Attributing a personality to a language may yield its most imaginative anthropomorphizations. Doing so turns attention away from the language as a means of sharing information, opinions, feelings, speculations, and so on, and instead centers on the language as having some inherent signifying power, above and beyond the semantic content of what is uttered or written in it. The language’s scope as a signifier is both diminished and expanded by this attribution. On one hand, it suggests that the language is inherently constrained by its character, which inhibits or skews the ability to use the language comprehensively. On the other hand, a language’s personality implicitly imbues anything conveyed in the language with an extra register of meaning. Languages are more likely to be assigned a personality when they are engaged at some remove from their vernacular imminence and presumed role as routine conduits of meaning—for example, when encountered as a foreign language, a language juxtaposed against other languages, a partial language, an endangered language, or a language under critical scrutiny.
All of these possibilities pertain to Yiddish, to which a remarkable range of personalities has been ascribed. Benjamin Harshav attributes this propensity to the language’s foundational vernacularity. He argues that associations with its orality and cultural intimacy inform the “semiotics of Yiddish,” regardless of how it is employed:
In the twentieth century, Yiddish has been used for many kinds of discourse, often quite contradictory to whatever might be its “inherent” or accepted nature. This “oral” and popular language has been successfully harnessed to impressionist prose, historiography, linguistic and statistical research, political propaganda, and “ivory tower” poetry. Nevertheless, in social perception, the language did carry a cluster of characteristic features, developed in its unique history and crystallized in its modern literature. The very fact that native speakers may assign such emotive qualities to the language, rather than seeing it as a neutral vehicle for communication, speaks for itself.1
Though this phenomenon has a longer history, ascribing a personality to Yiddish has become more expansive and perhaps more urgent in the decades following World War II. This practice is particularly prevalent when devotees employ other languages to extol the distinct character of Yiddish in order to convey its significance to audiences unfamiliar with the language. These accolades sometimes appear in books that compile selected glosses of Yiddish terms, historical information, explanations of traditional customs, or translations of anecdotes—all in an effort to celebrate the scope of Yiddish culture. Consider, for example, Endel Markowitz’s 1980 Encyclopedia Yiddishanica, a soi-disant “anthology of Jewish history, culture, religion, language, idioms, colloquialisms and teachings,” which begins as follows:
The Yiddish language can only be described as a conglomeration of ageless, paradoxical sentiment transfused into emotional reaction due to the constant pressure and recrimination heaped upon the Jews through the centuries. Steeped in irony and sarcasm; stained and spattered by bitterness and despair, the poignant Jewish existence, painfully accepted as their destiny, reveals itself through the subtlety of sardonic expressions, which, strangely enough, enabled them to retain their sanity and continue to survive.2
The preface to The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten’s “relaxed lexicon” of the language, offers a more overtly anthropomorphic characterization: “I think Yiddish a language of exceptional charm. Like any street gamin who has survived unnamable adversaries, it is bright, audacious, mischievous. . . . I think it a tongue that never takes its tongue out of its cheek. . . . In its innermost heart, Yiddish swings between shmaltz [here, ‘mawkishness’] and derision.”3 Maurice Samuel’s 1971 book In Praise of Yiddish also addresses “the inside feel of Yiddish,” which, he asserts, “is a mirror of the total Jewish condition of the last two thousand years.” However, aware of other characterizations of the language, Samuel first cautions against “those who harbor a sentimental but uninstructed affection for Yiddish as a quaint patois which has somehow produced a number of gifted writers” as well as “those Jews whose vestigial Yiddish is of the kind cultivated by borsht-circuit comedians posing as experts.” With this caveat Samuel suggests, if inadvertently, that these more limited and distorted perceptions of Yiddish are also part of its character, as a language whose significance is often misunderstood or underestimated.4
The practice of imparting a personality to Yiddish engages the language in what I have termed the postvernacular mode, which privileges the language’s secondary, symbolic level of signification over its primary level of communicating information. In the postvernacular mode, the fact that something is written or said in Yiddish, as opposed to some other language, is as important as the information being conveyed, if not more so.5 Postvernacular engagement with Yiddish long predates the Holocaust, but in its wake this mode of engaging the language comes to the fore. The deliberate, self-conscious nature of postvernacular Yiddish facilitates conceiving of the language as having a personality. After World War II, the notion that Yiddish embodies a distinctive character, shaped by the travails and tenacity of its speakers, addresses the implicit question of why one might turn to the language at a time when its use has diminished and its future seems uncertain.
