of them now long gone – zoln zey ale hobn dem lekhtigen Geneydem”) .

As I started to say, due to certain circumstances which I will not go into here, and which were definitely far beyond my control – my childhood was attimes very traumatic – even nightmarish. It was not however all trauma and nightmare – there was a lot of fun and joy between the traumas.
Children have a remarkable ability to bounce back from pain and swing with the good things – to find something good in almost any pile of shit. This is why children can amuse themselves for hours in a back lot covered with trash that would only be disgusting to an adult. Even though, now, armed with the insights of sophisticated psychoanalytic reformulations, I can look back on my childhood and say – sure -- basically there was absolutely nothing wrong with me, Chaiml -- that it was the older people around me who were so mentally ill and so petty-minded – stupid, to put it bluntly -- that they could do no better than to push a lot of their own mental illness and neurotic behavior off onto me – nevertheless, and no matter how you choose to look at it -- the end result was that, as a child, I sustained deep emotional injuries which would dog me the rest of my life – and would at times drive me to the verge of suicide – yes, suicide -- -- and yet, there,was a lot of joy in my childhood – much of it, perhaps trash heap joy – but some of my most basic Yiddish memories are connected with the love and nurture that was also lavished upon me as a very small child – notably, by my grandparents and Aunt Jennie – and all of it couched in Yiddish.

“Treyst” (my consolation) – “main ziys kind” – (my dear sweet child) – and “mir zol zain far dir” -- (it should be happening to me, not to you) – were merely the tip of the iceberg of a whole stockpile of fervently uttered, loving Yiddish expressions which constantly came my way in early childhood. The “mir zol zain far dir” one is particularly interesting, in that it more or less sums up the whole syndrome of self-sacrificing maternal devotion lavished upon a young child in a Yiddish speaking family, in Five Little Words. I don’t know how many times I may have heard this last
expression in the first five or six years of my life, but I was a somewhat sickly child – not weak and sickly, but subject to all the childhood ailments that were so common in those days at frequent ntervals – scarlet fever, mumps, whooping cough, severely upset stomachs – God knows what else -- Sometimes when I got sick I would feel really terrible and would lay there in my bed moaning and crying and thinking I was going to die or something – and it was at these moments of critical agony that my grandmother or Aunt Jennie would cradle me protectively in their arms and would start intoning, in an almost liturgical sing-song, the magic words, “mir zol zain far dir, main kind – -- mir zol zain far dir” –
and these words always weathered the storm and got me through the crisis – obviously, or I wouldn’t be here now – writing the words on this page. The words were truly magic because what they actually meant was: “God – please take the pain and suffering out of this poor little child and give it to me – I can handle I – and I don’t care if I die as long as you let my little child stop suffering – just give me the suffering and spare this beautiful child” – Yes, that is exactly what the words meant and it always did make the suffering bearable – and then fade away – and any kid who ever heard those words could ever possibly doubt that the source from whence they emanated could be anything but a person who loved them totally and unconditionally! – With early inputs such as this, how could one not love the language in which they were said!

To summarize the “bad part” very briefly, without dwelling too much on the morbidly grim details:
Into a traditional immigrant shtetl family that had arrived from the Ukraine in 1921, only a mere 11 years prior to my birth, my mother brought me as a “pitzele kind” (teeny weeny baby) back home from New York City where she had had me, to Philadelphia. Slight problem – she was not married. Therefore I was an ‘out-of-wedlock’ child, and worse, she would not reveal the identity of my father. Further complication – it was rumored that my father was a “Spanish artist” – not Jewish! – Now, the third part of the triple whammy – when I was not quite one year old, Rifke – my mother, then barely 24 years old – suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital. There, in the snake-pit environment that was par for the course in mental hospitals of the early thirties, she contracted septocemia (“blood poisoning) and suddenly died. When, in a moment of lucidity moments before her most untimely death, her sister (my aunt Mollie) asked her to reveal the identity of my father -- Rifke’s infamous last words were, “I can not…” –As my aunt Mollie retold it several times in very much later years, the actual Yiddish dialogue went like this: Mollie, to dying sister: “Rifke, vezey kenste iberlozen a kind af der velt on a nomen? – Ver iz zain tate?” Lterally; “Rifke, how can you leave a child behind in this world without a name --- WHO IS HIS FATHER!” – to which Rifke, for whatever inscrutable private reasons of her own, replies with her last breath, “Ikh kenn nisht”. --

The entire family was traumatized by the sudden death of this very bright but highly wayward daughter who had joined the Communist Party, run off to New York to study Methods of Yiddish teaching in a Communist school, was rumored to have had an affair with her teacher, Moissaye Olgin, the writer, lecturer and leading Yiddish spokesman for Communism of the time – had become pregnant by a different man, also a Communist but probably not Jewish – and had then visited the ultimate indignity upon her religious parents by flipping out and dying in an insane asylum.
Of the three scandalous items – (almost unbearably scandalousin a very conservative, highly religious Yiddish immigrant community) – (1) being a child of unmarried parents, (2) having a father whose identity was unknown but suspected to have been non-Jewish, and (3) having a mother
diagnosed as medically insane (‘schizophrenic’ is the modern term) -- who then goes and dies in the nuthouse – the last of the three was probably the worst. The reason being, that -- particularly in those days – insanity in the family was looked upon as a permanent blight upon the entire family
blood line.

