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Week 23: The language for tragedy


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 161 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 85 hours
I have reviewed 2,256 individual flashcards

I was going to post about the fact that I have completed another project and rewarded myself with another fake merit badge. I learned 100-plus words for sex, and I was going to talk about how silly and circumspect many of the terms are, and how had it is to find genuine, non-insulting terms for anything but the most common heterosexual encounters.

And then tragedy interrupted, in the form of the largest mass shooting in American history (not counting governmental massacres of our indigenous population, which of course count). It was in a nightclub in Florida and targeted the LGBT population there, the exact people Yiddish either never mentioned or had insulting words for. I suspect there was a gay Jewish underworld that had their own Yiddish slang, but I haven't located it yet, and I would like to. I think you should always call people what they choose to call themselves.

Related to this, there is a group called the League for Yiddish, and here is how they describe themselves on their webpage: "The League for Yiddish, Inc., was founded in 1979 by prominent Yiddish linguist and professor Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter in order to provide organizational support for the modernization, standardization and use of the Yiddish language in all spheres of daily life. With devoted members on six continents, the League for Yiddish is one of the few organizations in today's Yiddish cultural and linguistic world that conducts its activities almost entirely in mame-loshn."

I know about them through their Facebook page, which I joined recently. And today I was met with a startling post on that page: A list of words related to the shooting. Assault rifle = Di shturenbicks. Mass shooting = Dos masn-shisterai. Swamped with victims = Farfleytst mit korbones.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Based on their mission statement, these are exactly the sorts of words we need and exactly when we need them. That being said, there are words missing that we would also need: Gay bar. Drag performer. Gay. Lesbian. Bisexual. Transexual. Homophobia.

These didn't appear on the list, and are still absent in my vocabulary, and I could not find them by doing a search on the remainder of the League's Facebook page. I suppose they might be in the organization's comprehensive English-Yiddish dictionary, should I want to shell out $60 for the thing. But I find it odd that these words don't appear on the Facebook post, because the absence of these words erases the identity of those who were murdered, erases the specific circumstances of the murder, and only gives us the words to talk about the guns, the killer, and, when we discuss those he targeted, the only word we get is "victim."

I'm a little surprised, because we Jews are usually pretty sensitive about the language of tragedy, having been forced to make so much use of it ourselves. I was at an Anne Frank exhibit years ago that received substantial criticism because it all-but erased her Jewishness, which the curators admitted they thought was incidental to a more universal story they were telling. I was among the complainants, and my complaint was that Frank was not targeted for universal reasons, but specific ones, because she was a Jew, and so to erase her Jewishness was to do a disservice to her memory.

I don't think any erasure was intended by this social media post, but, then, it's rarely intended. It just happens.

It's odd, though. If we are lucky, we should only have to discuss mass shootings infrequently -- more frequently that we might hope, but these words are not high on the list of those I wish to know.

On the other hand, like most Americans, I have friends and family who are LGBT, and I have no Yiddish right now to discuss this in a modern way, despite having just completed a project in which I learned Yiddish words that address sexuality. And I don't know how this is possible, as everyone is just now making a fuss about "Indecent," Paula Vogel's play about Sholem Asch’s Yiddish-language drama “God of Vengeance,” which explicitly addressed lesbianism all the way back in 1907.

Google translate gives me the Yiddish word "lesbian" for the English word "lesbian," and I suppose that's the word I shall have to use at present. Perhaps Jewish lesbians did use the same word in Yiddish that we use in English -- it dates back a hundred years or more. But I don't know for sure, and feel certain there were Yiddish words used by Yiddish-speaking lesbians, and wish I knew what they were.

In the book "Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality" authors Anna Livia and Kira Hall claim there are no formal Yiddish words for gay but for the clinical "homoseksualist," with "feygele" being a problematic alternative -- although it means "little bird" and has been claimed by some Jewish members of the LBGT community, it also has a history as a homophobic slur. Apparently there was some efforts to claim "freilekh," which is the Yiddish equivalent of "gay," but I'm not sure this was done by Yiddish speakers nor do I know if it ever developed any currency.

 I guess my feeling is that if you're hoping to make Yiddish contemporary, it would be nice to popularize words for the lives of the LGBT community, rather than the words for their deaths.

Cooking the East European Way: Potaptsi


There are times in my life when I think I will just give up on real food and be happy with appetizers. At really meaty restaurants, the appetizer menu is often the only refuge for a vegetarian, and a couple of appetizers are usually enough to take care of my appetite.

There is a Yiddish phrase I learned, "“A lek un a shmeck," which means "a taste and a smell" and isn't generally used in a complimentary way -- the phrase either surfaces when somebody's portions are too small, or when somebody has done an especially shoddy job on something. "He was supposed to rebuild the engine, but listen to this banging!" someone will cry. "I asked for a complete job and he gives me a lek un a shmeck?"

 But I'm not sure that I don't prefer a lek un a shmeck, especially when what I am tasting and smelling is delicious. The potaptsi, as an example, which Discover Ukraine insists in a popular Ukrainian appetizer. It's easy enough to describe: It's essentially an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich with garlic and tomatoes.

 But, boy, a simple description does not do it justice. Listen, I am a patron of the American grilled cheese sandwich. A partisan, even. I like it on white bread with American cheese, even though I am pretty sure I am just consuming cheese-colored petroleum on bread-shaped sawdust. I judge greasy spoons on the quality of their grilled cheese, mostly because I usually can't eat anything else, but, then, if you can't make a descent grilled cheese how can you be trusted with anything else?

 This being said, I'm not sure I can go back to grilled cheese. The potaptsi is superior to it in every way. To begin with, your typical grilled cheese sandwich is only fried on the outside, leaving the bread slightly spongy, while the potaptsi bread is grilled on both sides to a lovely golden brown. This makes the bread more toastlike, and firmer, which is not only helps it support its ingredients, but also means the sandwich gets more butter or oil fried into it.

 There is a reason we so often pair grilled cheese with tomato soup -- the tomato's umami flavor balances the sweeter dairy of the sandwich cheese well. But it's hard to add tomato directly to a grilled cheese sandwich -- in my experience, the results tend to be a wet, sloppy sandwich. I suspect the grilling process liquefies the tomato somewhat, and it's the sort of thing a talented chef can correct for, but the potaptsi solves the problem in a simpler way. 

 Once the bread is fried, you add the tomato and grated cheese, along with fresh minced garlic, and put it in the oven at a relatively low heat for 5-7 minutes. This melts the cheese and lightly bakes the tomato, but maintains the structural integrity of the sandwich.

