Mark Glanville responds to James Inverne's recent piece in which he said he 'turned off' to a Yiddish rendition of Fiddler on the Roof songs, and 'all those that think like him' about the Yiddish language
October 13, 2019 14:23
‘Can someone write a great article to The Jewish Chronicle in response to this madness?’ Such was the cri de coeur from the distinguished Russian-Jewish singer Polina Shepherd on the Yiddish London group’s Facebook page to James Inverne’s invective against contemporary Yiddishkayt.
"How offensive", "Fifty shades of stupid", "khutspedike narishkayt" (impudent idiocy) were among the more printable of the responses I came across. As someone whose inner life was transformed by the muses of Yiddish literature and song, I understood their anger and pain. It felt like an attack on the very core of my Jewish being. As Polina Shepherd then went on to assert, "Too many people think like that. Not just one. Thousands."
So it is not only against James Inverne that I have taken up arms on behalf of Polina Shepherd, but all those who think like him.
"A makeshift (language) that we pieced together from various countries to which we were exiled. Yiddish is the very definition of a people without a home." Thus James Inverne dismisses, among other things, one thousand years of Jewish life in Poland.
Is Yiddish any more makeshift than Inverne’s own English tongue? Almost all languages are composites of influences. Both Yiddish and English have a Germanic core enriched by other tongues: French and Latin in the case of English, Hebrew and Slavic languages in the case of Yiddish.
Whereas English became the language of the British people and, thanks to the country's imperial past, spread throughout the world, Yiddish remained the language of one people who, until the creation of the state of Israel, lived as a minority amongst nations that spoke languages other than their own.
To describe a language that has survived one thousand years and was spoken by ten million on the eve of the ‘khurbn’ (the Yiddish word for Holocaust, meaning "destruction") as makeshift is simply inaccurate. Yiddish is a language in its own right. Its literature goes back to the 14th century. It boasts a Nobel Prize winning novelist in IB Singer and, in Abraham Sutzkever, one of the most important poets of the 20th century.
The greatness of their work is in no small part due to the glory of the Yiddish language itself, a wonderfully flexible and humane tongue, imbued with humour and passion, which, unlike Hebrew, grew out of the long and deep European Jewish experience.
Inverne, a distinguished writer on music who, among his many accomplishments, edited Gramophone magazine, relates that he turned off the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof after a few songs, preferring a German language version on Spotify which was much more to his taste. There he could "enjoy the fascinating classical undertones that reveals."
"Quot homines, tot sententiae" (there are as many opinions as there are men) wrote the Afro-Roman playwright Terence, in one of the tongues that contributed to English. But underlying Inverne’s uneasiness does one detect the old divide between the middle class Jews who spoke the tongues of their gentile neighbours and the working class Jews who spoke Yiddish? The mother of a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor friend of mine, who grew up speaking Polish but not Yiddish, wouldn't countenance garlic because she associated its smell with the Yiddish-speaking, working-class Hasidim whom she despised.
Most contentiously, Inverne links Yiddishkayt to a betrayal of the Zionist ideal embodied in the Hebrew language of Israel.
"And I sense an agenda," he writes, "…increasing numbers of diaspora — especially American — Jews do not feel the deep connection to Israel that previous generations did… some non-Zionist Jews look elsewhere for their Jewish identity.
"They find Yiddish, a link back to a thriving, bustling pre-Shoah culture, and they find riches there and they find pride there and they don’t have to engage with Hebrew, with its overtones of religion and Zionism."
But contemporary lovers of Yiddish culture are no more nor less likely to be Zionists than other Jews. To quote Eli Grunfeld, director of the Yiddish festival of Tel Aviv, "More and more Israelis, some of them second and third-generation, are making an effort to learn the language and culture of their families." Perhaps because, unlike Inverne, they wish to celebrate rather than denigrate a past which, in spite of frequent persecution, was also culturally and spiritually rich.
Rather than seeing contemporary Yiddishkayt as a "threat" (Inverne’s words), it should be the duty of all Ashkhenazi Jews to honour and preserve the magnificent heritage of a language whose speakers were mercilessly exterminated within living memory.
Mark Glanville is the performer and creator of two song cycles comprised of traditional Yiddish songs: ‘A Yiddish Winterreise’ and ‘Di Sheyne Milnerin.’ His latest programme, Weinberg – ‘Citizen of Nowhere’ will be performed at the Polin Museum in Warsaw on 8 December 2019 (the composer’s birthday) and will be released on CD later in the year.
