The State of Yiddish

The wedding of Yael Kornfeld and Avram Mlotek (photo: James Rajotte, NYT)

A wedding announcement in the newspaper caught my eye for two reasons. First, the bride is the sister of a woman who was my son’s teacher several years ago, but what also piqued my interest was that this was the marriage of two Yiddish speakers. The odds are not good these days that you would find two (non-Ultra-Orthodox) Yiddish speakers in their early 20’s, and the chances that they would fall in love with each other are even more remote. Or so one would think. It seems that Yiddish is a powerful force for bringing people together, as you can read in the “Vows” piece by Sandee Brawarsky that appeared a couple of days ago in The New York Times.

The groom is from the Mlotek family, Yiddish royalty – if there really were such a thing. Brawarsky quotes Sam Norich, the publisher of The Forward, as saying, “If Yiddish had a state, this would be a state wedding.” This statement keeps ringing in my mind for both historical and personal reasons.

I can only conceive of a Yiddish state as though in a fairytale. Yiddish is the language of the Jewish Diaspora, of dispersion. A yiddish (which literally translates as “Jewish”) state was, indeed, established, but Yiddish was not particularly welcome in it. Hebrew was the language of the post-Holocaust, “New Jew,” of the Israeli sabra.

Nonetheless, I do correlate Yiddish with state weddings. It was 29 years ago that I, at the peak of my Yiddish-speaking powers, was mesmerized by the lavish pomp and circumstance of Prince Charles’ wedding to Diana Spencer. Only a few weeks after delivering the Yiddish valedictory address at my junior high graduation ceremony, I was up at some ungodly hour watching the royal marriage ceremony on TV. Never since that time have I been able to converse in Yiddish at such a high level, nor have I seen (nor bothered to watch) such an elaborate nuptial display.

The last time I heard Sam Norich speak was at different sort of occasion. If I recall correctly, he was among the eulogizers at the funeral for my friend Leah Strigler‘s father, Mordechai Strigler, who was the editor of the Yiddish Forward. The funeral brought together all the remaining luminaries from the world of Yiddish culture, and from the age of most of the attendees and speakers, it certainly looked like the state of Yiddish was in severe decline.

So, it is a delight for me to read Norich’s musing from the recent wedding, a much happier lifecycle event, and one which looks toward the future of Yiddish, rather than its past.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand.  All rights reserved.