Eight people sit around the dining room table inside 1738 Academy Lane. Atop the blue floral tablecloth are a bottle of Dr. Brown's black cherry soda, apple juice, tea and an assortment of other kosher for Passover foods. The Cohens are visiting today, having made the hour-and-a-quarter drive from East Windsor, New Jersey. They talk excitedly, energetically. But not in English. They speak Yiddish, a language associated with the Old Country, with yentas, shlemiels and shlemazls. It is not often associated with young families, much less young American families. But inside 1738, Yiddish is more than a mere association - it is a way of life.
As long as there are kids who speak a language, then it isn't dying," says the home's owner, Alexander Botwinik.
Botwinik's children, Tovi, 8, and Dina Malka, 6, are being raised with Yiddish as their first language. It wasn't until they attended school that they gradually began to master English.
"They were recreating the immigrant experience," Naomi Cohen, Botwinik's wife, explains.
The youngsters would return from class, repeating new English words they had learned, at which point the parents would patiently repeat the word in Yiddish. The problem, they lament, is that at this stage parents often give up, succumbing to the urge to let their children speak in the new language. They're not determined, they don't coax the children back to the original tongue.
"Nobody I know of insists," Steve Cohen says simply, obviously disappointed at his statement's implications.
The conversation at the dining room table would be exclusively Yiddish. They use English for the guests' benefit, but once in a while slip back into the mameloshn -- mother tongue. Steve sips his glass of tea and then wipes the sweat from his forehead with a cloth napkin before launching into an explanation of his lifestyle. He's a small guy, with his hair cropped short and threads of gray starting to seep through the brown. He wears colored jeans that sit high on his waist. His gray Rice shirt is tucked in, and the sleeves are rolled up because they're too long.
Steve decided to raise his two young children, Daniel and Hannah, speaking Yiddish as an experiment more than anything else. About 10 years ago, he read an article in a Yiddish magazine about raising children in Yiddish. The article claimed the task was possible, and Steve found himself intrigued.
"I can try it," he says. "Maybe I can last a couple years."
Steve wasn't fluent in Yiddish at the time. He still isn't completely fluent in Yiddish now. When he doesn't know a word, he turns to the dictionary. In fact, Steve is creating his own dictionary of sorts. Having earned a doctorate in chemistry, Steve now devotes some of his spare time to putting together a Yiddish chemistry dictionary.
And he isn't the only one investing in literary projects. Botwinik's brother, Leybl, who resides in Israel, wrote a science fiction book in Yiddish. Before long, Naomi brings a copy of The Secret Mission to the table. It's a small paperback with Leybl's photo in black and white on the back. The cover consists of an eerie illustration of a blue, red and yellow sky.
Naomi brings over another paperback volume. This one is a compilation of prose, short stories and poems by young Yiddish writers from all over the world. It's supposed to be her bedtime reading.
But Yiddish books, especially Yiddish children's books, are not easy to come by. They sometimes have to be specially ordered from countries such as Germany or France. And while some classics, such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Winnie the Pooh, are now available, most books seem to be pushing a very religious agenda. It'd be nice to find a Yiddish copy of Harry Potter. But hey, it's hard to complain.
"We can't be too picky," Naomi says. "If we don't buy it, who will?"
If Yiddish is to survive as a language -- and many scholars debate whether this is at all possible -- it needs new speakers. Prior to the Holocaust, more than 11 million people spoke Yiddish, an Eastern European dialect that uses Hebrew letters. Now, that number is less than one million. For some scholars, the quest to pump new life into this dying language is futile. In 1998, Yiddish scholar and University of California, Los Angeles professor Janet Hadda wrote a controversial report on Yiddish in contemporary American culture. In it, she stated that Yiddish was facing its demise and speculated that those who refused to see this inevitable death were experiencing denial, one of the stages in any mourning process. In last year's spring edition of Pakn Treger, a magazine dedicated to Yiddish discourse, Hadda defends her original piece against the intense backlash that reverberated throughout the Yiddish community. She defends herself against those who call her a traitor. She defends herself against those who call her irresponsible, against those who consider her crass.
