CT residents keep “mamaloshen” alive

One hundred years ago, Yiddish was declared a dead language, even as five million Jews throughout pre-Holocaust Europe claimed it as their native tongue. Today, Yiddish is still a living language among Chasidic communities, the Germanic and Biblical Hebrew base mixing with the street English of Boro Park, Brooklyn or the modern Hebrew of Jerusalem. Yiddish also has a home in academia, with programs from Israel to Germany to Oxford, England to North America a staple of Judaic studies departments.

Though not as prevalent as spoken Hebrew, one can still find Yiddish speakers, or at least Yiddish-lovers, in many Jewish communities throughout the world. The Ledger tracked down several in Connecticut to learn how they came to the language and how they’re keeping it alive.

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Dr. Victor Bers

Hamden

Victor Bers didn’t speak at all until age three, and when he did, he spoke Yiddish.

Bers is a longtime professor of classics at Yale, specializing in ancient Greek language and culture. So he has a grasp of Yiddish not only as a native speaker, but also as a linguist.

Dr. Victor Bers

Born in Providence, R.I. in 1944 to Holocaust survivors, he was raised in the tradition of the Bund, the secular Jewish socialist party founded in the Russian empire in the late 19th century. “My family has been atheist for three generations and I was not bar mitzvahed and I did not learn Hebrew,” he says. “That remains a problem for me in that some Yiddish literature is full of things which, for full appreciation, you need to have good Hebrew and not just know the Bible, but also Gemara (a component of the Talmud). As a component of the culture and the literature and sometimes the linguistic structure, Hebrew plays an important part. I was always interested in the Yiddish language, and regarded it as a disgrace that I couldn’t read it.”

When he was in his 40s, Bers began to address that deficiency.

He first arrived at Yale in 1972. Surprisingly, he discovered many fellow Yiddish-speakers. “I found that I could conduct a great deal of business in Yiddish with deans and assistant deans,” he says.

There has been a lot of potential over the years to establish a Yiddish program at Yale, Bers says, an aspiration left unrequited. A Yiddish discussion group was started in the mid-‘60s by Ethel Himberg, a secretary at the university who also taught Yiddish language and literature through Hillel at Yale. Sid Resnick, a staff member of the Yale Law School library, created the Yale-New Haven Yiddish Reading Circle in the mid-‘80s, and Bers was an early member. Prof. Howard Stern of the German department has taught Yiddish on and off, but the language has never even found a home in the department of Judaic studies, Bers says.

“There is a very strong emotional tie to Yiddish, but it is also very interesting linguistically and historically,” he says. “It is a fact that Yiddish lost a great portion of its native speakers in the Holocaust. When we lost them, we lost direct access to people whose first linguistic reflex is in Yiddish. I did get some of that: there are some things I still think in Yiddish, not in English. There is nothing like a native speaker, and as soon as the language is something learned instead, it’s very different. So I also feel an obligation to do what I can, particularly in an academic setting. What we need to do is encourage its cultivation.”

In 1994, Bers took over as owner of Mendele, a website devoted to the propagation of Yiddish. Founded in 1991 by Norman Miller, a sociologist teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Mendele now boasts more than 2,000 subscribers throughout the world. When the website was moved to Yale’s servers, undergraduate Keith Weiser took over its editorship, and went on to become an associate professor of modern Jewish history at York University in Toronto. Weiser is one of three former Yale students who participated in the Yiddish reading circle and chose professional paths including Yiddish, Bers says. Ken Frieden, a professor and chair of Judaic studies at Syracuse University and Josh Price, who is also profiled here, are the two others.

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