Short Yiddish Quotes

Lose an hour in the morning, chase it all day.”—a Yiddish saying, author unknown

One profoundly understated poem by an American Yiddish poet raised as a Zionist in Eastern Europe, Kadya Molodowsky, began: O God of Mercy Choose— another people. We are tired of death, tired of corpses, We have no more prayers. Choose— another people. We have run out of blood.

It was a story no one could tell me when I was child. The story of Russian Jewry had been told in English, by American Jews; to them, it was a story that began with antiquity, culminated with the pogroms, and ended with emigration. For those who remained in Russia, there had been a time before the pogroms and a time after: a period of home, then a period of fear and even greater fear and then brief hope again, and then a different kind of fear, when one no longer feared for one's life but fear never having hope again. This story did not end; it faded into a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table poring over an atlas of the world, or of me sitting on the bedroom floor talking at my best friend. The history of the Soviet Union itself remains a story without an narrative; every attempt to tell this story in Russia has stopped short, giving way to the resolve to turn away from the decades of pain and suffering and bloodshed. With every telling, stories of Stalinism and the Second World War become more mythologized. And with so few Jew left in Russia, with so little uniting them, the Russian Jewish world is one of absences and silences. I had no words for this when I was twelve, but what I felt more strongly that anything, more strongly even than the desire to go to Israel, was this absence of a story. My Jewishness consisted of the experience of being ostracized and beaten up and the specter of not being allowed into university. Once I found my people milling outside the synagogue (we never went inside, where old men in strange clothes sang in an unfamiliar language), a few old Yiddish songs and a couple of newer Hebrew ones were added to my non-story. Finally, I had read the stories of Sholem Aleichem, which were certainly of a different world, as distant from my modern urban Russian-speaking childhood as anything could be. In the end, my Jewish identity was entirely negative: it consisted of non-belonging. How had I and other late-Soviet Jews been so impoverished? Prior to the Russian Revolution, most of the world's Jews lived in the Russian Empire. Following the Second World War, Russia was the only European country whose Jewish population numbered not in the hundreds or even thousands but in the millions. How did this country rid itself of Jewish culture altogether? How did the Jews of Russia lose their home? Much later, as I tried to find the answers to these questions, I kept circling back tot he story of Birobidzhan, which, in its concentrated tragic absurdity seemed to tell it all.

Mr. Lefkowitz—sixty-five, a widower—was having a very lonely time in Miami Beach, and he observed a man of his age who was never without a companion; people forever streamed around him, extending invitations, swapping jokes. So Lefkowitz screwed up his courage, leaned over, and said to the popular paragon, “Mister, excuse me. What should I do to make friends?” “Get—a camel,” the other said with a sneer. “Ride up and down Collins Avenue every day, and before you know it, everyone in Miami will be asking, ‘Who is that man?’ and you’ll have to hire a social secretary to handle all the invitations! Don’t bother me again with such a foolish question.” So Mr. Lefkowitz bought a paper and looked through the ads, and by good fortune he read of a circus, stranded in Miami, that needed capital. Mr. Lefkowitz telephoned the circus owner and within half an hour had rented a camel. The next morning, Mr. Lefkowitz, wearing khaki shorts and a pith helmet, mounted his camel and set forth on Collins Avenue. Everywhere people stopped, buzzed, gawked, pointed. Every day for a week, Lefkowitz rode his trusty steed. One morning, just as he was about to get dressed, the telephone rang. “Mr. Lefkowitz! This is the parking lot! Your camel—it’s gone! Stolen!” At once, Mr. Lefkowitz phoned the police. A Sergeant O’Neill answered: “What? … It sounded as though you said someone had stolen your camel.” “That’s right!” “Er—I’ll fill out a form…. How tall was the animal?” “From the sidewalk to his back, where I sat, a good six feet.” “What color was it?” “What color?” echoed Lefkowitz. “Camel color: a regular, camel-colored camel!” “Male or female?” “Hanh?” “Was the animal male or female?” “How am I supposed to know about the sex of a camel?” Lefkowitz exclaimed. “Wait! Aha! It was a male!” “Are you sure?” “Absolutely.” “But Mr. Lefkowitz, a moment ago you—” “I’m positive, Officer, because I just remembered: Every time and every place I was riding on that camel, I could hear people yelling: ‘Hey! Look at the shmuck on that camel!

The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.6 Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.

In the wake of the Black Death, Ashkenazic Jews pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It is this large region that would become the heartland of a pious, Yiddish-speaking population, growing from thousands of Jews in the fourteenth century to more than 6 million in 1900 and making it by that point the largest Jewish community in the world several times

had also become the familiar given, the necessary condition of life, viewed with a mixture of friendliness and, yes, condescension. They were simply the goyim, the routine term, still used today, for all Gentiles short of aristocratic status. Sometimes they were — in an inversion of “our Jews” — “our goyim.” And although Poles and Jews retained their spiritual separateness, their daily culture — habits, language, cooking, ordinary aesthetics — inevitably intermingled and influenced each other. They lived in similarly constructed wooden houses. Some of the gorgeous wooden synagogues of Polish towns and villages were decorated with Polish folk motifs. Yiddish was permeated by Polish vocabulary: shmata for rag, czajnik for kettle, paskudny for odious, among many others. The peasants picked up Yiddish words, and Jewish themes appeared in their proverbs. Even today, people in Brańsk say, “It’s as noisy as a cheder”, or “She’s dressed as for a Jewish wedding” — meaning, dressed ostentatiously. We no longer know whether the origins of chicken soup were Jewish or Polish. And then there was the music. Each village had its Jewish musicians, to whom everyone was willing to listen. People from Brańsk still remember the Jewish fiddlers and klezmer bands that played at Polish weddings. Their melodies combined Jewish and Gypsy and Polish and Russian influences — that vivid, energetic, melancholy mix that is the Eastern European equivalent of the blues. And surely if they played like that, moving their audiences to dancing and to tears, then their souls must have caught something of the genius loci — the tune, the temper, the spirit of the place. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, the balance began once again ineluctably to shift. In the Yizkor Book, several revealing details suggest new winds, new currents. Perhaps the most important changes were caused by sudden migrations, both inward and outward. The influx of new immigrants began after the assassination of the liberal Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an event followed by a wave of pogroms and other anti-Semitic persecutions within the Russian Pale. In the aftermath, tens of thousands of Jews, known as Litvaks — so named because most of them came from Lithuania or from parts of Belarus commonly called Lithuania in those days — fled to the Polish territories to seek refuge.