Assessments of the personality of Yiddish often arise in discussions of what are perceived as either its deficits or its excesses, in both cases intimating a defining imbalance of character. Regarding the former, Samuel’s portrait of Yiddish includes what he considers to be its “blind side.” He posits that although the language possesses words for flora and fauna, it lacks a sensibility for the natural world “such as we find in no other language,” notwithstanding the fact that until the late nineteenth century “the major part of Yiddish-speaking Jewry lived in townlets and villages in close proximity to, though not in, nature.” Similarly, he argues, Yiddish does not have a feel for the gentile world, whether Christian or pagan. This lack, he insists, “is not a matter of vocabulary; even if an equivalent or near-equivalent could be found for every word and idiom,” addressing these topics in Yiddish, he asserts, “would seem . . . to belong to an unintelligible world.”6 Samuel thereby suggests that the language is both thorough in its expression of the “Jewish condition” and, at the same time, limited to this sensibility.
This argument does not square with the views of Yiddishists who vaunt the language’s comprehensive breadth, exemplified by the extensive vocabulary for flora and fauna in Nahum Stutchkoff’s Yiddish thesaurus and the hundreds of terms for plant life in Mordkhe Schaechter’s dictionary of Yiddish botanical terminology.7 But the notion of the language’s inherent weaknesses (and the implicit corresponding limitations of its speakers) is hardly new, having featured frequently in attacks on Yiddish by maskilim and even on occasion by some of its champions.
Indeed, this critique figures provocatively in a landmark work of Yiddish literature by one of its most ardent champions, Isaac Leib Peretz’s “Monish.” (Initially published in 1888, it is sometimes identified as the first modern Yiddish poem.)8 “Monish” relates a mock cautionary tale of the eponymous pious Jewish youth led astray by his attraction to a foreign woman, who is actually a sinister demon in disguise. Midway through the poem, Peretz interrupts the narrative with a disquisition on the incapacity of Yiddish to address the subject:
How differently this song is sung
For gentiles, in a gentile tongue.
But not for Jews, not in zhargon;
It doesn’t have the proper tone
For love or feelings. Not one word
That suits the subject can be heard.9
Peretz’s meta-discourse on the character of Yiddish archly echoes the established maskilic trope that the language lacks, among other things, the capacity for expressing romantic love. Following this sequence (which continues for another five stanzas), the tale of Monish resumes. The poem recounts how he succumbs to his temptress, who exhorts the youth to swear his love by articles of Jewish piety, including his peyes (“sidelocks”) and the paroykhes (“curtain covering the ark in which Torah scrolls are kept in a synagogue”), and ultimately by God’s name, which dooms Monish to perdition. His demise is not only the result of this blasphemy, having been seduced by a femme fatale who represents the forbidden enticements of Western culture. Monish is also damned because of his inability to articulate romantic sentiments properly, given the limitations of his native language, which is implicitly emblematic of a larger cultural deficit among its speakers. Moreover, by offering this playfully double-edged critique in a Yiddish poem that is modern in its form and worldview, even as it draws on a trove of traditional Jewish lore, Peretz suggests new possibilities for the language as the voice of irony.
