Photograph by Jim Gipe

"He who reads his people's literature in translation," said the Hebrew-Yiddish poet Chaim Nahman Bialik, "is like one who kisses his mother's face through a veil."

True, Bialik, we might answer, but how else shall we read? Are we not orphans now, illiterate? Those mothers, indeed most of the world's Yiddish speakers--11 million before the Holocaust--are gone.

On the other hand (in Yiddish lore, there is always the other hand) we might invite the spirit of Bialik to eavesdrop with us on Ruth Roskies Wisse's seminar on the modern Yiddish short story. The subject is Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Taybele un hurmiza" [Taibele and her demon]. Wisse (pronounced "wice") is gesticulating, laughing, completely involved, without an English translator in sight. She is saying, "Di emese libe ken men shpiln bloyz unter a maske fun kyoyzek. Der belfer muz zikh farshteln far a shed kdey tsu bafridikn un kenen farvayln di agune..." [Here, love flourishes in the language of transgression. The schoolmaster's assistant can offer sex and amusement to the deserted wife only by pretending to be a devil...]

"And," she continues in Yiddish, "look how Singer wins us over and expresses his affection for us, behind the same devilish disguise."

The eight students--all of whom have studied Hebrew and Yiddish--take notes and keep the discussion going in Yiddish. There is some English, of course, if a point needs fine-tuning. But the delights of Singer's Yiddish seem to be the real reward; some of his slyest jokes don't make it into English.

"Eat, eat. If you don't finish, you'll take it home," Wisse says, for there are sandwiches today to celebrate the end of the semester. Yiddish is mame-loshn, the mother tongue, as Bialik's trope has reminded us, and this animated kitchen-table setting seems right. One student says it feels heymish [homey]. Students do a Yiddish concentration for nostalgic reasons, many of them, but this one is Caraid O'Brien, a special student from Boston University, whose roots are in Galway, Ireland.

The seminar is perhaps a version of Ruth Wisse's Friday night dinners, where she and her lawyer-husband, Leonard, and maybe one of her three adult children are surrounded by talkative friends--friends like Saul Bellow, who says, "All week, after I get that invitation, I feel as if things are looking up."

Ruth Wisse is Harvard's first professor of Yiddish literature, one of only a handful in America. Her chair, which she assumed in 1993, straddles, as it were, the departments of comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and civilizations. As yet unnamed, the chair was endowed in 1992 by Martin Peretz, Ph.D. '65, publisher of the New Republic and lecturer on social studies.

James Kugel, Starr professor of classical, modern Jewish, and Hebrew literature, was on the search committee. "We were starting this whole new program at Harvard," he says, "and she looked to us like a double-barreled threat, somebody who could come in and take charge--an outstanding scholar with tremendous organizational skills. At the time, remember, she was head of the Association for Jewish Studies, a huge organization, and also a driving force at McGill. I think everyone agrees that we were lucky to get her."

Wisse was recruited (schools like Brandeis and New York University had also made offers) from McGill University in her hometown of Montreal, where she was the first incumbent of the Montreal Jewish Community Chair in the department of Jewish studies, a department she helped create. She had taught at McGill steadily--except for a couple of years of teaching in Israel--since her days there as a doctoral student, becoming an assistant professor upon receiving her Ph.D. in 1969.

Her McGill colleague, Gershon Hundert, professor of East European Jewish history, verifies their loss and Harvard's gain. "We replaced her with two people at first, but she's irreplaceable because of her energy alone! She was at the center of Jewish studies here, and as a teacher she was off the charts. And so warm. For many of her students, she was in loco maternis."

In a conversation one day at her Cambridge home, Wisse reminisced about her own mother, Masha, still very much alive at 90. A multilingual patrician from Vilna (now Vilnius), the doomed "Jerusalem of Lithuania," Masha insisted that Yiddish be spoken by the family at home. Not street Yiddish, but language, like Masha herself, both literary and tasteful. "In our home," Wisse recalls, "the Yiddish vocabulary that fueled the borscht belt, words for sex, sexual organs, and bodily functions, grew rusty behind comfortable euphemisms, and if we knew them at all, it was from Weinreich's dictionary."

So indomitable was Masha's determination to keep her children insulated from the assimilative tendencies of middle-class Montreal Jewry that, in a gesture of stunning downward mobility, she insisted that the family move from the prosperous neighborhood of Westmount across town to Outremont, where new immigrants were settling, close to the Yiddish day school. "Totally against the stream, my mother. I inherited that characteristic, I guess." Indeed so. As we shall see.

In Outremont, in a large house full of paintings and books and music, Masha established a literary salon at which visiting and local Yiddish writers read from their works, and where Masha would play the piano and sing Yiddish songs (she has recorded more than 200 of them as part of a folk-song project).

Moving backward in her reminiscences, Wisse recalled the privileged first years of her childhood, before Montreal, in Czernowitz, Romania (now part of Ukraine). She likes to stress the fact that she was born in Czernowitz because of the city's resonance in the history of Yiddish: the first conference on the status of Yiddish as a national language was held there in 1908. As a child, however, she spoke German, because her governess spoke only German.

Her father, Leo, a chemical engineer, had been sent to Czernowitz from his home in Poland to oversee the building and management of a rubber factory, for which he was awarded a medal by King Carol of Romania. This medal probably saved the Roskies family, sufficiently impressing the authorities to permit them to leave Romania in June 1940.

In late fall 1940, after months of stateless wandering, Ruth, then four years old, her older brother, and parents reached Montreal. Leo joined his three brothers in the textile mill they had bought the year before. His father and sister, who stayed in Europe, perished, as did all but one of Masha's large family.

The school Ruth and her by-then two brothers and sister attended--one of an entire spectrum of Jewish day schools in Montreal, ranging from Communist to Orthodox--was the Yidishe Folkshule, or Jewish People's School. The Folkshule was created with a Labor-Zionist orientation, meaning that the focus was on secularism and Israel, with equal emphasis, therefore, on Yiddish and Hebrew. For the school, as for Ruth's parents, there was no question of eliminating Yiddish from their children's education, as most North American Jews were doing, or of simply patronizing the language for sentimental reasons. Writing many years later about preparing a Yiddish anthology, Wisse pointed out:

No one who ever worked in the field of Yiddish can be unaware of the relative disrepute in which the language is held, even among some of its fluent speakers and their cultural heirs. Despite its 800 years, despite having become by 1939 the vernacular of more Jews than have ever spoken the same Jewish language at any time in history, and despite a culture that would be the envy of many a nation, Yiddish was commonly thought to be a "jargon"--a language not altogether formed, an inferior version of the more perfect German.

But at the Folkshule, writes Wisse's younger brother, David G. Roskies, professor of Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, "Yiddish was a key to lebens-shteyger [folkways]...; Yiddish literature extolled the beauty of Jewish holidays...; Yiddish was symbiotically tied to Loshn koydesh [the holy tongue, Hebrew]...; Yiddish was the living link to a living people...." In the school's "total environment," which included teaching the students "to live in two Jewish languages," the children were to be conditioned "so that they couldn't live other than as Jews."

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs