Yiddish
Showing posts with label Yiddish. Show all posts

Year Two, Week 20: A Hiatus, of Sorts


 It's been a few weeks since I have posted, which is never a good sign on a blog. Life has gotten unexpectedly, and, to an extent, unpleasantly busy.

I am in preproduction of my play "Shaina," which I will post more about this week. I also had some stupid and embarrassingly trashy apartment problems. Without being too specific, people were using the parking lot outside our window for drug deals, and we discovered some of these same people were squatting in empty apartments in our building.

Additionally, I have started a new project, which I felt like I needed to do, as I was getting a little burned out on Yiddish. But when you do things that take a lot of time, that time must be borrowed from somewhere.

I have continued to study my Yiddish flashcards, but have taken a break from adding new ones. This is actually something I have been considering for a while. I have about 5,000 flashcards, and that's plenty for basic communication, but I barely know many of them. I have been thinking it might be worthwhile to stop plugging in as many new cards as fast as I can and concentrate on learning the ones I have already added.

So this is what I have been doing. It reduces the amount of time I spend on Yiddish from an hour-plus per day to a half-hour to 45 minutes, which is manageable. I think I will soon get back to adding in flashcards from my grammar book, because I want to be able to use the words I have effectively, but for the moment it has been a tremendous relief not to commit to so much time every single day, even if I have only really cleared up half an hour or so.

There also gets to be a point where you try something for a while and then revisit the experiment. I have always known that, studying on my own, Yiddish would be of limited practical value.

The American Jewish community has an affection for a hundred or so Yiddish words that is used as a sort of flavoring, but not much interest in Yiddish beyond that. There are a few dedicated Yiddish cultists, and there are communities of Haredi Jews who use Yiddish as a vernacular, but they are largely located in New York. There just isn't much opportunity for me to use Yiddish in a day to day way.

Knowing this, and knowing that things are not likely to change for me, I have to ask myself what degree of commitment I wish to continue to have to studying Yiddish as a vernacular, as I have been doing.

I don't have an answer for that. I genuinely love the language, and I love studying it, and so I think there will always be a place for continuing to do so. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that one should not make decisions when one is feeling a little burned out.

I develop interests sometimes that I pursue for a little while, and then I lose interest and just never really return to the subject. But there are other things where my interest wanes, and then returns, and then wanes, and so on. These are things that I continue to revisit for my entire life.

Yiddish has been one of those things since I was a teenager. And I know if I got frustrated now and stopped studying, in a year or so I would regret it, because my interest would return and I would find myself frustrated that I forgot so much of what I spent a year and a half studying.

I think it would help me to learn some tools for maintaining what I have learned when my interest cools, so that I don't have to start over again from scratch when I regain interest. And I think it would help for me to learn how to pare back a little when I start feeling burnout, instead of just pushing ahead, because that it one thing that is guaranteed to make me walk away from something completely.

So, for now, I will just continuing reviewing existing flashcards until I feel motivated to add new ones, which could be in a few days or could be longer.

I'm also kicking around the idea of studying another language, but am not ready to add that in yet. I feel like my Yiddish studies have given me tremendous tools for acquiring language, and it might help me to start learning a language that is actually used as a vernacular, so I can get some practice with a language that I can actually use.

It would probably be Spanish, which I have studied in the past, but who knows? One of the things that first got me involved with this Yiddish project was reading books by self-educated poly-linguists, and the idea of speaking a number of languages was very exciting to me.

We will see, though. As I said, I am very busy right now, and sometimes you have to respect how limited your time is.

Year 2, Week 18: The birthday


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 462 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 298 hours
I have reviewed 5,090 individual flashcards

Tomorrow is my 49th birthday. I started this project like I start all my projects, from a fairly absurd declaration that I then try to live up to. In this case, I decided that I thought all Ashkenazi Jews should be able to speak Yiddish by the time they are 50.

This is a product of my own experiences, where, when I was younger, I would sometimes find myself in the company of older Jews who would, on occasion, spontaneously and comfortably switch into speaking Yiddish -- sometimes a word or two, sometimes a sentence, sometimes complete conversations.

I don't know how fluent they actually were. I used to play guitar, and I was pretty good at it, but I would go to guitar stores and watch others sit down and play something utterly astonishing. Sometimes these people were genuinely terrific guitarists, but sometimes they were okay guitarists like me who had a few really impressive tricks. I had a few really impressive tricks too, and am sure when I ran through them people thought I was much better than I was.

So it is with everything. It's hard to gauge competence, especially when you are comparatively incompetent. Maybe I know enough Yiddish now so that the younger me would have been impressed.

I have a year left until I am 50, and I will be curious as to my comfort with the language then. It's starting to click for me, to an extent. Words come easier to me when I want them, and I am able to construct fairly complicated thoughts out of the words I know. I increasingly understand Yiddish when I hear it spoken, or at least some of it -- enough to get the gist of a sentence. I know my grammar is poor -- I mostly built sentences as though I were speaking in English. But not entirely. I have now memorized or partially memorized may 500 phrases and proverbs, and I find myself building new sentences out of them, and those new sentences are presumably closer to how they would be said in Yiddish.

I have always had an image in mind when working on this project -- me at age 50 sitting in a deli reading a Yiddish newspaper. I'm not sure where that image came from, but I am a long way away from it. While my oral Yiddish skills are coming along apace, my literacy is probably dreadful, because I never work on that. I panic at seeing Yiddish in small print, because it's so small and there are so many Yiddish words, and so I never do any reading at all.

I must rectify this. I probably know enough Yiddish now to be able to read children's books, and most of my English acquisition came through reading; I don't know why this wouldn't also be the case with Yiddish.

I shall have to make plans to address this. I don't actually have anybody to speak Yiddish with just now, but I can always have a relationship with a book.

Year 2, Week 17: Discipline


 The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 454 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 288 hours
I have reviewed 5,001 individual flashcards


Through sheer force of will, I have gotten myself back on track. I suppose I'm just learning the discipline of learning a language.


Discipline is hard to acquire. I've only got a few place in my life where I am really disciplined. I'm a disciplined writer, in the sense that if I sit down in front of a blank computer screen I know that within an hour or so I will have written somewhere in the area of 600 to 1,000 words. It's a discipline I had to develop as a journalist, although I am not disciplined enough to do my writing early; I typically do it on the day it is due.


I suppose every discipline is made up of many smaller disciplines. In writing, you have to learn the discipline of writing when you don't want to write, revising when you don't want to revise, writing when you are uninspired, writing when you don't have any idea what you're going to say, and the discipline of not hating your editors, which may be the hardest discipline of all.


In learning Yiddish, there are similarly a series of disciplines, some of which I have acquired, some of which I still struggle with. There is the discipline of constantly creating new flashcards. There is the discipline of creating flashcards containing words other than Yiddish slang for sexual activities. There's the discipline of actually studying the flashcards. There's the discipline of trying to locate gaps in your study and fill them. There's the discipline of caring that there are gaps in your study since all you do with Yiddish is talk to your dog. There is the discipline of not spending all your free time playing with your dog and getting back to studying. And don't even bring up video games.


Anyway, it helped to reshuffle my schedule a little. I now wake at 6:30 or 7 a.m., so am not as exhausted to the extent I was -- it's amazing how much an extra half hour or so can help. Instead of reviewing flashcards first thing in the morning, I review them on the bus to and from work, during my lunch break, and then before I got go to bed, which seems to work about as well.


I'm back to just finding words at random in the dictionary, but when I was last doing this, I was trying to be sort of fair to my dictionary. If I opened it to the page where I had already picked a few words, I flipped around until I find a page where I have learned no words at all. That was starting to take a lot of time, so I have gone back to being loosey goosey about the whole thing.


I am also working my way through a grammar book, as I mentioned, and continue to plug in a Yiddish homily or folk expression or proverb every other day, so there is some nice variety to my studies. I may get back to plugging in text from "Say It in Yiddish," which has turned out to be the collection of the dullest sentences ever conceived. Still, they are well-constructed Yiddish sentences, and it is useful to have a lot of those memorized.

I have made one shift in how I study that I would like to mention. It's small, but I feel like it has been surprisingly effective. It used to be that if I came across a flashcard I knew, I would say the answer and then click past the card. Now, even if I know the answer, I review the card five or so times.

This seems to be helping me to cement the flashcards in my old noggin. Otherwise, once I have learned a card, they only get very brief reviews, and I quickly start forgetting them again. I guess this is another discipline of learning Yiddish: spending time with a word you think you already know.

Also, a quick note: I passed 5,000 flashcards this week, which was one of my milestones. I bought myself a whiskey to celebrate.
 

Yiddish Film: Menashe (2017)


There are a lot of posts I do where I feel like am a duplicating the efforts of other. As an example, there is a fairly comprehensive book on Yiddish film, "Bridge of Light" by Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman. There is probably some value in me writing about, say, "Mamele," in that criticism always benefits from a plurality of voices, but aside from my own eccentric take on the subject I don't think I can contribute any new information not provided by Dr. Hoberman.

But Hoberman wrote his book in 1995, so there has been 22 years of new Yiddish film since then, and they have not been written about comprehensively. And every so often I get to tackle a new film relatively early, such as "Menashe," an independent film I viewed at the Minneapolis St. Paul Film Festival; it has not yet gone into wide release.

In some ways, I feel like I got into this one too early. The film is set in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and is largely made up of Hasidic and ex-Hasidic actors. It was scripted by director Joshua Z. Weinstein, along with Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed, none of whom, to the best of my knowledge, have extensive experience with the Haredi experience (in fact, Syeed is Muslim.)

But director Weinstein has a background in documentary filmmaking, and it sounds as though the cast (especially including star Menashe Lustig, whose biography this movie borrows from) contributed to the eventual film. Presumably this brought a needed authenticity to the story, with the cast and star acting as a refernce and providing checks and balances to how they are represented. But, again, the film is not yet in wide release, and probably will not generally be seen by Hasids, who tend to avoid secular films. I have some connections in the ex-Hasid world, and will be curious to see what they think.

From the outside, the film seems unusually nuanced. Firstly, the plot: The movie tells of a widowed Hasidic man and his troubled relationship with him community and his son. Menashe, played by Lustig, is an eccentric by Hasidic standards, particularly in his refusal to remarry. He seems to be wavering between extremism and liberalism, but mostly seems to be struggling both with poverty and immaturity.

Menashe is a shlemiel -- he's called that by his brother-in-law. Usually this word suggests someone who is comically unlucky or inept, but "Menashe" is not a comedy, and so the main character's experiences are more often frustrating or humiliating than humorous. Especially thorny: His son has been taken away from him until he remarries.

At first, this seems like an unusually cruel communal convention. Menashe deeply loves his son, and it visibly tortures him to be separated. (It should be noted that Lustig's performance in this film is superlative; the whole cast is superb.) But the film also hints that this rule is specifically being enforced because Menashe is too immature to properly care for his child; he can't even properly tend for a pet chicken he has purchased.

It can be tough to watch. There is a line in the movie "Amelie" that describes a character as not liking to see a parent humiliated in front of their child, and sometimes this seems to be the entirety of "Menashe." Additionally, the title character reveals the source of his ambivalence about marriage, and it becomes obvious that he's deep in the throes of what is called "survivor guilt." His guilt about his wife's death, and his relationship beforehand, may be the source of his irresponsibility and occasional hostility toward his community, which has neither the skills nor the language to address his experience.

The film allows both flashes of compassion and cruelty -- the same community leader that slips Menashe extra money and praises his terrible cooking is, in another scene, shown refusing a girl the opportunity to go to college. We just hear her in the background, and hear that her heart is broken.

The film represents the extent to which Hasidic life is circumscribed by ritual -- we see Menashe praying at night before he goes to sleep and washing his hands as soon as his wakes. It's a balancing act, as, if the film approached the subject as a documentary might, it would be possible to get lost in the rituals -- the thrice-daily prayers; the complicated rules around what can and cannot be done on shabbos; the dense, insular language of piety. The Hasidic world in not merely closed because some speak Yiddish, or because some live in religious enclaves, or because it has a handful of particular rules.

No, it is a denser world than that, and the film carefully threads the needle as to showing the particulars of that world while opening it up enough for viewers to connect with Menashe, his grief, and his struggles to reconnect with his son. As an outsider, I feel the filmmakers did a fine job with this, but, as I said, I do not yet know what insiders (or, at least, former insiders) think.

Year 2, Week 16: 160,000 flashcards


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 446 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 282 hours
I have reviewed 4,919 individual flashcards

I made some progress breaking out of my slump this week. I have received a copy of "Colloquial Yiddish" by LilyKahn and have started plugging lessons from that book. I have also started creating word lists of the sorts of things I talk about for new vocab words, rather than simply finding words at random in the dictionary, which was amusing for a while and maybe will be again in the future.

My word lists began with words about cowboys, because of course it did. I also added in a lot of words related to music, and I have a long time this weekend and think I shall spending it just making lists of words I use and then plugging them into my flashcards.

I think I need to revisit my schedule. I was waking up at 6 a.m. to take out my dog and then study Yiddish, and it has just left me exhausted. I had to stay out later last night and so slept in until 7 a.m., and it was wonderful.

So when to study Yiddish? I have been trying an experiment this week where I study on the bus, in waiting rooms, whenever I have downtime. Instead of studying in one fell swoop, I study in five or 10 minute chunks throughout the day.

This has turned out to work fine, so I think I will continue to experiment with it. It makes plowing through 100-plus words a lot less daunting, and kills time nicely where otherwise I would often be bored.

In the meanwhile, I also bought a new iPod. The last one kept running into memory problems, and so I use the old one pretty much exclusively for my Yiddish flashcards now and the new one for music, video games, everything that would no longer fit on the old iPod.