 Finally, the recipe I worked with called for adding "verdure," which, from context, seems to simply mean "herbs." One expects any of the herbs popular in Eastern Europe would be a nice addition: dill, bay leaf, maybe horseradish. Grilled cheese in the US is not typically served with garlic and herbs, and, for Pete's sake, why not? 

 There was apparently a time when we were actually afraid of garlic. Anti-Italian sentiments in America blamed the supposed hot temper of the Italians on their "spicy" food, and the spice in question was garlic. Maybe that's why the American grilled cheese sandwich is so very plain. 

 Well, I can't go back. I don't care if the garlic angries up my blood. I don't care if, as the Chicago Tribune complained in 1875, garlic is the unpleasant flavor of the workman's tenement. I don't care if eating it makes me somehow more Italian.

 Besides, you cut the crust off a potaptsi, so it's a very small sandwich. Barely enough to make someone too ethnic.

 Just a lek really. Maybe just enough for a schmeck too.

Film: Deli Man (2015)


I listen to a lot of food podcasts. I started a few years ago, when there was a period in my life when I lived in a food desert, trapped in a part of Omaha with no nearby grocery store, trying to put together a decent meal from whatever I could buy from a gas station/bodega I passed on my way walking home from work.

I felt a bit like one of the subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in which a group of conscientious objectors allowed themselves to be malnourished during World War II. Several of the men became obsessed with cookbooks, and afterwards became chefs. I had long had an interest in good food -- I am a former resident of New Orleans, after all -- but now this interest turned obsessive.

So on my way to and from work, passing that little gas station/bodega, I listened to food podcasts and dreamed of a day when I would live close enough to a good grocery store to be able to make proper meals. Last year, a particular movie came out, and the filmmakers or the subjects of the film made the rounds of these podcasts.

The film was "Deli Man," in which filmmaker Erik Greenberg Anjou documents the decline of the Jewish deli, as well as focusing on Ziggy Gruber, a bearlike fellow who owns and runs the acclaimed Kenny and Ziggy’s in Houston. Gruber is a fascinating character, a relatively young man who has the bearing and mannerisms of a 90-year-old Jewish man. He was trained in fine dining, but came from two generations of New York deli men, and has an obsessive love of the subject.

It is, the film acknowledges, a bad time for delis. In New York, the number of delicatessens has dwindled from 1,550 in 1931 to just 21 today. The deli owners in the film complain of a myriad of business problems, chief among them the fact that their clientele has largely either died or moved to Florida, coupled with the fact that they primarily serve meat, which has become prohibitively expensive. To Gruber, delis are an essential link with the past, with the history of Jewish immigration to the United States, which the film documents. But increasingly it seems like delis may also be a remnant of the past, struggling to survive with a diminishing base of very old, very particular Jews who insist on still eating the same food they enjoyed in the mid-20th century.

I am sympathetic to Gruber's passion. Delicatessens are not just an aspect of Jewish-American life, they are one of the defining aspects. I grew up near a deli in Minneapolis, the Lincoln Del, and New York delicatessens were an essential part of my regular trips to New York to visit family. I was a patron of Los Angeles delis for the years I lived in Los Angeles, and even here in Omaha, where there isn't a proper Jewish deli, I regularly make myself delicatessen-style food. As I've written elsewhere, I think that the deli served the same place for the American Jew as the Irish pub served for the Irish-American, and I don't know what fulfills that function now that the deli is in decline.

At the same time, it's hard not to struggle with the fact that delis are so stubbornly conservative, as though some idealized, perfect deli occurred in 1937 and that's how it should always be done. The film points out that deli food isn't actually the food of Eastern European immigrants. It is, instead, a hybrid, having started as a German innovation, absorbing a surprisingly large Romanian influence, and allowing itself to be Americanized. The heart attack-inducing, meat-based meals of early delis were a product of a specific American time, one in which meat was cheap and plentiful and had grown to dominate the American diet.

This certainly doesn't represent the diet of European Jews, which, thanks to poverty and dietary restrictions, including a lot of dishes in which veggies or milk dominated. In fact, there was a parallel development to the American deli called the milkhik restaurant that elusively focused on milk dishes. One of New York's most famous Jewish restaurants, Ratner's, was milkhik, and their menus demonstrate the extraordinary variety of meatless dishes possible in Jewish dining, including blintzes, potato pancakes, borsht, and kreplackh. (It should be noted that these restaurants also served a lot of fish, which is not considered meat in Jewish law.)

 So it is possible to re-conceive deli cooking without so much emphasis on the budget-busing meats. This is the deli food I have known most of my life, as I have been a vegetarian since I was 16, and I have never lacked for dining options when eating at Jewish venues. 

 That being said, it is hard not to watch "Deli Man" without thinking, you know, when I go into a deli, maybe I should suspend the vegetarianism thing for a little while. There is a genius to a properly cut and built pastrami on rye, and that genius is both in short supply and may not be financially viable for much longer. Do I really plan to go my entire life without ever eating lox again? And delis have already, for the most part, removed lungen stew from their menus, the meal largely made from cow's lung. If I get the chance to try it, as unappetizing as it sounds, can I really pass it up? Will my life be richer or poorer for the lack of classic, meaty deli food?

 Poorer, obviously. I don't know that the deli can survive as it is now, but, by God, deli food must always have a place in the Jewish-American diet. Is there a podcast on this topic? I feel like I need to start listening to a deli podcast.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Slivovitz


I spent several years of my life writing and editing an online magazine about cocktails (two, actually: Daily Lush and The Bottle Gang.) The one thing I really took away from the experience was a sense that the American drinking palate was absolutely ruined by Prohibition. American's nascent wine industry was decimated, legal imports of European liquors halted, and the quality of locally produced alcohol plummeted. Savory cocktails that highlighted the flavor of good liquor were replaced with sweet cocktails that masked the flavor of bad liquor, and Americans acclimated to this and eventually preferred it.

We're only now crawling out of this catastrophic failure of good taste, even though it is almost a century since the Volstead Act. Americans who previously insisted on drinking sugary vodka concoctions are exploring the world of pre-Prohibition drinking, and, as a result, it's finally possible to get a decent Sazarac pretty much anywhere.

So this might be the ideal time to consider the liquor menu of our imaginary Jewish bar. Ethnic bars always have signature liquors that represent their homelands: tequila in Mexican cantinas, Irish whisky in Irish pubs, Pimms in the better British watering holes, etc.

Jews had their own liquors too, which are suddenly more available than they had previously been. Some of them were manufactured by Jewish distillers, such as Slivovitz, which we will discuss here. Some Jews merely colonized, like Heering cherry brandy, which we will detail later. Some were universally popular in Eastern Europe, but just would feel overlooked if left out of the liquor selection, such as vodka, which author Paul Kriwaczek argues Jews had a large hand in introducing to mainstream Europe.

