Yiddish. I have heard the language since my earliest childhood in shul and summers at my grandparents’ bungalow in Seagate. I should have picked it up by osmosis. I didn’t.

Yiddish. I hate when they call it “Jewish,” like something from the “Old Country” along with those loud Garment Center Jews in neon flannel pants on the boardwalk.

Why study Yiddish? French is more chic; Russian has a richer literature (Yiddish has a rich literature, at least from the mid 1800s, something I’d learn later); Spanish is infinitely more practical. Yiddish was a connection to a lost world. The Hebrew-speaking staunchly Zionist schools ignored Yiddish, but Hebrew I felt wasn’t enough. Yiddish was closer to my ancestors. My grandparents didn’t speak (they could read) Hebrew. Yiddish was a way of connecting to my grandparents who understood a little English but seriously couldn’t communicate in the language. It was a choice of Polish or Yiddish (they knew Yiddish much better). I didn’t want to venture into the minefield of Polish with its tongue-twisting consonant clusters that are hard to master even for native speakers.

When I started my Yiddish exploration I was an 18-year-old lad, struggling with chemistry and trying to figure out the world. The year was 1980; Jimmy Carter was in office and all the computer gizmos like GPS and Zoom were still on the drawing board. Remember the old telephone booths? No one dreamed of cell phones in those days. In 1980 Yiddish was far from its prime. You could still hear the “mama loshen” in the back of Orthodox shuls and on the boardwalks of Miami Beach, where the Forverts (then a daily) was sold on the beach in vending machines. Here I was in the prime of my youth jumping on a sinking ship. My biggest surprise was how the native speakers (almost all the older generation), far from encouraging Yiddish, were the greatest disparagers. “Yiddish is a geganvete shprach” (Yiddish is a stolen language), my Uncle Beryl would say, making English with its slew of Greek, Latin and French grand larceny.

I came to the Yiddish table well prepared linguistically. I had a good command of Hebrew (also self-taught, no thanks to the yeshivas) and a year of college German (why I studied German is another story). My surprise was not how similar Yiddish was to German but how dissimilar in sentence structure, pronunciation and syntax, depending on the German and Yiddish dialect. Many people confuse Hebrew with Yiddish since it is written in Hebrew letters and contains many Hebrew words (not just religious concepts like Torah but many mundane words like shikur, mashke (booze) and mechutan), but the languages are not related.

Back then there were twice as many Yiddish speakers as now but a fraction of the Yiddish revival. Then the only college I knew that taught even one course in Yiddish was Columbia (where Yiddish studies started in the 1940s), and maybe Brooklyn College. You didn’t have Yiddish summer immersion programs like the summer program at Vilna. The National Yiddish book store was only a pipe dream. There were fewer teaching tools and only one standard dictionary.

There I sat hunched over a pile of musty Yiddish books. A few blocks away in the East 70s was CYCO, the last Yiddish book store that is now housed in an industrial loft in Astoria, a one-man show run by Yiddish diehard Hy Wolf who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking ghetto in post-war Brooklyn. The store is open by appointment only. Whenever I came across an obscure word I would ask nonagenarians at CYCO for the meaning of the word, which they would recall from memory from their shtetl childhood.

I loved the Yizkor books. Memorial books for communities wiped out in the Holocaust when every shtetl was destroyed. Nearly all are written in Yiddish or Hebrew or a combination, many still not translated into English. I would like to translate one. There is even some organization to promote translation of the books into English.

The world of the Yiddishists was socialist-semi-communist and totally secular (still is). Israel was, ironically or not, the most inhospitable place for Yiddish. Yiddish is much more spoken in America in communities like Boro Park or New Square, or even in parts of London.

The Yiddish I learned from reading or Yiddishist circles was the Lithuanian High Yiddish, a literary medium. My love affair with Yiddish was through the written word, intellectual.

I attended the Folksbiene theater with subtitles in English and Russian, literally the only Yiddish act in town.

I continued to make steady progress in Yiddish. Riding the subway with a copy of the Forverts and Weinreich’s dictionary, I would measure my progress by how many words were underlined in pencil.

I loved Yiddish proverbs and sayings (I say it’s worth learning Yiddish just to understand these golden nuggets). I cluttered my bookshelves with dusty copies bought at CYCO bookstore. Yiddish seemed so much more affectionate than cold English, with affectionate diminutives tacked on: “Shlome, shlomel, shloymele.”

Two generations ago you could travel the Jewish world in Yiddish from Buenos Aires to Sydney. In the early ‘70s my father didn’t know French but got around the Pletzl (diminutive of Platz-square) in Paris just in Polish Yiddish. Still, even now, Yiddish turns up in the most surprising places.

I was in a shul in Alexandria, Egypt. After davening, the parnas (community president) sees a strange face and asks me to introduce myself. I did, in broken Arabic. One of the members cuts me off in Yiddish, “Why do you have to break your teeth to speak Arabic. We all speak Yiddish.” This was a community of Polish Jews who settled there in the prosperous 1920s (I was there in the ‘80s). My first words in San Juan were not Spanish. In the old city I went to a store, I spoke to the store owner in Spanish; he answered in Yiddish. I didn’t realize that I spoke Yiddish with a Spanish accent! But he gave me a good deal.

Now after mastering Yiddish (by the way I find it the easiest of the 10 languages that I know. The grammar is infinitely simpler than German, pronunciation much kinder than French, with a fraction of the English vocabulary and phonetics, unlike English)

I have passed the torch and taught Yiddish to adults in a variety of shuls, community centers and the Workmen’s Circle. With the appreciative audience, Yiddish finally gets the respect it deserves. Yiddish goes back at least a thousand years (some say 1,200), but the teaching of Yiddish is far newer.

Adult education does not have the time or commitment of an immersion program like the one in Vilna or a college course. I was astounded by the fluent command of attendees at the Vilna program who, after a summer, spoke as well as myself after 10 years. Adult education can give you a taste, but you wonder how much they will retain after a few weeks. I encourage the students and everyone to take an immersion class or formal college class. Actually, being a native English speaker was in one way an advantage. I knew what it was like for an English speaker to learn Yiddish. I taught Yiddish at the Riverdale Reform Temple.

My final vindication came when I parted with my late grandfather in a Yiddish eulogy at his shloshim. He was my Yiddish teacher so it was fitting to say goodbye in Yiddish. The family was floored. I learned Yiddish at the start to speak to him and his generation.

Yiddish allowed me to enter the world of my grandparents, something my siblings couldn’t do. It opened up a treasured world, a Jewish dimension that Hebrew alone could not provide. It was well worth the effort. Zeit gesunt.

By Jeff Klapper