So I'd better keep this going. My goal is to literally fill up my old iPhone with flashcards. Currently the flashcards use 854 MBs of memory; my iPod has 32 GB total storage. I'm almost at 5,000 flashcards. So my iPod should hold at least 160,000 flashcards.

I reckon by the time I get there I will speak pretty good Yiddish.

Year 2, Week 15: The burnout


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 439 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 277 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards

I added no new flashcards this past week. Usually it's the last thing I do at the end of the day, just before I go to bed, but I would reach the end of the day, exhausted, and just not have the energy to plug in 15 new cards.

I know that some of it is that daylight saving time has thrown me for a real loop this year, worse than I remember. I wake exhausted and go through my day that way, fighting sleep at work, and slipping into naps on the bus on the way to and from my job. I will study my flashcards for a while and then feeling my eyes cross and have to sleep for 10 minutes, 15 minutes before I can focus again.

It also doesn't help that I gave up sugary food and caffeine recently. I had to. I am somewhat overweight, have a slight genetic propensity for diabetes, and a biological grandfather who died from the disease. The sugar also kept me on a constant, unpleasant rollercoaster of rising and falling blood sugar, which kept me snacking constantly.

With the sudden drop in caloric intake, my body has probably already run through whatever reserves of glucose it had, and so now I'm ending my day in a deficit. You want this if you want to lose weight, but, boy, by 11 p.m. I am ready to just crawl into bed and be done with the day.

But there is something else going on. It's burnout.

I was in the Lynn-Lake neighborhood of Minneapolis a few days ago and I passed a store there, Schatzlein Saddle Shop, which sells saddled and tack and also a selection of cowboy clothes.

I had wandered into the store years ago, curious about it, and was struck by a red cowboy shirt emblazoned with musical notes. After resisting for a few days, I bought the shirt, and quickly turned into the sort of person who would wear that shirt. I taught myself cowboy songs on ukulele, and taught myself to yodel, and taught myself how to spin a pistol. I even had my own little cowboy show in Omaha for a while.

I missed it. I still listen to country music quite often, and watch cowboy movies now and then, but it was a lot of fun turning myself into a singing cowboy.

There are few things in my life that I sometimes throw myself into, just for the fun of it. I am awful fond of the poppier aspects of mid-20th century horror films — I wrote about horror-themed novelty music for quite a long time, and really enjoyed that.

I found myself thinking about these things. And I found myself missing the fun. Should I dress in cowboy clothes once per week and go to western bars? Should I secretly start a blog about cowboy horror films? What could I do to get the fun back?

And then I realized I was not having fun with the Yiddish project.

Now, this was a momentary thought, and it's not especially true. I had a blast in New York doing various Jewish activities. But, for whatever reason, at that moment, I was ready to drop the Yiddish project. I wasn't sure where I was headed with it. I felt like maybe it had run its course.

I may have just packed too much into too short a time and need to pare back a little. I may also just be tired, and have been sick, and may be struggling with a lack of sugar and caffeine. The next day, I felt better.

But the fact that I have stopped adding new words indicated to me that I'm not getting anything out of that anymore. And of course I am not.

It's an awful lot of work, memorizing words and phrases. It's also tremendously frustrating, as you just keep forgetting what you have learned and must reteach yourself the same information over and over.

And so I am struggling to learn a massive amount of information that, at the moment, I have no practical use for. And because my grammar is so terrible, I can barely use it to put together a sentence to have a conversation with myself.

Nonetheless, I have continued studying my flashcards unabated, which means my burnout isn't so bad that I want to just take a break from it altogether. And thank goodness -- those are the sorts of breaks that people often don't come back from.

It may not help that I work full-time at a Jewish newspaper, which means that I am interact constantly with Jewish content. I may simply have over-Jewed myself a little.

But I think I have reached a moment where I need to come up with a practical application for the Yiddish I have been studying. In the meanwhile, I need to figure out a way to make the flashcards fun again.

Knowing me, it will be something very silly. Maybe something about cowboys.

Year 2, Week 14: The Flibbertigibbet



The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 431 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 272 hours
I have reviewed 4,876 individual flashcards

I was congratulating myself on managing to study Yiddish last week in New York, and then it all fell apart. Thanks to a combination of exhaustion and an extremely busy schedule, this past week was something of a bust, with me managing maybe 15 minutes of study per day and adding almost no new words.

Some of it was exhaustion, due in part to the onset of a small cold, my third this year, god damn it. (Woe be to you if you hear a child cough in an airport.) Some of it was a busy schedule. Some of it, stupidly, was a little video game I have gotten obsessed with where you solve puzzles to bring new life to a dead garden on an ancient mansion, like a video game version of "The Secret Garden."

