Lifestyle/Community
There’s still a lot of kick in the old Yiddish mare
It was around 2002 when Philip Todres had staged the first two sold-out Yiddish Song Festival fundraisers for the Cape Jewish seniors that he had a lightbulb moment. After the Herzlia School choir’s various renditions of old Yiddish favourites, including “Rosinkes mit mandlen”, Jack Shmukler, a child Holocaust survivor, whispered to Todres (in Yiddish): “If we weren’t doing this they wouldn’t have a word of Yiddish in their mouths.”
CINDY MORITZ
Todres understood that this was a chance to preserve the Jewish heritage l’dor va’dor, meaning from generation to generation.
“Yiddish is not just a language,” says Todres. “It’s a culture. It’s about literature, film, theatre, song, food. There’s a cultural imperative for us to regain those voices that were silenced in the Holocaust.”
The Yiddish Song Festival ran for 10 years in Cape Town and had its 11th swansong performance in Johannesburg in 2011. It had expanded to include a three-day Yiddish immersion course, Otazay, which proved hugely popular, and continues today to give students the full cultural experience of storytelling, singalongs, eating the gerichten, as well as speaking the mame-loshn for three days every August.
If an annual dose is not enough, doyenne of Yiddish studies in South Africa, Dr Veronica Belling – who did her doctoral thesis on Yiddish – teaches a weekly Yiddish class at the Cape Jewish Seniors Centre in Sea Point. In Johannesburg Yiddish classes are taught by Tamar Alswang and Cedric Ginsburg at the Yiddish Academy.
For Belling, who has a rich and varied academic footprint and has contributed enormously to chronicling Yiddish history and translating Yiddish work during her 31 years at UCT’s Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, Yiddish has not been well served in South Africa despite South Africa’s being predominantly a Litvak community.
“Other than two years when it was taught in the extramural programme at UCT and Wits, Yiddish has never been taught as a subject in the universities here.” she said, adding that nonetheless there is a body of Yiddish literature written in South Africa reflecting the eastern European immigrant experience.
But does it really warrant university-level study?
“From a cultural point of view it does,” says Belling, “in order to deepen and enhance our understanding of Jewish history and culture. From a linguistic point of view it also enhances the study of the languages from which it was derived, such as German, Hebrew and Polish, as well as the languages it has influenced, such as modern Hebrew and American English in particular.”
Columbia, Oxford and Chicago are among the many prestigious universities offering Yiddish studies, and no list of resources would be complete without mentioning the prolific YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Widely known for his Yiddish research, writing and teaching, is Prof. Dovid Katz, currently at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University.
He also lectures at the Jewish Cultural and Information Centre in Vilnius while continuing to advocate for preserving and defending the Yiddish culture and history. In Melbourne, Australia, Yiddish is a matric subject at one high school.
Clearly Yiddish culture – the language, food, song and theatre – is alive, even thriving, around the world, but are we doing enough in South Africa to keep up?
Possibly with baby steps. Todres is working with producer Heather Blumenthal of Spirit Sister on a documentary on the Yiddish Song Festival. Young talents are staging their own musical shows, and the Otazay course is attracting some younger blood as well.
At Herzlia, the choirs regularly belt out Yiddish favourites under the baton of Ivor Joffe, exposing them to at least some of the language in song. As the native Yiddish speakers become fewer, it will take some effort for South Africans to preserve their Litvak culture. There is no doubt, however, that Yiddish still matters.