Since all this happened while I was still a barely babbling baby I was essentially unaware in any direct way of all this heavy baggage through out my pre-school years, which is to say, up until the age of six. I was taken in by my grandparents who spoke nothing but Yiddish to me and, to whom, everybody else in the family and immediate circle of friends, spoke nothing but Yiddish. I was the apple of their eye, like some kind of late child in a fairy tale, and, though I called them “baba” and “zayde”, I probably thought of them as my parents – because, in effect, that’s what they were. The circumstances surrounding my mother’s escapades were a taboo subject never to be mentioned in my presence, and so I had no concrete awareness of them in these relatively idyllic early years. Except for some fleetingly traumatic situations associated with my grandfather’s worsening physical condition due to encroaching pulmonary tuberculosis, (which would take his life when I was seven), these earliest years were for the most part normal and happy as childhoods go.
I had everything I wanted in terms of food, playthings and attention. Zayde would take me around with him on rides about the city to visit family members and ‘landslayte’ – people from the same shtetl in the old country -- and he would love to show me off to these people as some kind
of “child prodigy” of phenomenally perfect Yiddish speech. He was really proud of the way I spoke Yiddish even at this childish level, and other people also seemed to be duly impressed. For some reason, it seems, I spoke much better Yiddish than the other little kids my age – probably because of my total immersion in the language with hardly any English around me at all, and constant,
round-the-clock reinforcement.

At any rate, in these early years I received nothing but strong positive feedback and “kvelling” – which is to say, lavish, gushing praise -- for the simple fact that I spoke this family language properly and, I suppose, rather eloquently for my age. It is also quite likely that my Yiddish sounded “old” for my age, because I did not speak it with other little kids -- almost exclusively with adults – so that my Yiddish sort of quickly by-passed the infantile stage and directly reflected the vocabularyand usage of the Yiddish-speaking adults around me. That is probably the reason adults were so impressed with my use of Yiddish. I can’t think of any other reason, because, what’s the big deal about a kid who speaks the same language as his mother and grandparents? In any case these frequent expressions of open approval – I guess you could even say “admiration” -- that often greeted my use of Yiddish in childhood must have laid down a special pleasure association of deepest ego gratification in the deepest recesses of my little soul, regarding the use of this language. Whereas other children from Yiddish speaking homes started shying away from Yiddish as they grew up, especially once they started going to the all speaking school, this never happened to me. I simply never had the slightest social hang-up about speaking Yiddish, and it always seemed completely natural to me to speak it with anybody whom I sensed would be more at home in Yiddish than in English -- whether the butcher, the candy-store man, the old man on the corner or with my ‘bobba’ who, of course, spoke no English at all.

Moreover, since it really was my first language much of my casual everyday thinking – my normal interior dialogue – actually went on in Yiddish, even after I started school, and most of my basic emotions were completely wrapped up in Yiddish. To this very day, I think that Yiddish is a language which has more emotional content for me than English, at nearly every level of emotion -- except maybe in the realm of sex! Certainly, the verbal resources I have at my disposal for
wishing various kinds of evil upon people -- must be far richer in my Yiddish storehouse of curses than in my English one, which relies primarily on a very limited stock of standard obscenities tediously strung together with little variation or creativity; ‘sonovabitch’ – ‘motherfucker’ – ‘cocksucker’ – and Anot much more -- whereas by comparison, the Yiddish curses are endless – from the simple and totally untranslatable, “A za yor af ihm” – which literally means “such a year on him” –but loses everything in the translation – to far more graphic visions of hell, like’ “brenen zol af ihm di hoyt” (may his skin catch fire and burn right on his body ) or, “brekhn zol er mit gal” – ( may he vomit gall ) – “kakn zol er mit blit” – ( when he shits it should be with blood ) --- and so forth, ad infinitum
…
Regarding the untranslatability of the commonplace Yiddish expression “a za yor af ihm” -- (‘such a year on him’), the reason it defies translation is that what these words really imply is that “he” – (whoever the subject is) – should have nothing but misery for at least a year, if not for the rest of
his goddamn life -- whereas, oddly enough, with the incredibly convoluted logic of Yiddish – the very same expression, if applied to oneself – “A za yor af mir” – implies the very opposite -- “I should only be so lucky” -- , i.e., “I should only have such a good year” – sort of like Babe Ruth, who when queried about his thoughts on the fact that his salary was higher than the president’s, replied; “Well, I had a better year than he did” (sic) – which would come out in Yiddish something like, “Farvos nisht – Ikh hob gehat a beser yor vi er hot gehat!”—to which the president might well have replied, “a za yor af ihm!” – which, depending on the degree of smirk on face and emphasis with which each word is delivered, could have the emotional content of “Fuck him – that sonuvabitch -- he should only drop dead on the spot!”

Duvall, Washington; Sunday, February 11, 2001

Reformatted and printed out, mon. sept. 19, 2005 -- San Sebastian, Spain