There should be a word to describe a language that isn't your mother tongue, one you don't yourself speak but was spoken all around you in your formative years. There should be a word for the piercing brew of emotions you feel when, after a long absence you are rarely conscious of – because, you know, life – you hear that once-familiar language spoken again.
Yiddish seems like the kind of language that could offer such a term. A fusion language using the Hebrew alphabet that was once the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews, Yiddish was sent to the brink of death along with millions of its speakers. But it has survived in pockets – and has made its mark on English with a wealth of onomatopoeic crossovers; words such as klutz, nosh, schmooze and shtick.
I am sure there is no word for the experience of hearing a once-familiar language spoken in an unlikely, unusual place. Not the retirement homes where the few fluent speakers you still know now reside, but on the big screen, in a contemporary feature film.
I attended a screening this month for Menashe, a Yiddish film with English subtitles. It is the story of a Hasidic Jewish widower (played by Menashe Lustig, whose real-life story inspired the film's plot) living in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. Menashe is an unlucky ne'er-do-well – a schlimazel – who, because of dictates from the highly religious community, is not allowed to raise his own young son (Ruben Niborski) unless he remarries.
It is not my intent here to kvell or kvetch about the movie itself – I leave that spiel to my colleague Brad Wheeler.
But schlock it's not. And for me personally, it was an amazing, transporting – and, at times, unsettling – experience, sitting in the dark, enveloped in the language of my childhood.
Before the Second World War, it's believed more than 10 million people spoke Yiddish. With the deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust, the language became endangered. Many who survived still spoke it, but seeking refuge in other countries, they raised their children in new tongues.
My parents, who were born in Poland and wound up in Toronto, spoke Yiddish to each other and with their friends (and Polish when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying). They would have loved for me to speak Yiddish as well.
I rejected the language; I had no desire to learn it. Before I knew what the word assimilate meant, it was my life goal. I wanted to be a real Canadian, and my perception at the time was that being Canadian meant being part of an English-speaking family, as with most of my schoolmates. My parents, who also no doubt wanted to fit in quite desperately, didn't push it.
So I was a kid who was often spoken to in Yiddish – especially terms of endearment and reprimands – but who never learned to speak it myself. A fair bit of it still managed to worm its way into my brain and I can understand many words. But much to my regret, I am not a fluent speaker.
Yiddish is hardly dead. It is used as the primary language in some ultra-Orthodox pockets. And faced with mainstream extinction, Yiddish is now experiencing a niche revival; one of my sisters now takes classes in Toronto; she was part of a group that recently recorded O Canada in Yiddish to mark Canada 150.
In the intersection between this cultural renaissance and deep Orthodoxy comes Menashe – directed by Joshua Z Weinstein, who is Jewish but does not speak Yiddish himself. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts
Watching the film was a kick, hearing words I hadn't heard spoken in conversation in many years – and once again witnessing Yiddish as a primary, everyday mode of communication. Every now and then, this became a distraction; a word would pop out and make me want to giggle – schmutz or tsuris (trouble), for instance, or the ubiquitous expression of parental exasperation, hak mir nisht keyn chuynik (which translates to "don't bang on my tea-kettle").
Even though the setting was wholly unfamiliar and nowhere near a part of my life experience, watching this film felt a bit like going home.
Perhaps this response is elevated when there is almost nowhere to go any more to hear a childhood language spoken, but I imagine a similar reaction to a film shot in Farsi or Arabic or Ukrainian for someone who grew up in a household infused with that language.
In June, I spent some time on Haida Gwaii with two of the filmmakers behind Edge of the Knife, the first feature film to be shot in Haida. The prospects for Yiddish cannot compare to the dire prognosis for Haida – there are fewer than 20 fluent Haida speakers remaining – but I felt a kinship with the filmmakers. There is an urgent, vital beauty to their project – and to other ventures meant to keep alive languages threatened by cultural or actual genocide.
Cultural revivals may not get us all speaking the languages of our ancestors over the breakfast table, but being able to go into a theatre and immerse yourself in the sound of your past is a gift. To make a film in a language that few people in your audience speak may sound meshuga – crazy – and I am so glad there are mensches out there who have the chutzpah to do it.
Menashe is now in theatres in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Marsha Lederman