But I know some of it is due to the fact that I am a flibbertigibbet, and must constantly find new ways to amuse myself or my attention wanes. Frankly, the fact that I have been able to maintain this project as long as I have astonishes me, because it usually only takes me a few weeks to become distracted by something new.

This means that I need to shake the program up a little. I'm not quite sure how to do this. I've ordered a new grammar book, "Colloquial Yiddish" by Lily Kahn, and if it helps me construct better sentences, I might enjoy that. But I feel like I need to drill down more, to find something that sort-of obsesses me. Something that will make me want to do the busy work of studying, the stuff that's hard and not especially fun.

I'm not sure what that might be just yet. But the thing that has kept this project going has been my ability to refocus when my attention wanes, to make the project fun again. I'll chew on this this week and see what I come up with.

God of Vengeance at New Yiddish Rep


I went to see New Yiddish Rep's production of "God of Vengeance" this past weekend. The play was an early one for Yiddish author Sholem Ash, but ambitious, telling the story of a brothel keeper who decides to purchase a Torah scroll as an almost totemic protection for his presumably virginial daughter, never mind that they live above the brothel and the daughter has been sneaking down nightly.

In fact, the play was one of the main reasons for my trip to New York, along with going to the Russian and Turkish Baths, because I am preparing to produce a play set in a bath house that makes use of an awful lot of Yiddish, and revolves around a performer with a background in Yiddish theater.

In the meanwhile, even though I have read about Yiddish theater for my entire adult life, I have never seen a live play in Yiddish, and am only now at the point where the Yiddish would be meaningful to me, rather than an almost totally alien language. And while I have been in steambaths before, even with old Jews, I have never been to an old-school New York shvitzbod, and both felt like things I needed to know about for my own show.

I have been a theater critic ever since I worked at my college radio station, which was back in, let's see, 1989, so I have reviewed theater for ... holy crap, 28 years. As a result it is almost completely impossible for me not to want to review "God of Vengeance," even though the run has ended.

The urge must entirely be habit, as I don't really have much to say about the show. I liked the performances very much. I found the direction sometimes gimmicky but generally effective. I appreciate that there is a theater company dedicated to Yiddish plays, and their mission statement makes explicit that they consider Yiddish theater to be a living form rather than a historic one. I hope that this will include commissioning and producing new works of Yiddish theater in the future, as that is how you make certain it remains living, rather than historic.

There are two aspects of the show I found tremendously interesting, and I am split on which one to discuss. The first is that two of the lead performers are not Jewish, but instead non-Jews who have had longstanding interests in both Yiddish and Yiddish theater.

I don't find this enormously surprising, as some seem to. There have been plenty of non-Jews who took an interest in Yiddish, and I would guess roughly 40 percent of the Facebook followers for this blog are gentiles. I spoke to the executive director of YIVO when I was in New York, and he told me that about 40 percent of the attendees and YIVO's programs are non-Jews.

It's not so strange. I have an interest in Mexican culture and history, and am not Mexican. People are curious, and they need not have a personal connection to develop a curiosity that leads to a passion. But I have become Facebook friends with both the performers in question, Shane Baker and Caraid O'Brien, and will interview both at some time in the future, so I can table any discussion of non-Jews in the world of Yiddish.

The other thing I found interesting about "God of Vengeance" was that many members of the cast were ex-Hasids. I had seen one before: Melissa Weisz, who was Juliette in "Romeo and Juliette in Yiddish." She was the subject of considerably speculation before the film opened, as she has a topless scene in it. She has since come out as queer, and I only mention these autobiographical elements because they seemed to inform her performance in the play. She played one of the prostitutes, dressed in a costume that resembled the 1930s S&M garb of the Sam Mendes production of "Cabaret." She is a lesbian in the play, or, at least, a predator who is comfortable using lesbianism to pull the brothel keeper's daughter into white slavery. She was suitably sharklike in this, seducing the girl with a grin that consisted mostly of bared teeth.

The play also featured Eli Rosen, Shmully Blesofsky, and Eli Rosen, all ex-Hasids. Hasidic Jews are one of the few remaining communities that produce Native Yiddish speakers (along with occasional transplants from Eastern Europe) and is a fast-growing segment of the Jewish population (Haredi Jews tend to have more children at a faster rate and starting from a younger age than other members of the Jewish community.) Along with this is a growing ex-Hasic movement, including a developing support network for those who wish to leave the movement. 

 This is an extraordinary opportunity for Yiddish arts. "Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish" took advantage of it, filling the cast with ex-Hasids and drawing the story largely from their own experiences. New Yiddish Rep has obviously likewise discovered that this community is a valuable place to pull from for Yiddish-speaking actors. 

