Reply To: Good ways to go about learning Yiddish

Hello Coffee Room,

I see I missed a lot while I was in Atlantic City for the day.

There is a great deal of discussion here about issues of contention that I had no intention of raising.

For everyone’s reference, I am new to the Coffee Room, looking to become Jewish after discovering Ashkenazic Jewish roots on my mother’s German side of the family. You can find out more about me on my thread from this past week that concerns this exact same subject matter. I will repeat some salient facts below:

I am already 35 and have been a practicing child advocate attorney for ten years;

I am a single woman with no children, and no one else in my family is interested in taking this journey with me;

The relatives who would have been able to tell me about my Jewish roots, which wound through Germany, Brazil, and then the US, have been deceased for years.

I apologize for the repeats above that many of you got on my first thread already.

I do not consider my learning Hebrew and Yiddish to be an either-or prospect. I will be learning both. They both are very meaningful to me and I would not choose one over the other. I want to learn Yiddish in addition to Hebrew because I want to feel that extra cultural connection to my dear late Mom Mom, who took that journey around the world between the World Wars to keep our family alive.

Perhaps learning two new languages sounds like it will be daunting for a newbie like me, and it is! However, I have always loved languages. I grew up with English as my first but learned a little bit of German and Yiddish from my mother’s side of the family. Later I studied Latin and became conversant in French while majoring in English, and when I trained classically in piano and voice, I learned to sing in Italian, French, and German.

If you really want to hear a tall order, you should know that I would very much like to eventually add another Jewish language to my knowledge base, even if the language is not spoken much or even at all anymore! I find Djudezmo and Judeo-Persian to be two tantalizing possibilities of many to consider in this regard.

All of that being said, you can pretty much assume that my knowledge base regarding resources to best learn Hebrew and Yiddish is extremely minimal. To answer 147’s question as to whether I am oblivious to the fact that Art Scroll does not translate certain texts into Yiddish, I repeat that I am just scratching the surface in my exploration — so yes, I am indeed oblivious at present but am trying very hard to rectify that.

To those who responded to my original post with suggestions on how to best go about learning Yiddish, I thank you for your suggestions and will reply more individually shortly.

For reply commentators on other topics, please rest assured that you need not convince me of the merits of any aspect of the enormously diverse Jewish cultural experience — I was already persuaded before I came to the Coffee Room. I sought you out not only because of my family connection but because I love all the beautiful similarities and differences that tie this people together. All of these aspects are priceless to me; I could never rank them.

It would be boring if we were all exactly the same. I have so much to learn from all of you.

I want to convey to all of you that I find all the ways and languages which the Jewish people have used to communicate with G-d and each other to be just as holy and beautiful. To me, it is awe-inspiring how we have found so many different ways to praise this one G-d, and I love to find the similarities across languages that are manifested in regional variations. A few years ago, I read a book by Dovid Katz called Words on Fire: the Unfinished Story of Yiddish, which really ignited my interest in learning all I could about as many vernaculars as possible.

There have been innumerable Jewish ways to praise G-d throughout time and space. As I learn more of the history of each way, what began as a solo melody line transforms into a rich symphony, all parts equally beautiful, holy, and worthy. I feel a calling to explore the Composer’s full score so I can understand the voice given to each instrument.