Yiddish Language Quotes

The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.

husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93.   Yiddish's

Yiddish is a cheerful language of not so happy people.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

Often, the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not-so-subtle way of discovering if we spoke Yiddish (which we didn’t) and were therefore Jewish (which we were).

The sense of differentiation is so acute in Yiddish that a word like, say, paskudnyak has no peer in any language I know for the vocal delineation of a nasty character. And Yiddish coins new names with ease for new personality types: a nudnik is a pest; a phudnik is a nudnik with a Ph.D.

Jossi had been slow in agreeing with Ben Yehuda and the others. Hebrew had to be revived. If the desire for national identity was great enough a dead language could be brought back. But Sarah was set in her ways. Yiddish was what she spoke and what her mother had spoken. She had no intention of becoming a scholar so late in life.

Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bears the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.

The secret to my father’s mastery of selling in a language he barely spoke is one word: chutzpah. It’s the Yiddish word for moxie, nerve, audacity; it’s a determined, give-no-f*cks approach to life. When Israelis say you have chutzpah, they mean you know what you want and go for it. They mean you have endless tenacity. They mean you’ll do what it takes.

Not only do Judaism in general and Yiddish in particular place an unusual emphasis on complaint, but Yiddish also allows considerable scope for complaining about the complaining of others, more often than not to the others who are doing the complaining. While answering one complaint with another is usually considered a little excessive in English, Yiddish tends to take a homeopathic approach to kvetching: like cures like and kvetch cures kvetch. The best response to a complaint is another complaint, an antiseptic counter-kvetch that makes further whining impossible for anybody but you.

As was the case in many left-wing Jewish homes, I learned a different version of “Never again”—that it was a directive, a sacred duty, to oppose hate and discrimination in all its forms, no matter who was the target. But, for the same reasons that she selected my biblical name, my mother insisted that I go to Hebrew day school to cement the bond to our tribe, to learn the songs, rituals, and languages (both Hebrew and Yiddish) that our adversaries had been trying to annihilate since before the Inquisition. And at that school, “Never again” did not mean “Never again to anyone,” as it did in our home—it meant “Never again to the Jews.” It meant “Never again because of Israel.” It meant “Never again because we who have been haunted by Shylock forever have our own double now—and he has a great many guns.

Here’s an imaginary twin pair that would be God’s gift to behavior geneticists—identical twin boys separated at birth. One, Shmuel, is raised as an Orthodox Jew in the Amazon; the other, Wolfie, is raised as a Nazi in the Sahara. Reunite them as adults and see if they do similar quirky things like, say, flushing the toilet before using it. Flabbergastingly, one twin pair came close to that. They were born in 1933 in Trinidad to a German Catholic mother and a Jewish father; when the boys were six months of age, the parents separated; the mother returned to Germany with one son, and the other remained in Trinidad with the father. The latter was raised there and in Israel as Jack Yufe, an observant Jew whose first language was Yiddish. The other, Oskar Stohr, was raised in Germany as a Hitler Youth zealot. Reunited and studied by Bouchard, they warily got to know each other, discovering numerous shared behavioral and personality traits including . . . flushing the toilet before use.

The process is taking place before our eyes and is already far advanced.” Under present trends, “the number of Jews in Europe by the year 2000 would then be not much more than 1 million—the lowest figure since the last Middle Ages.” In 1900, there were 8 million. The story elsewhere is even more dispiriting. The rest of what was once the diaspora is now either a museum or a graveyard. Eastern Europe has been effectively emptied of its Jews. In 1939, Poland had 3.2 million Jews. Today it is home to 3,500. The story is much the same in the other capitals of Eastern Europe. The Islamic world, cradle to the great Sephardic Jewish tradition and home to one-third of world Jewry three centuries ago, is now practically Judenrein. Not a single country in the Islamic world is home to more than 20,000 Jews. After Turkey with 19,000 and Iran with 14,000, the country with the largest Jewish community in the entire Islamic world is Morocco with 6,100. There are more Jews in Omaha, Nebraska. These communities do not figure in projections. There is nothing to project. They are fit subjects not for counting but for remembering. Their very sound has vanished. Yiddish and Ladino, the distinctive languages of the European and Sephardic diasporas, like the communities that invented them, are nearly extinct.

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.

Yiddish is a wonderfully rich, descriptive, onomatopoeic language full of colorful words and expressions. But Yiddish is more than just language. It’s a window into the Jewish mind-set. It’s a way of thinking, of seeing and categorizing the world. Yiddish knocks the high and mighty off their pedestals. It questions authority. It argues. It keenly observes the subtle nuances of human behavior. It’s philosophical about life. And, of course, it’s sarcastic as hell.

someone who did languages for a living stopped me in the subway because how I spoke was a linguist's treat I mean there it was yiddish and Spanish and fine refined college educated english and irish which I mainly keep in my prayers

The twelve branches of Indo-European included most of the languages of Europe (but not Basque, Finnish, Estonian, or Magyar); the Persian language of Iran; Sanskrit and its many modern daughters (most important, Hindi and Urdu); and a number of extinct languages including Hittite in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Tocharian in the deserts of Xinjiang (northwestern China) (figure 1.2). Modern English, like Yiddish and Swedish, is assigned to the Germanic branch.