 But there is also the very real possibility of this being an opportunity to waste an opportunity. These ex-Hasids are largely joining a more mainstream Jewish community that has almost entirely abandoned Yiddish. A large number of American Jewish groups are assimilationist, and the ex-Hasids might be eager for assimilation. There is almost no institutional support for Yiddish within the mainstream Jewish community, and, as a result, there is a risk that this community might leave it behind, as happened with previous generations of Yiddish speakers in America.  

 There is probably no need to hurry, as Haredi Jews are going to continue to produce children apace, and a percent of those children will continue to exit Hasidism apace, and so we can expect a regular stream of new Yiddish speakers in the larger Jewish community as long as this trend continues. Perhaps they will come to the same conclusions themselves and create a support network for their own use of Yiddish and produce their own art in the language; they seem perfectly capable of addressing their own needs.

 Still, I feel a keen, if distant, connection with these newly ex-Hasids. After all, I come from a Hasidic family as well, and sometime in my past, probably not too distantly, had ancestors who were ex-Hasids. We share a story, even if separated by decades. Perhaps we can also share a language, and share art.

Year 2, Week 13: Kishka and tongue sandwiches


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 425 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 269 hours
I have reviewed 4,853 individual flashcards

I was in New York for four days, and managed to study Yiddish on three of them, so I'm fairly pleased with myself. The image above is me on Hester Street, which was sort of a metaphor for me when I started this project: Because I was in Omaha, and there was no real Yiddish community around me, I would create a virtual Yiddish community, which I thought of as my own personal Hester Street.

"Hester Street" is, of course, a 1975 film, largely in Yiddish, written and directed by former Omahan Joan Micklin Silver and based on a novella by Yiddish author Abraham Cahan. It's also a street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and was a center for Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants.

I will be writing about a lot of my New York stuff as separate posts, but I want to just make a note here: There is a great risk in this sort of project of simply giving in to nostalgia, of fantasizing about a past experience of Judaism that somehow seems more authentic than the current version.

I do not wish to do this, and neither do I wish to present New York as somehow being a locus of an older, more authentic Judaism. New York Judaism is one sort of American Jewish experience, and has maintained some elements that are hard to find elsewhere, in part because its Jewish community is comparatively massive.

I am a product of the New York Jewish experience, as both my parents are native New Yorkers and I was a frequent visitor in my youth. But I am also a product of the Midwestern Jewish experience, where we sometimes called delis "dells," and I won't brook having that experience treated as being somehow less authentic.

That being said, there are some vintage Jewish experiences that are just not available to Minnesota Jews. It is not possible to have an Eastern European schvitz -- there are plenty of saunas in the Twin Cities, but they are not that volcanically hot and wet style favored by my ancestors. Local delis do not offer kishka or tongue sandwiches. There is no Yiddish theater.

I hope to be able to recreate some of this here in Minneapolis, and to tell people how they too can recreate it. You may not be able to hire Russian men to beat you with branches where you live, but that doesn't mean you should be denied the pleasures of platza.

I will detail this more in a fuller essay about something called mayn bubbe's tam, or my grandmother's tastes, but for now I will say that as someone who has studied Yiddish in isolation for almost 15 months, it was nice to see a play in Yiddish, and to meet with Yiddishists, and to hear Yiddish in the wild, on the streets.

Judaism is not really something you do in isolation, but instead as part of a community. Language is the same thing. And so it is worthwhile once in a while to go someplace where a community exists that is doing the sort of things that I do in isolation, to see what it looks like, to experience what it feels like, and, perhaps most meaningfully in Judaism, to taste what it tastes like.

Year 2, Week 12: It's up to you New York


 The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 430 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 266 hours
I have reviewed 4,821 individual flashcards

I'm going to New York this weekend and won't be lugging my massive Schaechter dictionary with me, but I don't want to have four days in which I add no new words to my collection of flashcards, so I have been working ahead, plugging in as many words as possible.

I think I have added enough to cover me during my trip. Now the challenge will be to see if I can actually peel away the time to study. Although there have been few days in the past 15 months I have failed to study, I have not been faced with the challenge of being in a city as distracting as New York. If I can manage to study there, I suppose I can manage to study anywhere.

I'm going out to New York for a few reasons. The first is that I haven't had a proper vacation in quite a long time and I am overdue. I've been back in the Twin Cities for five months, amazingly, and the move was stressful, as moves always are. I have been settling in at my new job, which has involved a steep learning curve, as happens with a new job.

We have mostly been homebodies since we moved back, largely because it is very cold in the winter and its wise just to curl up someplace warm. But it is starting to warm up, and I am starting to settle in at my job, and it is time to relax a little.

"Relax" may be the wrong word. I will be running around Manhattan a lot. I decided to take this trip, in part, because there is a Yiddish production of "God of Vengeance" and how can I do this project, be a playwright, be producing a Yiddish-themed play, and not take in some Yiddish theater?

