Gertrude and Dinah

Yiddish Cierpz (Sheps), Poland

Yiddish, written in a modified Hebrew alphabet, is considered both a Germanic language and a Jewish “fusion language” with a significant Hebrew and Aramaic component. Though there are many Jewish diaspora languages, Yiddish is the best known and most widely spoken. Despite attempted extermination in Europe and powerful forces of assimilation elsewhere, Yiddish lives on, albeit in a very different form.

On the genesis of this project: Gertrude and Dinah, my grandmother and great aunt, feisty, cantankerous, hilarious, two sisters from the Polish stetl, survivors from a lost world. They grew up in poverty in a tiny town outside Warsaw, surviving only because of the benevolence of the town's richest man, a violent hater of Jews, whose daughter they had saved from assault during a German raid in World War I. In the early 1920's their long absent father, who had gone to England to better their condition and was then deported in 1914 to Russia and conscripted into the Red Army, miraculously reappeared in the United States and sent for them. They spent their lives in the reconstructed villages of secular Yiddish Brooklyn; a community that was one of the final offshoots of a culture that was cut off at the roots. I am acutely conscious of the fact that when they passed, the Yiddish-speaking world of my family passed with them; its jokes, its songs, the whole texture and flavor Jewish Eastern Europe. They kept it alive but in our family the language did not survive without them, the children of its soil. I mourn this loss, the essence of which lies in the fact that the evolutionary thread of their language has been broken, stripped of its context. This sadness at witnessing the death of a language—combined with my discomfort regarding the exclusivity with which the language of the Holocaust portrays Jewish suffering—has brought me to the broader scope of the Exile and Mother Tongues series. Watching my ancestral language die, I have been searching for meaning in the overall connection between language and identity, in the thousands of languages and millions upon millions of stories wrapped within this essence of humanity.