For Hadda, the compulsion to revitalize Yiddish stems from the devastating way in which the number of its speakers deteriorated. "The loss of Yiddish, of mameloshn, is particularly intense because most of its speakers perished catastrophically and unnaturally. The continued vitality of Yiddish commemorates the dead and constitutes a small victory over the huge and hideous injustice of the Shoah," she writes.
There is something of a contradiction in the way the Botwiniks and the Cohens have dedicated themselves to Yiddish. Steve Cohen gets physically upset when he mentions Hadda's article. His voice gets louder. He gets more animated, more intense. Her argument is a Catch 22, he explains. If I agree with her, then what am I doing raising my family speaking Yiddish? If I disagree, I am merely in denial. It's a lose-lose situation.
But Hadda's argument runs deeper. It's not simply about denying the painful yet inevitable death of a language. It's about the implausibility of attempting to recreate the culture of Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
For these two young families, it's about the culture. It's about the religion. But it's about transporting that culture to America.
I don't want to go back to Europe, Steve says. There, they killed my family with axes.
Steve admits, rather openly actually, that a large part of why he decided to devote his life to Yiddish is stubbornness. Stubbornness. It sounds odd, you think.
"If someone says it's a dead language, okay, I'll show you," he says.
Earlier: "If someone says you can't or shouldn't do it that way, I'll do it to prove them wrong."
Earlier still: "Let's try this psychological experiment."
Botwinik has been speaking Yiddish his entire life. Raised in Montreal by a father from Vilna and a mother from Rome (they immigrated in 1956), the family spoke Yiddish at home, along with Italian. Something about the language, about its history, its heritage, clicked. Botwinik has not been able to let the language go. Now, he continues the tradition of speaking Yiddish at home and teaches the language to undergrads at Penn.
Enrollment varies, but his class last year was small. There were only four students. Botwinik refuses to make generalizations about why students enroll. Some want to go back to their roots, figure out who they are. Some have grandparents who speak the Eastern European tongue. And some are just exploring, dabbling in a little of this and that before they graduate. Other than the size, though, his classes are run much like any other language class. There's a textbook. There's grammar to be taught. There's homework and oral presentations. But then there's also music.
Botwinik's keyboard accompanies him to most classes. And it's a rare lesson that doesn't incorporate at least a song or two.
Wednesday is a make-up class. It's in his office on the 7th floor of Williams Hall. The office isn't completely his. He shares it with a Dutch professor, but you can tell that the distribution is not 50-50. The bookshelves are filled with volumes on Van Gogh and postcards adorned with windmills. But this doesn't really matter. The language can be taught anywhere, really.
Students take turns reading sentences, asking questions, and yes, singing songs. Botwinik pays close attention to pronunciation and accent. Placing emphasis on the wrong word can change the meaning of a sentence. If something's not right, he makes the student do it again.
Botwinik paces. He writes words on the chalkboard.
"Vos is dos?" he asks holding up a pen.
"Di feder."
Two students trickle out early -- other obligations trump this rescheduled class. Only one remains, and soon he too has to leave. It's at this point that the smallness of the class, the intimacy, really hits you.
Naomi Cohen is a petite woman. Her thin blonde hair is parted on the side and tucked behind her ears. Her large circular glasses dominate her face. She wears tapered jeans, socks, sandals and a striped sweater that extends below her waist. She's not a trendy woman.
You don't expect it when you first meet her, when she's rummaging around her kitchen, ducking out of the way of her husband's choir practice in the other room -- but Naomi speaks with confidence. She has a loud voice and a good sense of humor. But maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise. Maybe you need confidence and a sense of humor when you've decided to raise your family speaking a language that is dying if not already dead. You need the confidence and sense of humor to defend yourself against the questions, the comments and the weird looks. You need a sense of humor when a relative says you can't speak Yiddish in her house. You need confidence to continue with your studies when your own grandmother refuses to teach you the language of your heritage. Her heritage.