There is also a lot of old-school Jewish stuff in New York that I cannot do in Minneapolis -- no tongue sandwiches, no Russian baths, no Yiddish newspapers. So I'll be peeking in on a lot of that stuff, as well as the sorts of things I have grouped in as part of my Jewish identity but are more peripheral. I will be going to a Ukrainian museum, as an example.

I will also likely hit a few Irish bars, although I have done a lot of tours of Irish New York.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this sort of deep dive into Jewish New York before. I suspect it is because it is already so much of who I am: My parents are native New Yorkers, and so I took frequent trips there when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time in New York delis and the like. But the truth is that as an adult I have spent a lot more time exploring the Jewish culture of Los Angeles, where I lived for six years, than that of New York.

I will probably do more of that on my next vacation, which will probably be to Los Angeles.

Having this blog incentives doing a lot more of this as well, as it gives me something to write about and I enjoy writing about it.

And there's something else. I will probably work it up into a more formal essay at some point, as it's still bouncing around in my bean. But I was reading about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which was an area in the far east of Russian set aside to be a Jewish region, with Yiddish as the official language (along with Russian). It was a disastrous experiment in a lot of ways, and one of the biggest disasters was that participants realized that Yiddish had been separated from Jewish cultural practices, and, as a result was used to propagandize Soviet ideas to young Jews, encouraging their assimilation.

So Yiddish isn't, in and of itself, enough to support a Jewish identity. Without being wedding to other Jewish practices, it can even serve the opposite purpose and help wean Jews away from the Jewish identity.

And what is identity? I guess I have been coming around to the idea that if your identity is internal, it is just a piece of self-identification that exists inside yourself, that you're Jewish because you know you're Jewish and because you feel somehow Jewish -- well, this strikes me as a weak identity, one that can be hard to maintain and is even hard to pass down to the next generation.

It is a stronger identity if you couple that feeling of being Jewish with actually doing things that are Jewish. I suppose I feel this way in part because my father was a research professor, and so I grew up with Behaviorism, which suggests that our internal world is, in large part, created by our external actions, and not the other way around. That we are what we do.

As regular readers of this site know, my Jewish identity is secular and my religious identity is atheist. So I am always looking for  Jewish things to do, or to do things Jewishly, that are not explicitly religious. For the past 15 months, this has largely involved learning Yiddish. But language is just one thing, and, on its own, it is not enough, as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast taught us.

So I am going to New York to find Jewish things to do, or to do things Jewishly. I will report back.

Year 2, Week 11: The Chaos


 The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 412 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 260 hours
I have reviewed 4,678 individual flashcards

I have mentioned my dog, Burt, in the past. Burt is a rescue dog, and, when we first got him, almost a year ago, he was a mess. He was twice his body weight, he had just had an eye removed, he did not know his own name, he was not really house trained, and, further, he wasn't anything trained.

Burt has benefited from a regular schedule, some of which he made up on his own. For instance, he tends to wake up between five a.m. and six a.m. and demand to get into bed with me, unless he is already in bed with me, in which case he will sometimes jump out of bed, wander for a few minutes, and then demand to get back in.

We feed him twice per day, which was new to him. We walk him four times per day, and try to make his third walk, in the late afternoon, especially long to tire him out, or he will spend the next few hours moving our shoes around, digging tissues out of the garbage to tear up, barking with frustration at the garbage can when he can't get into it, and otherwise getting into mischief.

When we have had to change Burt's schedule, things have gotten chaotic. He's still not clear on why he can't pee inside the apartment, so we need to make sure we stick to his walking schedule. If we take an afternoon nap with him, his early evening mischievousness is magnified, because he has so much energy. He came from chaos, and, without structure, easily reverts back to chaos.

I mention this because it is all true of me too. Well, not the peeing in the apartment, but most of it.

If I don't get to sleep early enough, I wake and cannot focus on studying Yiddish. So I will decide to nap, figuring I can always get back to it. And then I will get back to it too late, and not finish it, and words I am studying will get pushed back to the next day.

The next morning, the amount of Yiddish I must study will be more than I have time for before I must go to work, and so I will put it off until the evening, and I will forget until the last minute, and more words will get pushed to the next day. So I will not add any new words, figuring 200, 250 old words are more than enough for me to do in one sitting, and I won't get them done. So maybe I need to not add any new words for another day?

This was last week. I finally nailed it all down a couple of days ago, getting caught up on my studies, but, man, it took me back. Years ago, it felt like everything had that sort of quality, like everything in my life was a growing avalanche of overdrawn bank accounts, unpaid bills, untidy apartment, incomplete projects.