Whereas some observers regard the personality of Yiddish as deficient in certain areas, others view it as plentiful in different aspects, especially after the Holocaust. As part of the beatified portrait of prewar Yiddish culture presented in their 1952 book Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe, anthropologists Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog explain that Yiddish “is rich in terms for referring to a learned man” and list ten examples, noting that “these are only a few of the terms used in everyday speech” to denote traditional Jewish erudition.10 But far more attention has been paid to the abundance of piquant Yiddish idioms, especially proverbs and curses, which have been anthologized repeatedly, both in the original language and in translation.11 Linguist James Matisoff introduces his 1979 study of Yiddish psycho-ostensives—conventionalized idioms voicing “blessings, curses, hopes, and fears”—by asserting that “Jews have always admired articulate, flavorful speech” and that “Yiddish has the deserved reputation of being a highly expressive language.” Like Samuel, Matisoff seeks to correct others’ portrayals of Yiddish as he proffers his own characterization of the language: “This ‘funkiness’ has been sentimentalized over with insistent vulgarity by some popular writers. At the other extreme we find the somewhat solemn academic approach of the professional Yiddishist, for whom the Yiddish language is primarily a vehicle for high-minded scholarly endeavor, a precious jewel to be preserved intact for an ever-dwindling cultural élite.”12
To determine just what gives the language its “considerable emotive power,” Matisoff advocates studying “the earthier side of Yiddish.” He identifies the richness of the idioms at hand, centered on “attitudes toward good and evil,” as a riposte against the onerous existence of eastern European Jewry, described as culturally isolated, economically impoverished, and socially oppressed: “For Jews with limited access to the mainstream of Western culture in the shtetlekh of Eastern Europe, the outside Gentile world was often rather hostile, cold, and intimidating. The inner Jewish world, in compensation, despite its material poverty and frequent pettiness, was at least full of overt demonstrations of feeling: heartfelt loves and hatreds, fears and hopes received constant outward expression in the language of the people.”13 For Matisoff, this aspect of Yiddish is noteworthy not merely for its histrionics but more significantly for providing its speakers with a defiant source of empowerment and a means of voicing moral convictions in the face of frequent injustices.
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Especially complex characterizations of Yiddish are offered by some Ashkenazim who were not native speakers of the language but were at some remove, if only by a generation or two, from its speech community. Among German-speaking Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, this relationship was shaped by the longstanding perspective of Germanists who pathologized both Yiddish and its speakers. The discomfort produced by these Jews’ attenuated relationship with the language engendered an understanding of its character that exposed their own definitional ambiguity about Jewishness.
Sigmund Freud’s references to Yiddish, particularly in his 1905 study Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten (Jokes and their relation to the unconscious), exemplify this complexity. Yiddish is an essential element of some of the jokes Freud analyzes, and this has prompted scholars to probe the psychoanalyst’s relationship to Jewishness.14 Among others, linguist Christopher Hutton notes Freud’s “clear association of Yiddish with ‘the natural,’ the true self that is suppressed in the process of transition (and translation)”—that is, the dynamic in Freud’s family from his ancestors’ traditionally observant life in provincial Galicia to his cosmopolitan, secular life in Vienna, marked by a shift in vernacular language. Hutton also links the suppression of Yiddish with the denial of “the feminine and the sexual in [Freud’s] nature, this being in part symbolized by Yiddish.”15
Consequently, “linguistic insecurity cannot have been absent from Freud’s personality,” Hutton posits. “The slip from German to Yiddish which would betray ‘the hidden self’ underneath would have been an important factor in the genesis of Freud’s sensitivity to the revealing nature of small deviations from normative behaviour.” Hutton argues that the use of Yiddish in the jokes Freud cites in his study are linguistic slips that “control” this regression. The language is employed as “a sign of the wish or the need for this repressed inner self to be revealed” and therefore constitutes for the Jewish tellers of these jokes “a kind of therapy.”16
Franz Kafka offered a more playfully contradictory enactment of this fraught characterization of Yiddish in a lecture on the language that the author delivered in conjunction with a recitation of Yiddish poetry by actor Yitskhok Levi in Prague’s Jewish Town Hall in 1912. Speaking in German, Kafka famously confronted his audience’s anxieties about Yiddish by asserting “how much more Yiddish you understand than you think.” Kafka’s remarks on the nature of Yiddish, which are so laden with errors that they appear coyly deliberate, characterize the language as “tangled,” lacking in “lucidity,” its grammar undocumented (and undocumentable), and consisting “solely of foreign words” and “only of dialect.” On one hand, he admonishes the audience that “you will not understand a word of Yiddish. . . . You will try to make out what you know already, and you will miss what is really there.” On the other hand, Kafka assures his listeners that they nevertheless have an inherent ability to understand Yiddish “intuitively. . . . If you relax, you suddenly find yourselves in the midst of Yiddish.” This will prove so powerful that the audience members will no longer be afraid of Yiddish but of themselves—which Yiddish can help them overcome.17 Kafka provocatively suggests that it is precisely the tension between the anxieties associated with the language’s otherness and the allure of its potential accessibility that defines his audience’s equivocal Jewishness. Like Freud, Kafka characterized Yiddish as emblematic of both a Jewish pathology and its cure.
