>> Barbara Henry: So, why Yiddish?
I get asked that a lot.
Why does a non-Jew choose the Yiddish language?
Study Yiddish literature?
I never get asked why I learned Russian.
And studied Russian literature.
Of course Russian literature!
Tolstoy! Dostoyevsky! Pushkin!
Nobody ever yells, "Sholem Aleichem! Peretz!"
Although frankly, Peretz alone is worth two Dostoyevskys.
Maybe three.
So, first off, don't think for a minute that you choose what you love.
If you are very, very lucky, what you love will choose you, and who, for that matter.
Your only choice in the matter is to decide whether you're going to explore
that strange new love, that strange new culture and language.
Especially if it's a language in culture that was not given to you, but which you had to earn.
So, Yiddish.
Growing up goyish in northern New Jersey in the 1970s
which sounds like a really bad sitcom
[ Laughter ]
It actually kind of was a sitcom.
Growing up goyish in northern New Jersey, Jewishness was never anything remarkable.
You had Jewish friends.
We got Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur off from school.
A great way to introduce goyish kids to the wonder of Jewishness.
We ate knishes.
We went to bar mitzvahs.
We could identify Hatikvah as the Israeli national anthem.
Jewishness was no big deal.
And then I heard the music, Klezmer music, Eastern European traditional Jewish music.
And it was pretty much all over after that.
I needed that music.
I needed to know what those songs were about.
And the more that I looked at where Klezmer comes from, Eastern Europe,
the more I fell in love with it, the more I needed it.
I was already fatally obsessed with Russia and Russian literature.
And discovering the Jewishness of Russia and the Jewishness of Eastern Europe was
like being given a whole other world, or as we say in New Jersey, a whole nother world.
And it was a world that had all the things I loved; poetry,
and plays, and music, and newspapers.
And it had a million political parties, and language conferences, and heated debates
about the most important issues of the day.
It is impossible to learn anything about the Yiddish world of Eastern Europe
and not fall completely in love with it.
Why wouldn't you love Yiddish?
It was the European Jewish vernacular for 1,000 years.
For 1,000 years, people lived and worked and loved and fought in Yiddish.
Your own great grandparents probably, many of you, spoke Yiddish.
Are you really ready to let all that go?
I'm not. So, Yiddish.
It sometimes seems like an emissary from another world.
A world where Warsaw is 1/3 Jewish.
A world where you could spend your entire life speaking Yiddish in school.
Going to Yiddish plays.
Reading Yiddish newspapers.
And all of this was completely normal.
That world is gone now.
But Yiddish is not.
There are a million Hasidic Jews worldwide who still speak Yiddish,
and for whom Yiddish is very much the language of everyday life.
I know people my own age who are not Hasidic who are raising their children speaking Yiddish.
They all know that Yiddish is not just a language.
It's a way of life.
And it's a way of being in the world that can only enrich what it means to be Jewish,
which is another way of saying what it means to be human.
So, both of these questions.
What it means to be Jewish?
What it means to be human, of course, are central preoccupations of Yiddish literature.
But after the war, that question is inextricably tied up with the question
of the survival of Yiddish itself.
For whom does the Yiddish writer write after the war?
How can you write in a language when the majority
of its European native speakers have been murdered?
How do you continue writing in a language that was very nearly itself murdered?
These questions, every day were a preoccupation for the Yiddish writer Aaron Zeitlin.
Every hour of every day after the war, Aaron Zeitlin dealt with this question.
He was born in Belarus in 1899.
And he grew up in Warsaw.
The son of a well-known Jewish thinker, Hillel Zeitlin.
Aaron Zeitlin wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew.
He wrote plays, poetry, essays, journalism.
And in March of 1939, he was invited to New York
by the Yiddish theatre impresario and actor Maurice Schwartz.
Schwartz was staging Zeitlin's play Esterke and brought him over to help or supervise
or steal ideas from him or something.
And it was this accident that Zeitlin was in New York,
when the war broke out, that saved his life.
His entire family, of course, his entire world perished in the holocaust in Poland.
And I chose a poem by Aaron Zeitlin called [inaudible].
Six lines.
Because for me, it very much presents the Yiddish language as a kind
of intermediary between the living and the dead.
Between the past and the future, both his own and ours.
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
Six lines.
One for each of the six million.
It's a poor gift perhaps, but it's the only one the poet has.
And perhaps the only epitaph for those who died.
It's the poem become both memorial and burial place.
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
I know no one needs me in this world.
Not in this world perhaps.
Perhaps in the next, in the world to come where his loved ones wait.
But not just there.
[Yiddish word], in the Ashkenazi pronunciation, means world, but it also means public.
It also means audience,which also means it's about you.
Perhaps you don't need him.
But he very much needs you.
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
Me,a word beggar in the Jewish graveyard.
All writers are word beggars.
Are they not?
Collecting words like coins.
Trading them for food, for warmth, for life.
But he, of course, is a word beggar in a Jewish graveyard.
And the [Yiddish word], the world, become [Yiddish word], the graveyard.
But then on some level, all literature is a dialogue with the dead.
The only way many of us will ever know the ones who came before us.
And for Zeitlin, the worry is who will know him?
Who will know his world?
Who will know his work after he is gone?
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
The question kind of hangs in the air.
And the fear is that the answer is that blank space between the first and second stances.
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
Only what is hopeless on the earth is beautiful.
And here, he uses the word [Yiddish word].
Germanic word [Yiddish word].
Cognate with the English earth.
And it's just that.
The soil, the ground, the place where we are.
Where we put down roots.
Where we grow.
Where we bloom.
And where we die.
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
Death is what makes life hopeless, and beautiful, and holy.
[ Speaking Yiddish ]
Only humility is rebellious.
To write a poem in Yiddish is hopeless.
A lost cause,which is exactly why it has to be done.
Because if Yiddish is a lost cause because it will die, then we are a lost cause as well.
You cannot love what cannot die.
But you can't not love.
You can't not speak.
You can't not listen.
To acknowledge the mortality of everything that we are, everything that we love,
and to love it anyway, is the greatest act of rebellion we can offer.
We live until we're not living anymore.
We fight until we're not fighting anymore.
And we speak, perhaps in Yiddish, until we're not anymore.
And if Aaron Zeitlin, knowing this, can go on writing,
maybe we can go on listening, and speaking, and reading.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]