But it's Slivovitz that I first associated with Jews. There is a throwaway scene in the 1990 Barry Levinson film "Avalon" that stayed with me, in which the movie's first-generation Jewish immigrants discuss their father's eccentricities, such as his refusal to drink tap water. What did he drink, they ask each other, trying to remember. "Slivovitz!" one declares, and they all shake their heads with disgust.

Slivovitz is a plum brandy, and it would be years before I first tried it, at a wedding of a Ukrainian friend in a Serbian Orthodox church. I did not taste the plum in the drink, and, in fact, tasted little other than the burn of high-proof alcohol. But there is a very good liquor store in Minneapolis called Surdyk's, and they had Slivovitz, and so I started to buy it regularly. After a while, I got acclimated to the flavor, and it became a point of pride to me that I could drink it at all. "It puts hair on your chest," I liked to tell people. "Then it sets fire to those hairs."

Over time, better brands of Slivovitz started to make their way to the United States, including some that had been aged 10 years or more. As with most liquors, aging Slivovitz mellows it. What had essentially been a plum moonshine was now quite drinkable, and the plum flavor came out.

So what does this have to do with the Jews? Firstly, because Slivovitz is made from plums rather than grains, it has long been a popular Passover drink. But Jews were also manufacturers of Slivovitz, especially in Poland, where they essentially had a monopoly according to Glenn Dynner's "Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland." Finally, Slivovitz has recently come back into the limelight as a Jewish drink thanks to being the drink of choice for Meyer Landsman, the hard-drinking homicide detective protagonist of Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union."

How do you drink Slivovitz? Traditionally, it was treated as being a sort of schnapps, which in Yiddish identifies any strong alcoholic drink, and not the cloyingly flavored neutral spirits we drink in America. These would be offered any time a toast was called for -- which was apparently quite often, according to author Michael Wex. Slivovitz could also be enjoyed as an after-meal aperitif, and the tradition was to serve it in little stemmed glasses that used to be common and were called pony glasses, but seem to have been abandoned in favor of the shot glass.

Slivovitz is notoriously hard to mix into a cocktail, and it is a new enough ingredient that I wasn't able to find many examples of Slivovitz mixed drinks online, although I had one that added in lemon juice, simple syrup, and seltzer to make a sort of plum collins, which was perfectly drinkable. Most cocktail recipes I found online seemed like existing recipes with one ingredient swapped out for Slivovitz, and I tend to be suspicious of this approach.

My own tastes tend toward those espoused by David Embury in his classic book "The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks," who preferred a cocktail that consisted of a base liquor, a modifying liquor, and a special flavoring or coloring agent. This describes such classic mixed drinks as the martini (gin, dry vermouth, orange bitters) and the Manhattan (whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters), and while I am not an utter purist on the subject, I do find this a good starting point, as it tends to produce a drink that highlights the flavor of the base liquor instead of hiding it.

I haven't found a recipe that does that yet with Slivovitz, so there is room for mixological inventiveness. I do have a shot to offer, however, and it is my own invention. Just combine Slivovitz with Heering cherry liqueur, although the Slivovitz tends to overwhelm the drink, so I'd mix it with one part Slivovitz to two parts Heering. I call it the Tkemali, after the Georgian sour plum sauce made with cherry plums.

Serve it in a pony glass if you can.

100 Yiddish Words Everyone Should Know: Introduction


I am a third-generation American Jew. Most of my grandparents came to this country from Eastern Europe, and brought Yiddish with them. They spoke it, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout their lives, and my parents, as second generation Jews, grew up exposed to Yiddish as a vernacular language.

I grew up with their Yiddish, which was less the language of everyday speech and more a language that served particular purposes. My father liked to swear in Yiddish, but also remembered some specific Yiddish phrases that he'd use when he felt like it.

Because I went to a Jewish high school, I was also exposed to the day-to-day Yiddish of religious Jews. These were members of the American Orthodox community, and, while they had not maintained Yiddish as their first language, as the Hasidic community has, they made frequent use of particular Yiddish words. So while I am not fluent in Yiddish, I have a solid grounding in what "The Joys of Yiddish" author Leo Rosten called "Yinglish." Specifically, Yiddish or Yiddish-inspired words and phrases that have entered the English language, if only in the Jewish community, and are understood by English speakers.

But we're now several generations removed from the Yiddish speakers that first came to America, and even generations removed from their children. This has likely eroded Yiddish usage, at least among the average American Jew. In 2010, only 10 percent of American Jews were the sort of Orthodox who I grew up hearing Yiddish from. In the same survey, 30 percent of American Jews were non-denominational, and the number of Jews who identify as secular keeps rising. Additionally, quite a few Jewish children are the products of intermarriage, and may not have been exposed to as much Yiddish as a result.

None of this is meant as a complaint, of course. I am a secular Jew, and all of my nephews and nieces are the products of intermarriage, so when I discuss these trends in modern Judaism, it's not merely an abstraction. Instead, it's my own family I am talking about.

I have not been able to find any surveys about how much Yiddish might be in the lives of the average American. In my own family, it ranges from some to none, with my older cousins in New York making use of quite a bit while my younger cousins in the Midwest having, at best, a passing familiarity with a few of the more common words. In an earlier blog entry, I mentioned that it seems like there is a lot of Jewish comedy just now, but it doesn't seem particularly Yiddish-inflected. I don't know whether this represents a lack of Yiddish usage on the part of the comics or a fear on their part that Yiddish won't be understood by a wider audience, but it represents a change in American Jewish comedy, a movement away from Yiddish.

I've titled this project "100 Yiddish Words Everyone Should Know," and the intention is to provide a starting point. I've composed this list out of Yiddish-based words that were common in English when I was younger and are still valuable. They express something uniquely Jewish, or something inexpressible in English, or are words that benefit from having a Yiddish variation.

This list is by no means comprehensive. There are only a few words on the list that explicitly refer to Jewish religious practices, as there are so many Yiddish-derived words in the Orthodox world that it would easily expand this list to many hundreds or even thousands of words. The list is meant for average American Jews, and they might not find the word "shammash," which refers to a salaried sexton at a synagogue, especially useful. I've also left off the names of specific foods, although you will find a few general culinary terms.

There are some fairly common Yiddish words I have left off the list. If you wish to learn how to be racist or homophobic in Yiddish, there are other places to do so.