I did not like it, and, in my late 20s, later than I should have, I set out to change it. It took most of a decade to unlearn bad habits and learn good ones, which was tremendously frustrating, but, as things became less chaotic, I found myself getting more done. I wrote plays and got them produced. I managed to move from being a cashier, which I did throughout my 20s, to being a journalist, which I have done ever since. Like the dog, I needed structure, and, unlike the dog, I had to impose it on myself.

The thing is, old habits don't really go away. I can always feel the chaos creeping at the edges of my world. I know that, without these little, ridiculous tools I use to try to keep my life from going off the rails -- numbered lists of things I need to accomplish, etc. -- my life would go off the rails.

It hasn't been easy fitting Yiddish into all this. It is hard work -- much harder than I expected. It requires at least an hour a day, and, when there is a lot you want to do, seven hours a week is an awful lot to carve out. Worse still, I have mostly made up for the missing time through lack of sleep, and lack of sleep is a great way to let the chaos in.

On the other hand, studying Yiddish has also forced me to be even more precise in how I schedule my day. More than that, it has forced me to think about how I schedule longer stretches of time. I have not been a patient man in the past, and could rarely sustain any single project for a few months, much less a year.

But I noticed over time that the really important projects, the really significant ones, generally took years, and sometimes decades. They took someone committing to the project, and pursuing it, sometimes without any end goal or without any visible accomplishment. They did so because the project itself was valuable enough that it didn't matter if there was any big payout at the end, or where the project was going. It was just worth taking the time to do.

I needed to learn how to do this. In the long run, it is less important that I now know the Yiddish word for maniac (I learned it this morning, and it's maniak) than the fact that I am doing something that is very hard over a very long time period.

Although, that being said, I do like knowing the Yiddish word for maniac.

The Golem and the Mock Wedding


Azoy.

There used to be a thing in the Catskills, now mostly forgotten, like a lot of Catskills things. It was a mock wedding, which Phil Brown writes about in his book "Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat's Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area."

He called the mock wedding "curiously common in Catskills resorts, a burlesque form with switched sex roles and rabbis speaking Yiddish gibberish."

"Why was the mock wedding so popular?" he asks. "It enabled people to stage an event that reminded them of Lower East Side Jewish vaudeville houses, without having to possess either music or comic skills, and without having to hire any entertainers. As well, the mock marriage was an ethnic self-criticism of the tradition of arranged marriages; in the new world, without the customary arranged marriage, the very institution of marriage could be mocked."

Brown recalls one wedding in which was man was the bride, the groom was a woman, and the ring was made of raw potato. It's possible to see moments of a mock wedding in the 1982 documentary The Rise and Fall of the Borscht Belt, and the image is as garish as an underground cartoon, including a pipe-smoking hillbilly following the bride and groom with a shotgun.

For those who wish to experience the real thing, however, there will be a Catskills-style mock wedding March 23 in New York City with the band Golem.

This will be the second time they have thrown a mock wedding, but have not done so since 2005, so this is a rare event. I will be in New York that weekend, but stupidly reserved a flight for the following day, so I instead spoke to Annette Ezekiel Kogan, the band's founder, about the event.

"I feel like I'm planning a real wedding," she told me, sounding exhausted. She would not share a lot of the details, except that there would be a groom, a bride, a flower girl, a wedding cake, and a band member would be the rabbi. She also allowed that there would be cross-dressing, and that much of the performance would be the badeken, the ceremony in which the bride is veiled and marched to the huppa.

Afterwards, there will be a dance, the way there are at weddings, even mock ones. This is something Golem has a lot of experience with: It is still possible for bands to make a living on the events circuit in and around New York, playing bar mitzvas, weddings, anniversaries, and the like.

Golem does these sorts of events, which allows the 17-some-odd-year-old band to make music full-time; attendees at the mock wedding will be able to see the sort of mix of Golem playlist and party music that the band provides when working an event.

For those unfamiliar with the band, Golem started out as the result of Kogan's various interests and studies, which included Slavic languages, Yiddish, and Ukrainian dance. "I had no interest in doing original songs," she told me, but, after a while, a vision for the band coalesced -- a multilingual, modern, frequently raucous spin on traditional Jewish and European music. "I imagine of the Holocaust hadn't happened, this is the sort of music that might have happened," Kogan says.

As to the name of the band, Kogan explains that they started performing shortly after a trip to Prague, the home of the mythical Jewish monster. "It just seemed like it was all about golems," she says.

I remain a little surprised that every single klezmer band hasn't called itself Golem. "No, just us," Kogan says. "There is a German Death Metal Band called Golem, but we have very little to do with each other."

"I think they should just give us the name," Kogan says. "For reparations."

For more information about Golem or their March 23 mock wedding, visit their Website.
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