Stu­art Rojs­tacz­er was born in Mil­wau­kee, Wis­con­sin, where he was edu­cat­ed in pub­lic and Ortho­dox Jew­ish schools. For many years, he was a pro­fes­sor of geo­physics at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. He has been a Kar­ma Foun­da­tion Annu­al Short Sto­ry Final­ist and a Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion Young Inves­ti­ga­tor. His debut nov­el, The Math­e­mati­cian’s Shi­va, is now avail­able. He will be blog­ging here all week for the Vis­it­ing Scribe series.

One day last year I was speak­ing to my cat in the front yard. A neigh­bor walk­ing by stopped because he was sur­prised I wasn’t speak­ing Eng­lish. ​“What lan­guage are you speak­ing to your cat?” he asked.

“Yid­dish,” I said.

“Your cat knows Yiddish?”

“About as well as she knows any oth­er language.”

My neigh­bor had set me up unwit­ting­ly. He isn’t Jew­ish. He didn’t grow up speak­ing Yid­dish. How was he sup­posed to know I was going to turn his inno­cent ques­tion into a joke? But my father, if he were still around and had been on my porch at the time, would have seen what was com­ing a mile away. My wife, who grew up around Yid­dish speak­ers, would have seen it too had she been there.

When I was a kid, there was some­thing that Jew­ish men of my dad’s age who had been born in Amer­i­ca would some­times say, ​“Dress British. Think Yid­dish.” Nei­ther my father nor I dressed British when I was grow­ing up. But being born in Poland, my father def­i­nite­ly thought Yid­dish. So did my moth­er, who was also born in Poland. Being around those two, how could I not think Yid­dish as well? 

We spoke Yid­dish in our Mil­wau­kee home. I learned Eng­lish when I was lit­tle by watch­ing shows like Leave It To Beaver. I think Yid­dish to this day. My Yid­dish is, because I haven’t used it reg­u­lar­ly in decades, rusty. And to keep it from dis­ap­pear­ing, I speak it to my cat. Don’t think I’m not wait­ing for the next unsus­pect­ing neigh­bor to inno­cent­ly ask what lan­guage I’m speak­ing to her. Jokes, bad and good, are an intrin­sic part of Yid­dish cul­ture. So is rep­e­ti­tion of jokes, both bad and good.

In Amer­i­ca, Yid­dish has been dis­tort­ed into some cutesy thing that’s all about jokes, col­or­ful curs­es, and sen­ti­ment. But in my child­hood home, it wasn’t a cute lan­guage. It was the lan­guage of com­merce, heat­ed argu­ments, and sophis­ti­cat­ed thought. It was also a lan­guage for dis­cussing reli­gion and although I nev­er thought of my fam­i­ly as par­tic­u­lar­ly reli­gious, we kept a kosher home and had a Sab­bath meal every week. I’d also be ush­ered off to read the Old Tes­ta­ment and Rashi with black hats, and attend evening prayers with those black hats, bob­bing my head as I prayed, three or four days a week.

Write about what you know, they say. Nowa­days, I don’t go to syn­a­gogue more than about ten times a year, but giv­en my back­ground, what are the odds that I’m going to write about Angli­cans? Or Catholics? Or athe­ists? Or sec­u­lar human­ists? About the same odds as my cat actu­al­ly under­stand­ing Yiddish.

Write about what’s in your heart, they say, too. My heart, mein hartz, is Jew­ish. My first lan­guage was Yid­dish. I look at my face in the mir­ror in the morn­ing and I know that I don’t look any­thing like Sylvester Stal­lone or Alec Bald­win. Who have peo­ple con­fused me with on the street more times that I can remem­ber? Albert Brooks, whose real name is Albert Ein­stein. (Yes, Mr. Brooks’ father was a Jew­ish come­di­an.). I know who I am, I’m hap­py to be who I am, and I know what I am: a Jew­ish writer.

Stu­art Rojs­tacz­er has writ­ten for The New York Times and Wash­ing­ton Post, and his sci­en­tif­ic research has appeared in both Sci­ence and Nature. He lives with his wife in north­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Read more about him here.

Relat­ed Content:

• Essays: On Writ­ing Jew­ish Lit­er­a­ture and Being a Jew­ish Writer
• Essays: Yid­dish and Languages
• Read­ing List: Emerg­ing Voices