There are words that probably should be on this list, because they reflect the experience of modern Jews. There is a Yiddish word, veltekh, that literally means "worldly" but also means "secular," and it's the word I like to use when referring to secular Jews. There is a Yiddish words for the Holocaust, Churbn, that I likewise prefer, because it seems right to use a Yiddish word to name something that happened to Yiddish speakers. But neither are commonly used in the American Jewish community, and this is a list of words that are actually used, not words that I wish were used. Perhaps that will be another list, later.

Should everyone actually know these 100 words? Perhaps not. It's an idiosyncratic list, compiled by a secular Midwestern Jews based on Yiddish usage from almost 30 years ago. Not all American Jews are Ashkenazi, and as I speak no Ladino whatsoever, it's pretty brash of me to expect Sephardic Jews to learn Yiddish. Non-Jews might find the list interesting, but probably can get by just fine without knowing a single word.

That being said, as my essays on each of the words will demonstrate, these are words that once had tremendous currency in the United States, even outside the Jewish community. The words on this list were selected because they have proven to be especially easy to drop into everyday English, or especially durable in some other way. If you end up being exposed to Jewish culture from the middle part of the 20th century, you're probably going to experience these words, and so knowing them contributes to your general Jewish literacy. Some of these words even had a moment when they were adopted by the larger community, and perhaps will again.

I presume no previous exposure to Yiddish with this list. Some of you may know every single word on here and wonder why such a list is necessary. Some of you may never have heard a single one of these words and wonder why a list like this requires so many insults. Some might look at the list and see glaring absences, words they grew up with and cannot believe were left off. Others may be bewildered by the presence of some of these words and feel they barely deserve a mention, much less the honor of having a place on a list like this. And some of you Yiddishists will complain that these words are not actually Yiddish, or are used differently in actual Yiddish.

You're all correct, every one of you. Go, make a list of your own. The world will be better for it.

Week 22: Living in a Post-Vernacular World


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 155 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 80 hours
I have reviewed 2,146 individual flashcards

As you can tell by the photo above, I have finally received my boy scout-style sash and begun affixing merit badges to it. (For those of you who have just started reading, this is the way I am rewarding myself for completing certain tasks in Yiddish.) The 1,000 pin at the top of the sash represents my completion of a list of 1,000 common Yiddish words I found online, and each star after it represents total words learned -- so 2,000 words total. The extended middle finger represents my having learned 200 Yiddish curses and insults, and the martini glass represents my having learned at least 50 words related to drugs and alcohol. I am currently working on 100 words om the topic of sex, and have completed 72 of them, so next week I shall have another merit badge, this one somewhat R-rated.

At the beginning of this project, I wrote about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the proper term for a phenomenon in which people who know very little are convinced they are pretty competent, while people who are fairly competent are convinced they are rank amateurs. I fretted about being at the amateur end of things, and I was -- I was hopeful that I would have a good basic grasp of conversational Yiddish after learning just a thousand words. I have twice that many, and could not have a conversation to save my life -- although, in fairness, this is partly my fault, as I haven't really bothered with conversational learning and instead have just focused on things that interest me. Swear words, as an example.

I'm now at the other end of Dunning Kruger. At 2,000 words, I undeniably know more Yiddish than 90 percent of the Jews alive. Learning the first thousand really has given me the fundamentals, the essential building blocks of Yiddish; I just haven't bothered to figure out how they all fit together yet. I'm certainly nowhere near expertise, but I have a really solid base to build on.

And yet I feel like a barely know anything. When I watch Yiddish films, I feel like I don't understand a word of what I hear, and when I listen to Yiddish music, I still feel like I barely understand the theme of the song, much less individual lyrics. Reading Yiddish newspapers is an exercise in hitting endless stumbling blocks, where I sort of understand what I am reading for six or seven words and then hit a stretch that is completely incomprehensible to me. Thank goodness for my sash and badges, or I would have little to remind me how much I actually have accomplished.

I expect to go through the rest of my life on this end of Dunning-Kruger, with an ever-expanding base of knowledge that mostly serves as a reminder of how much I have not yet learned. And that's how it must be with Yiddish. I have no plans to move to Brooklyn or back to Los Angeles, where I could make myself part of a community that uses Yiddish all the time, and so the best I can hope for is occasional chances to carve out some time to engage in spoken Yiddish -- perhaps through Yiddish summer programs and the like. I will never be as fluent as a native speaker of the language, and will always be aware of the gulf between myself and them.

But Yiddish is not a language like other languages, and Jews don't have the same sort of relationship with languages that most people do. I am reading a terrific book just now called "Adventures in Yiddishland" by Jeffrey Shandler, which I shall write about in more detail when I finish. But I will mention that the book's big idea is that Yiddish has, for most Jews, become a post-vernacular language -- that is to say, it is no longer the language of everyday speech, but still exists, and serves other purposes.

Yiddish would not be Judaism's first post-vernacular language. Educated European Jews generally knew multiple languages. There was Yiddish, of course, and also, to some extent, the language of whatever country they inhabited. But there was also Hebrew, which ceased being a spoken language around the 6th century BCE, but was still studied because it was the language the Torah was written in, and so was a holy language. And Jews also studied the language that displaced Hebrew, Aramaic, which most Jews haven't spoken since about 1200 CE. But it's the language the Talmud was written in, and so Jews learned it, more or less.

I don't know how fluent most Jews were in these languages. I am given to understand the answer is "not very," but for the small number real scholars who devoted their lives to the study of these subjects. But the languages were maintained, in detail by very few, in general by a larger number of people. They were maintained because they served a function, and that function was something other than conversation.

I have, without intending to, been pursuing Yiddish in a post-vernacular way. If my primary interest was traditional fluency, then memorizing swear words would be considerably less important than memorizing sentences such as "I am gasping for tea" and "where is the bathroom." But I don't really need to ask for tea and then, as always happens after tea, ask for a bathroom.

I do have some use, however, for swear words. There is tremendous value in being able to cuss someone out without them knowing what you're saying. And I'm not alone in thinking so -- Amazon has a fistful of books with titles like "If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It In Yiddish" and "Dirty Yiddish: Everyday Slang from 'What's Up?' to 'F*%# Off!'" that cater to this decidedly post-vernacular interest in the language.

It's really the opposite of vernacular. It's learning a language specifically so you won't be understood, and there is some of that in this history of Yiddish. It was often referred to as a jargon in Europe, even by Jews, but sometimes Yiddish served as a cant -- as the secret language of the underworld. It also winds up serving this sort of function among the Hasidim in America -- it may be a vernacular among fellow Hasids, but it also serves to separate them from the outside world, and keep their world private.

I will explore this more as the project continues, but I rather like the idea of Yiddish existing as a sort of anti-language for Jews, as speech that is meant to baffle and confuse. And for it to be this, you don't need to be fluent -- you just need to be more fluent than the guy you're cussing out.