It wasn't an easy decision for Naomi to raise her family speaking Yiddish. She didn't grow up speaking the language. Sure, her mother would throw around a few words while she cooked, but that was it. Naomi didn't take her first Yiddish course -- the only Yiddish course Temple offered -- until she was a Temple Owl herself. Even then, she didn't become obsessed with the language. One course, that was it. There wasn't a craving.
Following graduation, Naomi got a job working at the Penn library. As an employee of the University, she had the opportunity to take a few courses for free. So she took a Yiddish course. Her instructor suggested that she participate in Yiddish Week, a program designed to immerse participants in the language and culture of Yiddish. After the week-long excursion, the language started to click. Naomi enrolled in a second year of Yiddish and soon was speaking in complete sentences.
Naomi continued to attend Yiddish Week and on her third trip, she met Botwinik. The two dated for a while, Botwinik still living in Montreal and Naomi in Philadelphia. Most phone conversations were conducted in Yiddish. Naomi would get annoyed when Botwinik would constantly correct her pronunciation.
Rather early on, Botwinik popped the question: Would Naomi be willing to raise children speaking a second language? She was thrown off at first. She didn't feel she knew enough of the language to get by herself, much less raise others speaking it. Naomi agreed, although it took a year of marriage for her to gain confidence.
"I felt like if I don't study Yiddish, who will?" she says. "This is a little bit of a victory over Hitler."
It's 7:40 p.m. on a Monday. Botwinik is in the living room of his Havertown home. Eight mismatched chairs sit atop a floral rug. A keyboard is set up directly in front of a slightly out-of-tune piano. Choir members trickle in.
The choir, a synagogue group that Botwinik conducts, is preparing for its Holocaust Remembrance Day program, which is two weeks away. Two of the songs the choir will be performing are in Yiddish. They are both in E minor.
"Mee, me, ma, mo."
The choir sings in unison warming up its vocal chords. Botwinik accompanies the group on the keyboard, accurately and deliberately increasing the pace of the cadences. Then the group launches into Dos Elnte Kind, a piece which Botwinik arranged himself. He is sitting behind the keyboard now, playing and mouthing the lyrics. The frizzy mop of black and gray hair that is his head is bobbing. His body, in a blue button-down shirt, is swaying. The music consumes him.
All of a sudden, Botwinik's hands shoot up and he cuts off the choir.
"Let's try one more time," he says.
He wants to perfect the entries. He wants to perfect the alto part in measure two. He demonstrates the part for the group. They try again, but Botwinik soon stops the melody. He corrects the group's grammar. He then explains that he wants the group to crescendo. He translates the section of the song.
"The night was black when it happened there, but even more black was my mother's face."
He emphasizes the increase in volume on his keyboard as he translates.
The group continues. Botwinik's hands wave in the air. He closes his eyes. The warm, sad melody engulfs the room.
As the practice wraps up, you steal a few moments to chat with the choir members. Surprisingly, none is fluent in Yiddish.
"I remember being spoken to in Yiddish occasionally, when they didn't want me to understand," says Sid Perloe, a slim man with short gray hair.
"My grandmother wouldn't teach me Yiddish. Wanted me to be American," another choir member adds.
From Linda Greenbaum: "I feel like we're getting in touch with a culture that's not alive anymore. It feels more alive when we're singing it.... It's not just keeping the memory alive. It's keeping the culture alive."
Anne Addicks recounts a story. There was a mother and her child riding together on a bus. The child was speaking Hebrew. The mother got upset, persuading the child to speak instead in Yiddish. When questioned by the other passengers about why she didn't want her child to speak in Hebrew, the woman replied without hesitation, "I don't want him to forget he's a Jew."
Anne laughs. It's a boisterous laugh. "There's something innerly true about that"
