I struggled learning Hebrew but when I began studying Yiddish, everything just clicked

I had a large amount of time to fill before starting work and my friend had sent me a flyer for a four-week intensive course at Tel Aviv University. I knew very little about the language except for the words I would use to schmooze over a bissle cholent at shul. However, my general interest in Jewish culture, together with the promise of a significant discount, convinced me that it would be a worthwhile experience.

As I arrived, those words from the rabbi reverberated. I was determined not to fail as I had before.

The first seminar began with the rising tones of a clarinet as the programme director explained the course outline in Yiddish and then English. There would be language classes in the morning, followed by an afternoon cultural programme exploring Yiddish poetry, music and linguistics.

It was this series of cultural programmes that captured my imagination over the next month.
It is true that I spent my mornings studying a language that has no country and very few speakers but I soon came to appreciate that the programme took seriously its inheritance of a language spoken by millions less than a century ago.

We read poetry that spoke to the life of Jews in the diaspora, confused by allegiance and struggling with faith.

Some of the course was overcast by the shadow of events to come, sometimes in ways that were darkly comic. I quickly learned that there is no better way to learn how to conjugate the past tense than by reading A Passage on the Warsaw Ghetto. However, these Yiddish authors also wrote on the fullness of life’s experiences, as Jews but also as Europeans and liberal, educated artists.

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote about the Holocaust but he speaks far more about living with faith in a changing world. American writer Celia Dropkin wrote poetry about erotic love that would make E L James blush.

This is Yiddish, I soon realised, that cannot afford to be relegated to half-mangled phrases at a kiddush.

Over the next few weeks, my worst fears about language learning also fell away. I built up my vocabulary through an elaborate system of flashcards and verb tables and surprised myself in the weekly tests.

I found that I took to Yiddish far quicker than Hebrew and felt closer to the language in a way that I couldn’t quite explain.

A friend on the course said she preferred the sound of Yiddish and I agreed. But my affinity seemed to call to something deeper.

Whilst on a particularly reflective walk back from campus, I recognised that during my failed attempt to learn Hebrew all those years before, I’d felt like an imposter, intruding into a language that has its own native speakers who would always have a greater claim to it than I did.

Although Hebrew might be the language of all Jews, Ivrit could never truly be mine except perhaps if I made aliyah. And I like tea too much to do that.

Yiddish, by contrast, only has me. It has no country to which it belongs and no one can stake a greater claim to it than those smatterings of Jews today trying to keep it alive in Stamford Hill, Glasgow, New York and Borehamwood.

Israeli culture has grasped our collective consciousness with new food, new words and new parameters for what acceptable customer service might entail. But within Yiddish is packed centuries of music, poetry, art and literature as an inheritance that belongs to every one of us. Even those not-so-good-at-languages people.

I think it’s an inheritance that’s well worth exploring.