Book: And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved


When I was in my teens, I attended a Jewish high school. There weren't many of us -- just 13 students my first year, pursuing an ambitious curriculum in just a few classrooms at the back of the Jewish Community Center in Minneapolis.

Despite the smallness of our school, we somehow wound up with a surprising amount of unsupervised time -- in my case, this often happened after school ended, while I waited for my mother or father to pick me up, which could be a wait of a long as an hour or so. I typically spent this time in the library, and I got a little obsessed with the JCC's collection of records.

There were collections of Hasidic songs, some of which I can still sing to this day. There were endless recordings of cantors, which probably caused a short-lived interest I had in becoming a cantor; the closest I came was working as a songleader at Jewish summer camps. There were records from the 1960s from Israel, whose covers showed handsome, brown-skinned sabras tending to kibbutz fields or leaping in rural Israeli locations.

I can't precisely say what the legacy of this was, except that I still know an awful lot of Jewish songs, and will sometimes just start singing them. It's a sort of joke I do, because when I get to the chorus, I will shout out "Everybody!" like I am still a camp songleader and everybody should just know this songs. Nobody knows these songs. Not anymore. The era of vinyl is long past, and few have made the transition to the digital realm.

The records are still out there, of course. This 2008 book, "And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved," is nothing but vinyl, and it is like somebody took the entire JCC record collection of my youth and decided to reprint the album covers. It evolved out of a web project, which pleases me as a guy who does web projects too, and one of the authors, Roger Bennett, is also responsible for books titled "Bar Mitzvah Disco" and "Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies," which likewise seem to have ransacked my childhood.

"And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl" is undeniably kitchy and doesn't shy away from the fact. I suspect the project started with an appreciation for the sheer spectacle of the album covers, which were often exercises in the lapses in Jewish good taste, and the text of the book has a keen eye for the ridiculous. But the authors also recognized that album covers, in their own way, told a story of the Jewish experience, particularly the American Jewish experience for a good chunk of the middle of the 20th century. An especially dazzling section looks at records produced by Israelis, sometimes explicitly for consumption by American audiences, and it reveals a country of endless reinventions, from settler farmers to triumphant soldiers to Eurovision-style pop stars.

Most of the book, however, shows a different sort of Jewish reinvention -- what seem to be quicksilver-like changes in the American Jewish experience. Trends rise and fall as American Jews attempt at once to make themselves a part of the American mainstream and try to set themselves apart from it. And so we find these astonishing hybrids, from the Jewish swing of the Barry sisters to a short, magnificent trend of Jewish songs with Latin arrangements to old Yiddish songs being revived for the folk explosion of the 60s. There is not a Jewish thing that somebody hasn't tried to Americanize, and an American thing that somebody hasn't tried to Judaize. 

Like the authors, I think I prefer the moments when this produced lapses in taste. I remember attending a cousin's bat mitva at a very old, very established Reform temple in New York, and it was all old money. As it happened, there would be two concurrent celebrations that day, one for my cousin, and one for the scion of one of the synagogues most established families.

 It was immediately evident who came from what family. The scion's family were tidy, elegant, unfussily formal. My family looked like Chechen, in ill-fitting black suits with black ties over black shirts, some unshaven, some lounging in the synagogues pews like they were visiting friends at a bathhouse. I felt a strange pride at this -- this was my family, and we were the troublemakers, the barely reconstructed immigrant family, the tacky and noisy and strange.

 I like my Jewish albums like I like my Jewish family. I like the loud female comics like Belle Barth, the weird Yiddish records the explain how to make schmaltz, the Orthodox Jewish boys who decide to form their own R&B bands. I like it when the frayed edges of assimilation show, when genre blending has such hard angles as to essentially be a mash-up, and when people who little or questionable talent nonetheless find an audience thanks to pitching themselves perfectly at a small, niche immigrant audience. 

 Those are my people, and they make my albums. This book is full of them.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: Surf Music, the Original Gypsy Punk


A quick note at the start of this: I have used the phrase "Gypsy Punk" in the title of this post, and it will occur again in this series, but I don't prefer it. Firstly, the word "Gypsy" is a complicated one, and there are many in the group it denotes, the Roma people, who consider it a slur. Roma people sometime use the term, and that is their prerogative -- many of the members of the Gipsy Kings are Roma, and so obviously I do not have an issue with their choice of band name. But there are a lot of performers in Gypsy punk bands who are not Roma, and even if they claim Roma influence in their band, it's not a term they are entitled to. Worse still, the music sometimes represents an idealized or exoticized version of Roma life, and some of it has no particular Roma influence, so the phrase can be misapplied at best, and an example of a crass sort of musical colonialism at worst.

That being said, I like a lot of the music, and wish there was a better term for it. Gogol Bordello has a song titled "Immigrant Punk" that I sometimes use as a substitution, but even that doesn't work especially well, as only a small percent of immigrants come from the Balkan and Slavic countries that primarily influence this music. One of the downsides of being a blogger in Omaha is that I don't get to name musical genres; however, an upside is that I still get to complain about it.

But my complaining is done. I'm not even going to begin with Gyspy punk, but with a precursor: surf music.

You'll note that the title of this blog post begins with "Jukebox at the Jewish Bar," and that's how I have conceived of this project. As you may recall from my previous post, in my weird little head I have conceived of a Jewish bar that serves the same function to American Jews as Irish bars serve for Irish-Americans, as a place where nostalgia meets contemporary ethnic culture meets food and drink. But it's not enough for me to imagine such a place existing -- the real fun comes from thinking about what drinks I would serve, and how I would decorate it, and what music I would put on the jukebox.

I'm starting with surf music, which may seem like an odd place to start. It is. I could have started with a sort-of "old folks night," where I play ancient Yiddish platters, or a lounge night, or a jazz night, where I play Jewish versions of those genres. All would be appropriate in a bar, and I will get to all of them.

I suppose I'm starting with surf because I feel like I'm the only one that thinks the genre is somehow Jewish. I should note that I define "Jewish" pretty broadly -- my Jewish bar wouldn't be limited to songs by Jews about Jewish topics, but would be expansive, including music that draws from the same well as Gypsy punk. I don't think it is possible to point at some music and say "that is Jewish" and other music and say "that is Russian" when Jews so frequently acted as the professional musicians of Eastern Europe, alongside Roma musicians. There was an album back in 1993 by the Hungarian folk band Muzsikás called "Máramaros: The Lost Jewish Music of Transylvania," consisting largely of music the band had learned from Roma performers, and that album sort of perfectly sums up the cultural cross-pollination that happened between Eastern Europe's gentiles, Jews, and Roma peoples.