OK, so which sound was it? Well, another problem here is we don’t even use that sound in English any more, except in a few cases, like for that sound of disgust, that back-of-the-throat rough vibration found at the end of the word blechhhh. Linguists call it a velar fricative. You’ll also find it in yech, ichh, and ughh, but you can hear it in a few more wordy kinds of words too—the composer Bach, words from Yiddish like tuchus or chutzpah or from Scottish like loch or the name Lachlan.

People ask me often, ‘Why do you write in a dying language?’ And I want to explain it in a few words. Firstly, I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it. Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection. I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: “Is there any new Yiddish book to read?” For them Yiddish will not be dead. Thirdly, for 2000 years Hebrew was considered a dead language. Suddenly it became strangely alive. What happened to Hebrew may also happen to Yiddish one day, (although I haven’t the slightest idea how this miracle can take place.) There is still a fourth minor reason for not forsaking Yiddish and this is: Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead. [Isaac Bashevis Singer’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1978]

Yiddish is the common language of Jews.” “You all speak it? Write it?” “All speak it.” She explained that it was a folk language, born in the Rhineland in the twelfth century. “Like a bastard—a German father, a Hebrew mother. The Jews spoke German, but they wrote it with Hebrew letters. When they moved eastward into the Pale, they added Polish, Russian, Lithuanian. They began to speak it, too. Anyone with an education can also write it.” “You’re

Any reader who feels superior to such quaint English might remember that when the overwhelming majority of humankind was illiterate, it was hard to find a Jewish lad over six who could not read and write (Hebrew). Most adult male Jews could handle at least three languages: they used Hebrew in the synagogues and houses of study (see Besmedresh), Yiddish in the home, and—to Gentiles—the language of the land in which they lived. My father, a workingman denied the equivalent of a high school education in Poland, handled Yiddish, English, Hebrew, and Polish. Jews were linguists of necessity.

The Hebrew alphabet, incidentally, came from the inhabitants of Canaan, which was that part of Palestine the Greeks called Phoenicia. Hebrew was most probably the language spoken by the Phoenicians/Canaanites (Isaiah spoke of the “language of Canaan”), who almost surely created those letters that formed a Semitic alphabet and from which all the alphabets in Europe descended. Hebrew was one of a cluster of related languages (Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Arabic, etc.) known as “Semitic.

Yiddish is the Robin Hood of languages. It steals from the linguistically rich to give to the fledgling poor. It shows not the slightest hesitation in taking in house-guests—to whom it gives free room and board regardless of genealogy, faith, or exoticism. A memorable remark by a journalist, Charles Rappaport, runs: “I speak ten languages—all of them in Yiddish.

the language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves’ cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form “flash,” a

Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.

If the first chapter seems to talk more about the Bible and Talmud than bupkes and tukhes, it’s because the Bible and Talmud are to Yiddish what plantations are to the blues. The only difference is that blues left the plantations behind, while Yiddish—try as it still sometimes does—never escaped from the Talmud. A

By the time we became friends, he was concerned he was losing his facility for the language, so he actually found a Yiddish-speaking psychiatrist in Los Angeles and paid her hourly fee once a week just to sit and speak with him in Yiddish. He

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.

Au commencement était le verbe nous disent les anciens. Pour moi, celui du commencement fut roumain. Le médecin et ceux qui avaient veillé sur ma difficile naissance parlaient le roumain. Chez moi, on parlait roumain, je passais la majeure partie de mon temps avec Maria, la jolie fille de paysans qui s’occupait de moi et m’adorait en roumain. Ce n’était, certes, pas la seule phonétique de mon environnement. Dans la Bucovine d’avant la dernière guerre mondiale, on parlait l’allemand, le yiddish, l’ukrainien, le polonais et un étrange mélange de slave, caractéristique des Ruthènes. La grande guerre fratricide entre le yiddish, la langue de l’exil, plébéienne, laïque, et l’hébreu sacré, élitiste, connut, ne l’oublions pas, son heure dramatique à la Conférence de Czernowitz en 1908, quand la victoire solennelle du yiddish (« les Juifs sont un seul peuple, leurs langues est le yiddish ») ne pouvait laisser augurer la suprématie spectaculaire et définitive que la création de l’État d’Israël allait assurer quatre décennies plus tard à la langue hébraïque. Lorsque mon grand-père demanda si j’avais des ongles, afin d’évaluer les chances du nouveau-né, je suppose qu’il le fit en yiddish, bien qu’il sût l’hébreu, parlât couramment le roumain, et que dans sa librairie on vendît essentiellement des livres roumains. À 5 ans, déporté en Transnistrie avec toute la population juive de Bucovine, je ne connaissais que le roumain. Lors de mon premier exode au-delà du Dniestr, la langue roumaine subit l’exil en même temps que moi. (p. 45, première page du texte « La langue exilée », 2002)

