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Yiddishland in Israel
The Chicago Jewish News: December 4, 2009 - Pauline Dubkin Yearwood
This spring, a new Center for Yiddish Studies will be created at Israel's Ben-Gurion University. That might not sound like big news, but it is, says the man who will be running it.
The center "represents a sea change that is indicative of something very profound going on across all strata of Israeli society," Professor David Roskies says.
In Chicago recently to "talk up" the new center, Roskies is currently the Sol and Evelyn Henkind chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
He is also a cultural historian of Eastern European Jewry and the author of a number of books, most recently Yiddishlands: A Memoir, published last year. It's the story of modern Yiddish culture as told through the lens of his own family and particularly the Yiddish-speaking matriarchs of the clan.
Soon Roskies will be on his way to Ben-Gurion, in Israel's Negev region, to establish a department of Yiddish studies there, something he did at JTS 34 years ago. He calls the new appointment "the capstone of my career, something I always dreamed of doing, and in a rare instance the dream came true," he said in a recent telephone interview.
At the center, which will focus on Yiddish literature (the university already has a Yiddish language department), "I want to build strategic alliances and show people how Yiddish is important for the study of modern Jewish history, of the Holocaust, comparative literature, gender studies, linguistics - any number of things where Yiddish can inform their work," he says.
After he "gets things percolating," Roskies says, he expects to identify and train a successor - he is 62 and mandatory retirement age in Israel is 68. He hopes that successor will be Israeli-born, someone to "direct this institution and take it further."
Roskies' own identification with Yiddish culture is deep-rooted. His mother, who grew up in Vilna, Lithuania, told him stories of her mother, who ran a Yiddish publishing house, and of other colorful family members, many of whom "made the dramatic switch from Orthodoxy to modernity all at once. Their rebellion against tradition got expressed through their Yiddish culture."
He grew up in Montreal, part of "the last generation that grew up with a living, breathing Yiddish culture. Montreal had a Yiddish press, a Yiddish theater. I went to a Yiddish day school. Our home was a salon for Yiddish writers, and I grew up meeting all the great luminaries. No wonder I went into this field professionally," he says.
Yiddishlands - which he began "the day I got up from shiva" after his mother died - makes the argument that "there isn't just one setting for a meaningful Yiddish culture," and in fact he describes three: in Lithuania, in America and "on the road" in other settings including Israel, Moscow and Poland.
While he was writing the book, he realized that he was focusing on the feminist aspect of Yiddish culture. "I come from several generations of matriarchs, and I argue in the book that Yiddish culture and Yiddish lands became a place where women were very important to the preservations and transmission of Yiddish," he says.
To reinforce the point, the book includes a CD of his mother singing Yiddish songs. "I kidnapped my mother's story and her voice, and this is my act of moral restitution," he says. "Let the world hear what she actually sounds like. She comes alive in her voice."
Meanwhile, he is preparing to make the transition to the Negev, where the new center represents "a profound search among all third-generation Israelis," he says.
"They are looking for some meaning - where do I come from? What am I doing here? It is a spiritual search, and Yiddish is part of this search. You see it in pop music, in secular synagogues. Israelis who are absolutely secular are beginning to organize prayer groups, and they don't even know what prayer is. It is a grass roots phenomenon. I see what I'm doing as part of a much larger spiritual awakening."
He looks at that awakening as "an evolutionary process, a third-generation process. This generation is not locked into this Oedipal struggle with their past, they're not at war with their past. When Israelis finish the army they typically go off to India to try to find themselves. Now they've gotten kind of bored with India and woke up to their own culture, which can be just as foreign and exotic to them as going to India. It is kind of like an internal pilgrimage."
A similar phenomenon occurred decades earlier in the United States. "I am a child of the '60s, and (interest in Yiddish) is really a '60s phenomenon," he says. "We've been there, done that. The klezmer music revival has been going on for 30 years. But in Israel all this is brand new."
www.chicagojewishnews.com