And so we leap forward to surf music, which has these influences buried in it, and Dick Dale, who created the surf guitar sound. Dale is often credited as being Lebanese, he was also of Belorussian extraction and born and raised in Boston, and while he claimed blues artists and jazz drummer Gene Krupa as his primary influences, his music seemed as much borrowed from the sorts of songs you might hear at an ethnic wedding or Bar Mitvah. These include his legendary performance of "Miserlou," an ancient Turkish/Egyptian song that has long been a favorite among Klezmer bands; Dale had heard first the song played on a oud by his uncle.

 Dale also recorded a similar version of "Hava Nagila," filled with slashing power chords and a deep, heavily reverbed lead guitar, and this is the Dick Dale song I would include on my jukebox.

Every surf instrumental band since has owed a debt to Dale. Surf can claim a lot of influences, and it is easy to pick out Mexican sounds and Hawaiian sounds in the music, but there always seems to be those Eastern European/Near-Middle Eastern chords and scales lurking in the background.

Some bands have made this explicit, with songs that reference these influences directly. Here is a list of some of these, and all would be on my jukebox:

1. "Cossack" by The Barons. I know almost nothing about this band, except that they apparently hailed from the Dartford, Kent and released this in 1961, which, if true, is astonishing. The song sounds classically surf, but precedes Dick Dale's "Miserlou" by a year. Let's call it parallel evolution. I don't know why they chose to call this twangy, uptempo number "Cossack," but it has a minor-key quality to it, and it is possible to imagine Cossacks leaping about to it.

2. "Russian Roulette," The Nevegans. Obscuro surf rock from Las Vegas, they released this propulsive song sometime around 1963, and it's a delight: Russian music meets pipeline surf meets Tequila saxophone.

3. "Exodus," The Lively Ones. The Lively Ones were a superb 60s surf band, and produced an entire album of Latin-tinged songs called "Surfin' South of the Border" in 1964. For whatever reason, the included Ernest Gold's theme to the Zionist epic film "Exodus," and it was a masterstroke -- the band managed at once to make the melody a moody beach epic and something that sounds suspiciously like the theme to a western movie, including clopping horse hooves. The Jewish experience has never been this cowboy before.

4. "Ukranian Dance#13" by The Red Elvises: The Red Elvises, formed by Russian expats in Los Angeles, have perhaps done more to explore the link between surf and East European music than anyone else -- this song is off a 1997 release called "Surfing in Siberia." The song starts with a guitar riffing through a minor key scale while the singers wail like chanting pilgrims, and then settles into a Henry Mancini spy-movie groove which propulsively speeds up, interrupted by occasional shouts of "Hey!," as though a folk dance had broken out.

5. "The Cossack" by The Space Cossacks. This Washington DC surf band, formed in 1996, had one theme, but my God what a theme: Surf music inspired by the Cold War space race. They put out at least four albums of the stuff, with song titles like "Solaris Stomp" and "Cossack Rocket Patrol," and almost all of their songs would be just right on my imaginary jukebox. This 1998 release is frantic and swirling, and I suppose I was attracted to how delirious it seemed, but feel free to rifle through their material and find the song you like the most for your own bar.

6. "Skating Red Square" by Phantom Surfers. Surf bands all borrow from Dick Dale, as I said, but the Phantom Surfers went right to the source, recording an album with the legendary guitar player in 1996. They also have the delightful habit of performing in Zorro-style masks and had Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis illustrate the cover of their album "The Great Surf Crash of '97," so I am predisposed to liking this band. As it happens, they have also repeatedly returned to Dale's oud-style guitar scales, as on this song, from their 2000 compilation "A Decade Of Quality Control." The melody is deliberately a pastiche of Russian melodies, including the same sorts of cries of "Hey" that The Red Elvises favor.

7. "Bubamara" by Los Venturas. Apparently there is a surf scene in Belgium, which produced Los Venturas. "Bubamara" is, as near as I can tell, a surf version of Goran Bregović's song of the same name from the 1998 Serbian romantic comedy "Black Cat, White Cat" by Emir Kusturica. The film was originally intended to be a documentary about Roma music, and so this rollicking melody may be the song on this list that most directly lifts from Roma folk music.

"Avienu Malkainu," The MelTones. Montreal surf band The MelTones followed Dick Dale's lead in 2003, adapting a traditional Jewish song as a surf song as Dale had with "Hava Negila." The MeTones chose one of the moodiest songs from Jewish prayers, "Avinu Malkeinu" from the Jewish high holidays, and it works perfectly. Who wouldn't want to face down a tubed wave while begging musically for repentance?  

8. "Kol Nidre," Meshugga Beach Party. A project of Mel Waldorf, who was the Mel in the MelTones, this Bay Area band takes the promise offered by the MelTones "Avienu Malkainu,"and turns it into pure novelty. The band dresses in black caftans, flowing beards, and sidelocks when they perform, and every single one of their songs comes from Jewish tradition. They also happen to be a first-rate surf band, as demonstrated in their 2003 version of the Kol Nidre, re-imagined as a sort of surf march, to the rattattat of marching drums, with whaling, psychedelic guitars in the background.

9. "На Молдаванке (On Moldavanka)," Gulag Tunes. Gulag Tunes seeks to re-imagine popular Russian songs in a variety of styles, and with this 2007 release they borrowed the melody of an older song -- I think it's "Smuglyanka," a song written in 1940 to celebrate female Bessarabian rebels. It's an effective surf song, but the folk melody comes across unusually strongly. Unlike other songs on the list, which lampoon cliches in Eastern European music, this one sounds genuinely Eastern European.

10. "Raskolnikov's Revenge," The Secret Samurai. A 2011 release from this San Diego band, named for the fictional antihero of "Crime and Punishment." The band describes themselves as follows, and somehow they manage to pack all of it into this one song: "Morricone-inspired solar apexed gunfight staredown hymns cross-pollinate with Kuraswawa battle drone. Czarist soundscape entanglements morph into snake charm surf rock silhouettes."

Cooking the East European Way: Homemade Kvass


Sooner or later, I was going to experience the real foreignness of foreign food. We Americans like to think we have an international palate, because we grow up eating food that calls itself Mexican, and food that calls itself Chinese, and food that calls itself Indian. It's all delicious, and it's rarely a challenge. Your average Mexican restaurant in the US, as an example, doesn't serve food made with corn smut, a corn-destroying fungus that is seen as a delicacy in Mexico. You're probably not going to get snake soup in Chinese restaurants or bullfrog in an Indian restaurant. Heck, it's pretty hard to get black pudding in Irish pubs in America, and that's a mainstream British treat.

