>> Barbara Henry: So, why Yiddish? I get asked that a lot. Why does a non-Jew choose the Yiddish language? Study Yiddish literature? I never get asked why I learned Russian. And studied Russian literature. Of course Russian literature! Tolstoy! Dostoyevsky! Pushkin! Nobody ever yells, "Sholem Aleichem! Peretz!" Although frankly, Peretz
alone is worth two Dostoyevskys. Maybe three. So, first off, don't think for a
minute that you choose what you love. If you are very, very lucky, what you love
will choose you, and who, for that matter. Your only choice in the matter is to
decide whether you're going to explore that strange new love, that
strange new culture and language. Especially if it's a language in culture that
was not given to you, but which you had to earn. So, Yiddish. Growing up goyish in northern
New Jersey in the 1970s which sounds like a really bad sitcom [ Laughter ] It actually kind of was a sitcom. Growing up goyish in northern New Jersey,
Jewishness was never anything remarkable. You had Jewish friends. We got Rosh Hashana and Yom
Kippur off from school. A great way to introduce goyish
kids to the wonder of Jewishness. We ate knishes. We went to bar mitzvahs. We could identify Hatikvah as
the Israeli national anthem. Jewishness was no big deal. And then I heard the music, Klezmer music,
Eastern European traditional Jewish music. And it was pretty much all over after that. I needed that music. I needed to know what those songs were about. And the more that I looked at where
Klezmer comes from, Eastern Europe, the more I fell in love with
it, the more I needed it. I was already fatally obsessed
with Russia and Russian literature. And discovering the Jewishness of Russia
and the Jewishness of Eastern Europe was like being given a whole other world, or as
we say in New Jersey, a whole nother world. And it was a world that had
all the things I loved; poetry, and plays, and music, and newspapers. And it had a million political parties, and
language conferences, and heated debates about the most important issues of the day. It is impossible to learn anything about
the Yiddish world of Eastern Europe and not fall completely in love with it. Why wouldn't you love Yiddish? It was the European Jewish
vernacular for 1,000 years. For 1,000 years, people lived and
worked and loved and fought in Yiddish. Your own great grandparents
probably, many of you, spoke Yiddish. Are you really ready to let all that go? I'm not. So, Yiddish. It sometimes seems like an
emissary from another world. A world where Warsaw is 1/3 Jewish. A world where you could spend your
entire life speaking Yiddish in school. Going to Yiddish plays. Reading Yiddish newspapers. And all of this was completely normal. That world is gone now. But Yiddish is not. There are a million Hasidic Jews
worldwide who still speak Yiddish, and for whom Yiddish is very much
the language of everyday life. I know people my own age who are not Hasidic
who are raising their children speaking Yiddish. They all know that Yiddish
is not just a language. It's a way of life. And it's a way of being in the world that
can only enrich what it means to be Jewish, which is another way of saying
what it means to be human. So, both of these questions. What it means to be Jewish? What it means to be human, of course, are
central preoccupations of Yiddish literature. But after the war, that question is
inextricably tied up with the question of the survival of Yiddish itself. For whom does the Yiddish
writer write after the war? How can you write in a language
when the majority of its European native speakers
have been murdered? How do you continue writing in a language
that was very nearly itself murdered? These questions, every day were a preoccupation
for the Yiddish writer Aaron Zeitlin. Every hour of every day after the war,
Aaron Zeitlin dealt with this question. He was born in Belarus in 1899. And he grew up in Warsaw. The son of a well-known Jewish
thinker, Hillel Zeitlin. Aaron Zeitlin wrote in both Yiddish and Hebrew. He wrote plays, poetry, essays, journalism. And in March of 1939, he was invited to New York by the Yiddish theatre impresario
and actor Maurice Schwartz. Schwartz was staging Zeitlin's play Esterke
and brought him over to help or supervise or steal ideas from him or something. And it was this accident
that Zeitlin was in New York, when the war broke out, that saved his life. His entire family, of course, his entire
world perished in the holocaust in Poland. And I chose a poem by Aaron
Zeitlin called [inaudible]. Six lines. Because for me, it very much presents
the Yiddish language as a kind of intermediary between the living and the dead. Between the past and the
future, both his own and ours. [ Speaking Yiddish ] Six lines. One for each of the six million. It's a poor gift perhaps, but
it's the only one the poet has. And perhaps the only epitaph for those who died. It's the poem become both
memorial and burial place. [ Speaking Yiddish ] I know no one needs me in this world. Not in this world perhaps. Perhaps in the next, in the world
to come where his loved ones wait. But not just there. [Yiddish word], in the Ashkenazi pronunciation,
means world, but it also means public. It also means audience,which
also means it's about you. Perhaps you don't need him. But he very much needs you. [ Speaking Yiddish ] Me,a word beggar in the Jewish graveyard. All writers are word beggars. Are they not? Collecting words like coins. Trading them for food, for warmth, for life. But he, of course, is a word
beggar in a Jewish graveyard. And the [Yiddish word], the world,
become [Yiddish word], the graveyard. But then on some level, all
literature is a dialogue with the dead. The only way many of us will ever
know the ones who came before us. And for Zeitlin, the worry is who will know him? Who will know his world? Who will know his work after he is gone? [ Speaking Yiddish ] The question kind of hangs in the air. And the fear is that the answer is that blank
space between the first and second stances. [ Speaking Yiddish ] Only what is hopeless on the earth is beautiful. And here, he uses the word [Yiddish word]. Germanic word [Yiddish word]. Cognate with the English earth. And it's just that. The soil, the ground, the place where we are. Where we put down roots. Where we grow. Where we bloom. And where we die. [ Speaking Yiddish ] Death is what makes life
hopeless, and beautiful, and holy. [ Speaking Yiddish ] Only humility is rebellious. To write a poem in Yiddish is hopeless. A lost cause,which is exactly
why it has to be done. Because if Yiddish is a lost cause because it
will die, then we are a lost cause as well. You cannot love what cannot die. But you can't not love. You can't not speak. You can't not listen. To acknowledge the mortality of everything
that we are, everything that we love, and to love it anyway, is the
greatest act of rebellion we can offer. We live until we're not living anymore. We fight until we're not fighting anymore. And we speak, perhaps in
Yiddish, until we're not anymore. And if Aaron Zeitlin, knowing
this, can go on writing, maybe we can go on listening,
and speaking, and reading. Thank you. [ Applause ]
