About twenty people are conjugating verbs on a Tuesday night in Crown Heights in the back room of a bar that primarily serves natural wine to patrons wearing pricey cardigans. Ikh hob, du host, er hot is written on the whiteboard. The instructor, a woman in her late twenties who has a stick-and-poke tattoo of a Yiddish letter on her forearm, is patient in the way that someone becomes after fifty explanations of the same grammar concept and still finds it fascinating. There isn’t a single person in the room who resembles the stock photo of a Yiddish speaker. Fur hats don’t exist. However, a man wearing a Carhartt beanie is pronouncing gezunterheyt very carefully.
Even though the mainstream Jewish press is only now beginning to take notice, something has been going on with this language for some time. According to the Workers Circle, enrollment in its Yiddish classes has more than doubled since 2015, with adults under 35 experiencing the fastest growth. Online programs at YIVO sell out. In upstate New York, there is a Yiddish farm where people pay to milk goats and don’t speak English for a week. A friend of mine who works as a teacher at one of these intensives told me, half-jokingly, that her most challenging students are not the novices but rather the ones who come in believing they already know everything because their great-grandmother once said “shmatte.”
Nobody really knows what to do with the grandparents. The majority of those who are still alive did not intentionally transmit the language. They were motivated. A few of them made it out of the camps. When some of them arrived in Israel in 1948, they were essentially informed that Yiddish was the language of those who had allowed themselves to be killed. Yiddish was on the wrong side of the ideological project that was the Hebrew revival, among other things. Kids changed their names. Ahuva was Liba. Like a sweater you can’t quite throw out, the diaspora language was folded into a drawer.
The fact that the grandchildren are the ones knocking on the drawer is therefore a little odd, and perhaps a little delicate. Rokhl Kafrissen, a Yiddishist, has pointedly stated that this is neither nostalgia nor a Renaissance fair. She’s got a point. The feeling of nostalgia is passive. By all measures, learning a case-rich Germanic language with a Hebrew-alphabet script and a whole literary tradition you have never encountered is laborious. It’s cute, but you don’t pick it up. You pick it up because you’ve decided to go look for something that’s missing.
It’s more difficult to identify what’s missing. It has a political component. Many younger American Jews, especially those on the left, have become uneasy about how Jewish identity in the US has been dominated by Hebrew and Israel. With roots in Eastern Europe, labor organizing, tenement journalism, radical theater, and the chaotic diasporic life that existed before the twentieth century attempted to flatten it, Yiddish offers an alternative lineage. People I’ve spoken to seem to feel that Yiddish allows them to be Jewish without having to engage in politics they don’t identify with.
Just the language’s texture contributes to it. Yiddish does things that English does not. Its diminutives are infused with tenderness, and its unique sense of irony makes anyone who eventually understands the joke feel flattered. Yiddish-speaking thieves, bigamists, and tabloid-page lunatics were documented in Eddy Portnoy’s Bad Rabbi, which shocked those who thought the language was only used by soft-handed bubbes. It didn’t. It was everyone’s property, even the ones no one had placed on a memorial plaque.
It’s difficult to ignore the generational nature of this as it develops in Brooklyn. The initial generation made an effort to forget. The second generation was unaware that there was anything to recall. The third is learning the words their grandmother stopped saying aloud, slowly and imperfectly, in the back of a wine bar. It’s still too early to tell if that amounts to a renaissance or merely a protracted act of repair.
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