Reviving Mamaloshen, the Desiccated, Nearly Dead Yiddish Language

My father calls to confirm that I will be coming to his concert. "You've only got one parent now," he says after I'd forgotten to show up to the Broadway play my mother and I were supposed to see, "so you better come on Wednesday, or you'll be crossed off the list entirely." I pick up my tickets and enter the auditorium alone; Dad's already onstage, singing something from Pirates of Penzance, in Yiddish, a folded Who bandanna tied over his head, swaying in a line of Yiddish pirates. Old people listen with their eyes closed, murmur and cry when the song drags on the word "Romania." It's over, and the two of us elbow our way through crowds and coalesce at the food platters, where I eat much cheese with Jewish libertarians who have translated Shakespeare into Yiddish. Some of the audience are here to pay their respects, the rest want to reminisce about mamaloshen, their mother tongue.

Yiddish is a desiccated language, death by attrition. The UN put Yiddish on its list of seriously endangered languages, meaning that unless things change, Yiddish is going to be among the half the world's 6000 languages that will be gone by the next century. But Yiddish is also making a comeback, through people like my father, but also through theater and klezmer, nice Jewish kids nostalgic for something they've never actually experienced. It's big business these days, to revive anything that's tangentially associated with you. Yiddish even has a saying for it: The grandson remembers what the son wants to forget.

When Yiddish first started out nearly 1000 years ago, it was street language, "zhargon" (jargon), and used mainly by women: the "hoarse child of the ghetto." Plenary committee decided to get it up and running in the late19th century?leftist middle-class Jews needed an official language. The idea was Esperanto for Zionists (that common idea that language is a homeland; incidentally, Esperanto was invented by a Yiddish-speaking optometrist from Bialystok), but Hebrew was chosen instead.

These days, outside of the ultrareligious, Yiddish is more like italicized French, used by Americans to express those quirky, paradoxical emotional states that English was never designed for. Modern Hebrew wasn't designed for them either. It's too new a language to be abstract or literary, but it's also like that by design; it's supposed to be stolid, fierce, pioneering.

Yiddish is goofball. Jewish-American humor (all American humor is either Jewish or British, either shtick or slapstick) is based in Yiddish's puns and reversals. Which is why Yiddish didn't make it politically, but why it has a burgeoning fan base in music and theater.

There's klezmer every other week or so at the Knitting Factory. One of the two major Yiddish theaters in New York, the Folksbiene, just debuted its Off-Broadway Yiddish-English musical, Songs of Paradise, after 85 seasons of all-Yiddish shows, and a kids' show called Kids and Yiddish 2001: A Space Mishegas. Yiddish theater has its own internal logic, its own heroes: before Songs of Paradise started on opening night, the light was turned on the audience and various stars of Yiddish theater from the 30s to the 50s stood up, took a bow, said something.

It's a tight-knit community: the show was cowritten by the director's mother; one of the cast members does its translations; the musical director's children star in Space Mishegas. Because the shows used to be in Yiddish only, it's a big deal, somewhat contentious, for the theater to go bilingual. The idea is, you don't want to destroy the language, but then again, you don't want to kill it.

Makes me think about that Yiddish saying, "A Yiddish poet is someone who reads Auden, but Auden doesn't read him."