My letter,” Bella said in Yiddish that was a bit garbled, but perfectly understandable. “I want my letter back and she won’t give it to me. Why doesn’t she understand my English?” “That’s Yiddish you’re speaking,” Yetta said. “No, it’s not,” Bella said irritably. “It’s the English I learned in the factory.” “It’s Yiddish! You must have learned Yiddish because there were so many of us Jews in the factory. Listen”—Yetta switched languages—“English sounds like this.” Bella stared up at Yetta, her eyes seeming to grow in her pale face. “I don’t even know what Yiddish is,” she said, in Yiddish….. “Bella learned Yiddish by mistake,” Yetta said. “She thought she was speaking English.” “Wish I could learn a new language just by mistake,” Jane said. “I’ve been studying Italian for weeks, and it’s totally useless.

The Jews of Middle and Eastern Europe, who are scattered in all parts of the world, finding it necessary to have a common tongue for mutual intercourse, have raised Yiddish to the status of a language, and have succeeded in translating into Yiddish the best books to be found in the world's literature.

We Jews also spoke Yiddish and in fact, from a young age I spoke three languages on a daily and regular basis.

If the first requirement of a civilisation is the possession of its own language, the second must be the pursuit of a literary tradition. Books are, in historian Barbara Tuchman's words, the carriers of civilisation.

The theme of translation has a long history in psychoanalysis. It retains significance as a term that represents three related ideas: a language change, a movement across a psychic boundary, and the transference of an object relationship. Freud's terms Übertragung [transference, transmission] and Ubersetzung [translation] carry all of these connotations, for they both mean bringing something across, or carrying something over. The etymology of the related word 'metaphor' derives from a literal Greek version of the Latin of transference (both meaning 'carrying beyond or across'). Similarly, we can include the related term 'interpretation,' which certainly describes a transfer of meaning or a translation of one set of terms into another. Again the Greek word metaphrase unites these two meanings, and a metaphrastis is a translator. In a similar vein, the Yiddish expression fartaysthn means to translate and to explain (Bloom, 2008).

The transformation of Judaism into a religion served American Jews’ interests in yet another way. America, after all, is corrosive of ethnic identity. Four generations after Italian immigrants arrived on America’s shores, how Italian are their descendants? Do they speak Italian? Are their homes distinctively Italian in any meaningful way decades later? When a descendant of an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in 1910 marries a descendant of a German immigrant from the same period, is any cultural adjustment required? Rarely. Aside from ethnic identities related to physical appearance (African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and the too often ignored Native Americans, among others), most other ethnicities have long since disappeared. Even the ethnic dimension of Jewish life has mostly dissolved. Few American Jews speak Hebrew, Yiddish, or other Jewish languages. For the most part, cuisine in Jewish homes is scarcely different from that of other American homes. American progressives are culturally almost indistinguishable from progressives of other backgrounds. Jews were perhaps the last to give up the ethnic ghost, but even among American Jews, ethnicity is finally disappearing. If anything has survived, it has been a sense of Judaism as a faith tradition, Judaism as religion, no matter how profound or casual a person’s faith and no matter what particular form religious participation takes.

Zeidy says the English language acts like a slow poison to the soul. If I speak and read it too much, my soul will become tarnished to the point where it is no longer responsive to divine stimulation. Zeidy always insists I speak Yiddish, the language of my ancestors that God approves of. However, Yiddish is nothing but a hodgepodge of German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and other random dialects. Many of them were once considered as secular as English. How is it that Yiddish is suddenly the language of purity and righteousness?

the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) appeared half a century later than in Berlin, Vienna or Paris, and took on a national form: secularization and modernization gave birth to a Jewish nation whose pillars were the Yiddish language and culture.

The Jewish bookstore in Borough Park sells books that Zeidy doesn’t approve of. He likes me to read in Yiddish, gaudily illustrated tales of legendary tzaddikim, who perform predictable miracles through prayer and exercises in faith, whose stories spill abruptly out over the length of twenty or so pages of monotonous language. He brings home Yiddish weeklies, periodicals depicting news mined from old journals and encyclopedias, outdated essays on midcentury politics or Jewish cantorial music. I know there are other works written in Yiddish, but they are banned. In fact there is a whole world of Yiddish literature I will never be allowed to read. Sholem Aleichem is forbidden in this house; he was an apikores, a so-called liberated Jew. Satmar people do not read anything written by liberated Jews, even if it is written in the holy language of Yiddish.