Foreign foods can run pretty far afield of the American palate, and, unless a restaurant caters to an immigrant clientele, their menu will be Americanized. I've been to many Eastern European restaurants in my life, including having been a regular at the legendary (and recently closed) Nye's Polonaise Room in Minneapolis, and so I reckoned I'd had a lot of what Eastern Europe has to offer, and I was wrong.

It's only my second blog entry in this series, and I have already strayed far from mainstream American tastes. Because I made my own kvass.

For those of you who don't know, kvass is an enormously popular beverage in Slavic and Baltic countries, where it is vended in the streets. It is slightly sour and fizzy and mildly alcoholic. It tastes like rye or black bread, which is what it is made of. It's not widely available in the US, because we drink sweet drinks, and we don't drink bread.

I drank it once previously. I peeked into a Russian grocery store once, curious, and bought some candies and some cookies. I also saw a massive bottle of what looked like a brown soda pop, so I bought it, and it tasted like a tart beer. I shrugged it off then -- who would drink a beer soda pop? -- and threw the rest away. I was younger and stupid, because millions of people drink the stuff, and it is the basis for several popular recipes.

I am older and not quite so stupid, and so I made my own kvass. There are a number of recipes online, and they are all pretty similar: Soak bread in boiling water for a while, add in sugar and yeast and let sit, cool and drink. Sometimes you add something else -- I added raisins, which is a popular choice. You can use any hearty bread, and you cook it or scorch it before adding it in, to make the drink extra bitter. It's not hard to make, although it is a little time consuming -- all told, it was about three days from toast to kvass.

There are other types of kvass as well, including a beetroot variation that I have not made yet. The kvass I made seems fairly straightforward, and I am not yet acclimated to the taste. I used rye bread, and I am a fanatic about the taste of rye, but it is taking a while for me to appreciate it as a soft drink. Also, because I fermented the stuff on my own stove, I was terrified it might kill me, but I have had several glasses now and managed to survive.

I also tried mixing it with other beverages, which I don't believe is typically done in Eastern Europe, but American bartenders have started to experiment with the drink as a mixer. I added lemonade and touch of lemon seltzer to give it more fizz, which seemed logical -- kvass has a beer-like flavor, and people have been mixing beer and lemonade together forever and calling it a shandy. The kvass shandy was pleasant enough, although the combination seemed to highlight the fact that kvass is not beer. It tasted somehow off, which is the risk you run when you try to just substitute one ingredient for another, less familiar ingredient in a drink you are already familiar with.

I suppose the next step is for me to try other recipes and, over time, I will be familiar enough with the flavor of kvass to know what to expect, and what I like. It's happened to me with other drinks. I have developed a real taste for an herbal liqueur called fernet, which is about as bitter as you can imagine -- as bitter as a married couple discussing the terms of a divorce.

In the meanwhile, I will start looking for cooking recipes that use kvass. I barely understand how to drink the stuff, so why not cook with it?

Said nobody ever.

Week 21: Merit Badges and Don Rickles


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 147 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 76 hours
I have reviewed 1,967 individual flashcards

I have decided to stop posting the "percent correct stats," which you will find at the top of previous posts, because I find them depressing. There is just thing ongoing, slow-motion slide downward, each week I have been fractionally worse at remembering Yiddish than the week before.

I expect that's perfectly normal. I am just a hair's breadth away from having studied 2,000 distinct flashcards, and that's a lot of information to cram into your noodle in 21 weeks, and I keep adding more while struggling to remember the old ones. So I won't take this too seriously, but, at the same time, why broadcast?

In the meanwhile, I have at last completed my list of 1,000 Yiddish words, and so should be able to award myself a gold pin marked with the numeral 1,000 that I mentioned a while back. I have not yet gotten my scout-style merit-badge sash yet, however, so I'm stalled, at least as far as granting awards go.

Despite the stall, I have started work on my next Yiddish merit badge, this one for cuss words and insults. Originally, I had intended to teach myself 100 words and then congratulate myself with a badge, but that seemed like too few words, and, when I counted up the insults and curses I have already learned, I had already reached that point. In fact, I was just shy of 200. So I added in a few more and when I have learned them I will have earned my first badge.

My second badge will be words related to drugs and alcohol, and this is not quite the bonanza that the previous category was: apparently European Jews were quite concerned with belittling each other and not so very concerned with intoxicants, which isn't surprising from the culture that produced Don Rickles instead of William S. Burroughs.

If I can locate 50 words on the topic of drugs and alcohol, I will be lucky. I briefly felt that this was not enough to justify awarding a merit badge, as it would take less than a week to learn these words, but then I read up on actual Boy Scout merit badges. There are some badges that can be earned in a single afternoon. It makes sense that some badges are easier to earn and some harder, and I will give myself a similar mix.

In other news, somehow I just completely forgot to study one night this past weekend. More precisely, when I remembered to study, it was already 11 pm, and, like the Jewish day, the Anki day starts the previous evening, and so I had inadvertently skipped a day of study. The program forces you to catch up on words you are reviewing, but you end up completely missing a day's worth of new words when you skip a day. I kicked myself for this for a little while, but this is only the second day I have failed to study Yiddish in four months, so I have a 98 percent attendance record, in a manner of speaking.

I will always be a grade grubber, even about attendance.

Cooking the East European Way: Green Borscht


There are books on Jewish cooking, of course. I have a few. Most are pretty general about where foods that are typically seen as Jewish come from. Oh, sure, they'll mention that Ashkenazi Jews adapted local recipes to fulfill their dietary requirements, but often that's as far as it goes. We don't generally learn that the bagel is Polish in origin and dates back to the 16th century, and was as popular among Slavs as it is now popular among Jews. Our beloved blintz is also Slavic, and apparently pagan, as the pre-Christian Slavs reportedly saw them as symbols of the sun. And so it goes, with cholent perhaps coming from the French, knishes deriving from either Ukranian or Russian antecedents, and kugels borrowing from the Germans.

So I've decided to just go ahead and claim East Europe's food as my own. Why not? It's where my family came from, and they claimed their share. I'll follow their lead and modify it to serve my own needs, as I am a vegetarian, but the basic recipes will be those from my ancestor's countries: Russian, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Moldova, as well as broader influences -- my Moldovan connection gives me license to explore Romanian food, while Poland leads me to Lithuania, and Ukraine gives me Mongolian and Turkish food. I know this is all just an exercise in making excuses to eat food I want to eat, but if you invaded or were invaded by one of my family's ancestral homes, I'm going to go ahead and eat your food.

