In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three great writers of Jewish fiction emerged: Sholem Jacob Abramovitz, Isaac Leib Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem, the latter of whom authored tales that would later crash into the popular consciousness as Fiddler on the Roof. What did these forebears to Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth have in common? All three started out writing in Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, Lashon Hakodesh, before they turned to Yiddish, the mamaloshen. Why? Prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and the consequent revival of Hebrew as a living tongue, Lashon Hakodesh was the language of the Bible and, to believers, the language in which God created the world. Potent stuff. As a vehicle for modern fiction, however, it had problems. Hebrew was an ancient tongue, divorced from modern life and inaccessible to a mass readership. Yiddish, by contrast, was the language spoken by most Jews. The language they joked in, bickered with friends in , and used to pester their children. And so, when Peretz, Abramovitz, and Aleichem decided to abandon the practice of Jewish intellectuals and write not in Hebrew but in Yiddish, they were enacting an aesthetic revolution comparable to Wordsworth and Coleridge, when they announced their aim to write poetry in the “real language of men.” A door was opened.
But what does Yiddish mean for Jews in the west today, most of whom know only a smattering of cute-sounding words: schlep, meshugener, schlemiel, and schmuck? (Words commonly known and used by non-Jews too, of course.) On the one hand, for Ashkenazi Jews, ignorance of Yiddish is a benchmark of assimilation. An illuminating joke:
A woman on a bus in Tel Aviv speaks Yiddish to her son, and every time he answers her in Hebrew, she corrects him: “Speak Yiddish.” Another passenger overhears and demands an explanation. The woman shrugs. “I don’t want him to forget he’s Jewish!”
As with all great jokes, the subtext is uncomfortable. What, after all, is the woman saying? That the modern, Hebrew-speaking Israeli, who lives in a Jewish state, is somehow not Jewish? Suddenly the joke, like so many Jewish jokes, seems to flirt with antisemitism .
The story takes on another level of significance when set beside this passage from The Truce, Primo Levi’s vital account of his long journey home from Auschwitz. One night, Levi and his Italian friends met some teenage girls speaking Yiddish:
I turned to the girls, greeted them and, trying to imitate their pronunciation, asked them in German if they were Jewish, and declared that we four were also Jewish. The girls (they were perhaps sixteen or eighteen years old) burst out laughing. ‘Ihr sprecht keyn Jidisch; ihr seyd ja keyne Jiden!’ ‘You do not speak Yiddish; so you cannot be Jews!’ In their language the phrase amounted to a rigorous logic.
The idea that Primo Levi (who is virtually a saint for atheist Jews) isn’t Jewish enough for these girls is very funny. But again there’s a troubling subtext. If Levi was an atheist, and he was ignorant of Jewish languages, then where did his Jewish-ness reside? Surely not in the sole fact of his oppression by fascists? What an awful definition of Jewish identity that would produce: to be a Jew means to be hated by antisemites, and nothing more.
At the heart of my novel was a query. What is it, exactly, that believers believe?
I’ve said that ignorance of Yiddish is a mark of assimilation for western Jews, but as the two stories I’ve recounted suggest, it is also perhaps a badge of shame. Especially for Europeans. One of the terrible victories of Nazism was the devastating blow it struck to Yiddish culture. Before the war, there were an estimated eleven million speakers globally; today there may be as few as a million and a half. For this and other reasons, Yiddish is listed by UNESCO as a “ definitely endangered” language. Under Hitler’s orders, an entire language with a wonderful and idiosyncratic body of literature was brought to the point of oblivion. Although there have been valiant attempts to keep the language alive, which is still widely spoken in certain religious communities, especially in New York and Israel, the magnitude of the loss is clear. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in 1978, the triumph was surely tinged with sorrow. The highest literary honor available was awarded to a Yiddish writer only after the assassination of the language had been almost total. And with vanishingly few children speaking it as their native tongue, the first Yiddish Nobel laureate might also prove to be the last.
So where does this leave the modern Jewish writer, working in English? As I researched Fervor, my debut novel, I knew I would be indebted to those pioneering Yiddish writers of the nineteenth century, and to their successors in the twentieth: especially S. Ansky and Bashevis Singer. The rhythms of Jewish speech in English and the cadences of Jewish jokes – it all goes back to those earlier masters. What came as a surprise to me was that to write a novel of contemporary British life, I found myself delving into Hasidic tales from the eighteenth century, collected and translated by Myer Levin, Elie Wiesel, and Martin Buber.
For at the heart of my novel was a query. What is it, exactly, that believers believe?
Fervor narrates the lives of the Rosenthals, a religious family that threatens to tear itself apart precisely because of a disagreement in beliefs. As she reaches her teens, Elsie, daughter of the family, begins to act in strange ways. She becomes aggressive and unpredictable. She self-harms. Frightens her classmates. In time, her parents barely recognize the girl. The problem? She is under the sway of demonic influences. At least, so her literalist parents believe. Her brother, an atheist, disagrees. His sister is not beset by evil powers; she is the victim of ludicrous parenting and unenlightened nonsense.
To hold these contradictory views in place, my novel had to become a work of clear-eyed realism that was at the same time a work of extravagant fantasy. The paradox inheres partly in the languages that pull the characters in opposing directions.
For the Rosenthals, Hebrew is the language of absolute truth, English the language of day-to-day reality. That there is a distinction between the two already muddies the waters of communication. Yiddish, however, is something murkier than either. For those born and educated in England, Yiddish is the language of superstition, of folk wisdom and memory, where dybbuks and golems and witches roam the shadows. The language in which the Zaddikim spun their religious tales replete with veiled Kabbalistic meanings. But Yiddish is also the symbolic language of Europe’s murdered Jews. The language that all but perished in the same slaughter. It is the ghost at the feast. And so the truths contained within this strange hybrid of German, Russian, Slavic, and Hebrew must never be dismissed or consigned to a forgotten age. Because as the mother on the bus reminds us: once you forget Yiddish, what else is forgotten?
Toby Lloyd was born in London to a secular father and a Jewish mother. He studied English at Oxford University before moving to America to pursue an MFA in creative writing at NYU. He has published short stories and essays in Carve Magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books and was longlisted for the 2021 V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. He lives in London.
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