My earliest memories are peppered with Yiddish phrases alongside conversations carried on by my grandfathers and great-grandparents.
When I was around 15 or 16 my great-grandmother Sadie would sometimes get confused and it was easier for her to speak Yiddish. She would ask me “?גײסטו אין חדר”
“Do you go to cheder?” She wanted to know if I was going to a Jewish school and getting an education. I would smile and nod my head.
Sometimes my maternal grandfather would respond to, he would say my mother’s and point to me:
“מאָם, דאָס איז דיין גרויס-אייניקל”
“Mom, this is your great-grandson.”
Grandma would smile and the conversation would continue. I could follow chunks of it but not as much as I wanted to.
For a short while grandpa had worked on teaching me Yiddish and so I had learned a bit. By the time my junior year of high school hit I had an opportunity to take a class in it and that helped expand things further.
But I never got as proficient as I wanted and there were always other things going on so I didn’t focus upon it.
That changed recently as I started using Duolingo to work on it again and am slowly teaching myself again. The accent of the instructors isn’t the European tinted language I remember but the words and expressions make me smile.
It is a connection to a world that once existed. It would be nice to have the grandfathers here to speak “Jewish” with and to have them help provide instruction so that I sound more natural.
I would prefer not sound like the guy using “Thee and thou” but we’ll do what we can with what we have.
Things That Age You
My baby is going to be 19 soon and not long after will start her sophomore year of college. My youngest nephew is 17 and from what I hear about my height or maybe slightly taller now.
Meant to include some of that in Johnny Writes Letters but got distracted by other things because life is particularly busy now.
In about two weeks we’ll mark the fifth anniversary of my father dying and I am sure when I visit him I’ll mention something about it.
Because we used to talk about how fast the chunks of time start to go and I can hear him tell me that it will feel strange when I realize there are no babies around anymore.
There haven’t been for a long while but if you could go back 10 years you’d find the moment where he pointed at his oldest grandsons and told me that life was about to start moving fast.
It is funny because I remember looking at him and saying something about having been a father for 13 years and how that felt fast to me.
But when I look at the last 10 years it is hard to reconcile the speed with which it passed, especially given that some of that was filled with the hardest moments of my life.
This time twenty-three years ago was filled with conversations about potential names, research on baby equipment and questions about how many kids would one day run around the house and who they would grow up to be.
The comments old people made about it going too quickly were irritating and felt over-the-top but here I am nodding my head because now I understand.
דער מענטש טראַכט און גאָט לאַכט.
Der mentsh trakht un got lakht.
Man plans and God laughs.
Don’t have to close my eyes to remember walking down Fairfax or hanging out at Farmer’s Market and hearing Yiddish all around me.
Sometimes I would see the tattoos they received in the camps and wonder about the experiences they had and what it took to get here.
I can smell cigars and hear the men talking about the war and what they did during it. What throws me a bit is to think about the chunks of time that are involved.
If you use kindergarten as benchmark it was 29 years between then and the end of WWII. Add another 20 on top of that and it is 49 years since I was that little five-year-old.
A different world, a different life.
But I remember much and I recognize now that I am close in age to many of those I heard speaking back then. Just a few years younger than my grandparents were and almost a quarter century older than my folks.
Language is tied to culture and to memory, so the time spent learning helps keep both alive. There is something reassuring about that.
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