I started with a Ukranian dish. Ukraine is a global breadbasket as a result of huge reserves of farmland (it's one of the reasons people keep invading), and so Ukraine is a country with an extensive and varied cuisine -- they have something like 30 varieties of borscht, which is a commitment to borscht you just don't see all that often.

So borscht was to be my first meal. Borscht is still something I am learning to love, and I blame my American upbringing. Americans have a notorious sweet tooth, and so a soup that could fairly be described as "sour" isn't going to be the first thing we turn to. Borscht is generally made with beetroot, which is also not something common in American cuisine, and it's often made with pickled ingredients and served cold, and this is about as far from a candy bar as it is possible for a food to get.

I started with green borscht, which does not have beetroot, but is typically made with sorrel instead. It's not that easy to get sorrel in Omaha, so I used a common substitution: spinach. One website suggested adding a splash of citrus to duplicate sorrel's acidity -- although spinach is alkaline, apparently it doesn't have that sour punch that is so distinctive of sorrel.

The other ingredients for the soup include diced potatoes, a smattering of rice, sour cream, and dill and green onions for flavoring, as well as a hard-boiled egg that has been chopped up. There are other recipes out there, but this is a good combination -- the resulting soup is a bit like cream of potato, but the spinach, dill, and green onions give it a sharp, earthy flavor. I'm not usually in the habit of chucking an egg into my soup, but I made my own ramen last week and that also called for a hard-boiled egg, so I am starting to think everybody else puts egg in their soup and I've just never noticed.

This is a soup that Jews absconded with a long time ago, re-dubbing it schav or shtshav in Yiddish, although that's barely a new name, as it is called szczaw in Polish, so our Yiddish name is a bit like we claimed the hot dog, insisted it was a Jewish food, and it's Yiddish name was the khat dag.

Green borscht can be served hot or cold. I've only had it hot so far, and, let me tell you, it's a great partner for a grilled cheese sandwich on a rainy night. Or perhaps I should refer to the sandwich by its Yiddish name: grill kez.

Jewish Geneology: The Hasid


I don't know if I have mentioned it, but my day job is in a historical society. Specifically, I am the society's lone professional researcher, which, in practice, means that I fill a lot of roles. One of them is teaching a genealogy class.

I am not a trained genealogist, but, then, my class is quite introductory, and, in order to be a teacher, you need not know everything about a subject, you merely need to know more than your students. I have pursued my own family tree, on and off, since I was in my early twenties, and quite avidly for the past few years.

Properly, that should be plural: I have pursued my own family trees. I have two, one biological and one adoptive. The biological one points exclusively back to Ireland. The adoptive one points to a variety of places in Eastern Europe, and many of the branches end as you might expect, with extermination at the hands of the Nazis. This is the distressing fact of Jewish genealogy is your family is Ashkenazi -- it inevitably ends up being a map of genocide. This may be an area of investigation for me at some time in the future, as I can't help but feel that they deserve some documentation from a family member. It is not my first area of investigation, however.

My Irish family tree isn't terribly long. Ireland lost many of its official records in a fire in 1922, and that tends to create a wall for genealogists. My biological family has done research on their own, as they still have relative in Bohola in County Mayo they keep in touch with. So I have some names that go back to the 1800s. There is my biological 3rd great grandmother Margaret O'Brien, as an example, who was born about 1821.

But my adoptive family's tree goes back much further. It goes back to 1660, and this is thanks to the Hasid.

I don't know when I first learned about the Hasid. I feel like it must have been back in high school. I had thought my mother had told me about him, but she insists she didn't, so it may have been my uncle. Nonetheless, at some moment in the past, I learned that via adoption I was now part of the family line of a man named Ze'ev Wolf Kitzes.

I am going to continue to write this under the assumption that my readers know a little bit about Hasids. I will assume you know that it began as an ecstatic, mystical movement in Western Ukraine in the 18th century, and was headed by a man named Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, generally called the Ba'al Shem Tov, or the Master of the Good Name.

I found a photograph, converted into the illustration at the top of the page, last week. It is from an old Jewish cemetery in Medzhybizh, Ukraine. For those of you who can't read Hebrew letters, the grave on the right is labeled "Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem Tov." The grave on the left is labeled Ze'ev Wolf Kitzes.

That's my ancestor, buried next to the leader of Hadidic Judaism. I did not know that was where his grave was.

I did know a few things about the Hasid, though. The fact that he is my ancestor was the basis for a play I once wrote called "Kishinev," and I did an awful lot of research for the play. I knew he was a Hasid even before the Ba'al Shem Tov was a Hasid; he was reportedly one of the leaders of a group of early Hasidim, and although he was apparently initially skeptical of  the Ba'al Shem Tov, he quickly became a devotee.

There are miracle stories about Wolf Kitzes in Martin Buber's books on Hasidim, and there are stranger stories still in books published by and for Hasidic Jews. There is a story that I made the centerpiece of my play, in which Wolf Kitzes was to take a journey, and the Ba'al Shem Tov told him if anyone should ask him how things go with the Jews, he should tell the truth. Wolf Kitzes becomes lost on his trip and is sheltered by a man, and, when asked about the Jews, responds that God watches over them. Wolf Kitzes returns to a distraught Ba'al Shem Tov, who informs him that the man was the patriarch Abraham, and he could have intervened on behalf of the ailing Jews had Wolf Kitzes told the truth.

I don't remember where I read this story, or how close this version (the version I put in my play) is to the original. And so I plan to do some digging.

Just last week I managed to push my family tree far enough back to find Wolf. Even though he did not start a dynasty of Rebbes, Hasids are pretty dedicated to maintaining family trees of important Rabbis, and so Wolf's is online. I could follow his family down through the ages, one Kitzes after another, finally connecting to my grandmother, and then my mother, and then me.

I don't know anything about the intermediate family but for their names, and sometimes not even that. Sometimes Jews like to pretend we were not as sexist as the rest of the world -- after all, to be a Jew, you need a Jewish mother! We're a matriarchy!

But if you want to see a chart of power, rather than ethnic membership, my family tree is an example. All the men are named. Many of the women aren't. There is my 6th great-grandfather Israel Kitzes, and then there is his wife, Wife Kitzes. There is his father, Nachman Kitzes, and there is his mother, Wife of Nachmann. His father was Ze'ev Wolf, the Hasid, and while I know his wife's name -- Rachel -- one of his daughters is on my family tree as Daughter Kitzes.

I don't know that I will be able to fill in these blanks. But this is my family history, and I am interested in it, so I shall dig into this as best I can. I'll start with the Hasid himself, Ze'ev Wolf Kitzes, because it has been a long time since I have looked into the life of my 8th great grandfather, and it is time that I did.
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