Evelyn Torton Beck argues that Kafka’s perception of “the highly connotative nature of Yiddish,” a consequence of his intense interest in Yiddish theater in the years 1910–1912, informed his distinctive literary style: “Especially rich in idiom and nuance, the Yiddish language is characterized by warmth and intimacy, a fact which Kafka himself observed when he wrote that to call the Jewish mother by the German Mutter is to create a false image, since the German language is colder and more formal than the Yiddish.” According to Beck, Kafka’s attention to the multivalent signification that inheres in the language may be reflected in “his vocabulary, which often suggests several layers of meaning behind each word.”18 Though written in German, she intimates, Kafka’s prose was haunted by the personality of Yiddish, a reminder of the problematic fit between the author and his literary language.
Not all German-speaking Jews attributed to Yiddish a characterization that reflects their own anxieties about an ineluctable Jewish otherness. Martin Buber, for example, introduced his 1903 translation of a Yiddish play by David Pinski into German by explaining that Yiddish was “not just a rich but a supple language—less abstract but warmer than the Hebrew which it has enriched. Yiddish may lack the pure spiritual pathos of Hebrew, but it is replete with incomparably softer and sturdier, tender and rough inflections. In Yiddish the very substance of the people has in itself become a language.”19 Defined explicitly in contrast to the elevated stature of Hebrew—and implicitly, like Kafka, against the affectively cool constraints of the assimilated Jew’s German—Yiddish incarnated for Buber an emotionally vibrant folkhood. He reported being drawn to Yiddish folktales because they “seem to live only by virtue of the unique inflections of that inimitable language of East European Jewry.”20
Other Jews whose relationship to Yiddish was similarly attenuated have been drawn to study the language in order to connect with its distinctive vernacularity. Author Richard Fein offers an extensive account of this undertaking is his 1986 memoir, Dancing with Leah: Discovering Yiddish in America. Fein recounts his childhood engagement with Yiddish in a multigenerational household, where the language “was not so much spoken” but served “as a point of reference” among adults. Consequently, he explains, he grew up with a dislocated Yiddish: “Rhythms without a vocabulary,” the language “was in my bones but hidden from my tongue.” As an adult, Fein resolved to study Yiddish, initiating a relationship with the language that he describes in powerful anthropomorphic terms. He writes that he “succumbed to Yiddish” (the inverse of Monish’s fate), which “was all the time waiting patiently for me,” having “autochthonous powers of claiming me.” The forceful agency that Fein attributes to an anthropomorphic Yiddish is echoed in his characterization of the language’s “incantatory sounds” and “muscular flexing.”21 For Fein, like Buber, Yiddish has a personality of compelling energy, rooted in its ethnic authenticity.
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The slogan “If you can’t say anything nice, say it in Yiddish” might seem to have been lifted from Peretz’s aforementioned disquisition on the language in “Monish.” However, this is the title of one of the more recently issued English-language collections of Yiddish curses, and the sentence also appears emblazoned on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and lapel buttons, among other mass-produced items available for purchase.22 This pithy characterization of Yiddish extends to other publications and material objects, appearing primarily in the United States after World War II, which present Yiddish as a language of invective, histrionics, and vulgarity. These phenomena include an array of comic dictionaries, which provide playful glosses and amusing anecdotes to selected Yiddish terms. Some of these books—such as Drek!: The Real Yiddish Your Bubbe Never Taught and Dirty Yiddish: Everyday Slang from “What’s Up?” to “F*%# Off!”—present Yiddish as the idiom par excellence for imprecation.23 Other examples, titled Yiddish for Yankees and Every Goy’s Guide to Common Jewish Expressions, suggest that they are especially meant to provide cultural outsiders with access to Yiddish arcana.24 But the front cover of the latter book reads, under the title, “Also recommended for Jews who don’t know their punim [‘face’] from their pupik [‘navel’].” Here, the non-Jewish reader serves as the rationale for a dictionary also intended for Jews bereft of Yiddish literacy, not unlike the role of women as the emblematic readers of early Yiddish literature that was, in fact, also for men who lacked the erudition of the learned elite.
Similar to these books is an assortment of mass-produced ephemera imprinted with one or more Yiddish words, almost always romanized, and often in a “kosher-style” font. Though sometimes evoking sentimentality (e.g., mameleh, “mommy”), the preponderance of words on these objects are provocative: alter kocker (“old fart”), yenta (here, “gossip”), chutzpah (“audacity”), meshuganah (“crazy”), shiksa (pejorative term for “non-Jewish woman”), among others.25 In these manifestations, Yiddish—always appearing in fragmentary form, as isolated words rather than a whole language—is a signifier of the flamboyant, irrational, truculent, or salacious, but never the dispassionate. Stand-up comedians made similar use of selected Yiddishisms, first performing for fellow American Jews in “Borsht Belt” resorts, located in the Catskills and Poconos, and later for national audiences on comedy albums and television.26
Thus, after World War II, Yiddish shifts from being a sign of Jewish vernacularity to more of an emblem of linguistic and cultural obstinacy or alterity. Uriel Weinreich noted this shift in Yiddish use and signification in the early 1950s. In postwar America, he posited, the language was “losing its main communicative role” and seemed “destined to acquire peculiar connotations,” especially “comic associations,” through a selective “borrowing of its lexical elements,” notably “colorful idiomatic expressions . . . with strong affective overtones, whether endearing, pejorative, or . . . obscene.”27 This practice has continued into the present, imparting the sensibility of Yiddish-speaking immigrants’ children, who came of age in the middle decades of the twentieth century, to future generations. They, in turn, receive Yiddish as a mock heritage, understood as inherently fragmentary, unrestrained, and carnivalesque, and preserve it by perpetuating this limited Yiddish vocabulary in the modes of sentimentality, ridicule, and indelicacy.
Assessments of the character of Yiddish inevitably approach it selectively, as a result of either a limited familiarity with its full scope or a deliberate focus on those aspects of the language considered the epitome of its distinctive nature. Those who strive to describe the personality of Yiddish sometimes juxtapose their observations against others’, an indication of how contingent and subjective these assessments can be. In light of the wide range of characteristics attributed to Yiddish—pious, vulgar, histrionic, ironic, ludic, constrained—it may be tempting to think of the language as suffering from multiple personalities. But such a diagnosis reflects an expectation that Yiddish ought to be consistent across speech communities as well as in the eyes and ears of all those attending to it, when, in fact, this is not the case.
Native speakers’ efforts to attribute a character to Yiddish may reveal their sense of change in its value as a widely shared vernacular among Ashkenazim. For those who claim Yiddish as an ancestral language and engage it later in life, imbuing it with a character becomes an implicit exercise in self-scrutiny, refracted through the prism of a language that is both at a remove and, in some way, connected to them. Not only is the scope of their engagements with Yiddish frequently limited to isolated words or idioms taken out of context; they appear in formats other than vernacular language use: staged performances, anthologies, material goods.
Often, it is precisely those attributes of Yiddish that were reviled by earlier generations—its signification of ethnic particularism, irrational religious fervor, scholarly pietism, or unrefined earthiness—that attract subsequent enthusiasts. Their interest is rooted in a desire to engage a form of Jewishness understood as arcane or lost; it is envisioned as organic, authentic, and comprehensive, realized in the intense expressivity of vernacular speech. This devotion to Yiddish is different from that of secular Yiddishists, for whom the language is emblematic of national legitimacy and vitality, or from that of contemporary Hasidim, who value Yiddish for defining their communities’ constituency and their borders. Rather, this is a postvernacular attachment, informed by a distance from Yiddish as a language of daily life. This distance is not only, or even primarily, a limitation, but is instead what animates the interest in Yiddish—and, moreover, imbues the language with a sense of liveliness that takes on a personality, embodying the desires that those who engage with Yiddish seek to fulfill.
