Mame-loshn

“Dos iz a tir,” says Vladimir, pointing toward the door of the classroom. “Dos iz a tir,” everyone repeats after him and points toward the door, intoning in different voices—thin voices and thick voices, clear voices and hoarse voices, old voices and young voices, self-assured voices and hesitant voices, all of them repeating the words, “Dos iz a tir.” Miriam’s voice was one of those not so sure of themselves. Even here, in the beginners’ class, there were some people who had some background from their homes, but Miriam had arrived not knowing a word of Yiddish.

“Dos iz a padloge,” says Vladimir, pointing to the floor while he walked on it with exaggerated steps, as though he were pointing to it with his feet as well. “Dos iz a padloge,” they all repeat and point toward the floor. This time Miriam’s voice was more self-assured. For some reason that particular word had made its way into her memory—padloge, a kind of rolling word, a word that requires no particular effort to pronounce, one that sort of speaks itself.

Sweat glistens on Vladimir’s brow. He is investing all his effort in this lesson, teaching with his whole body—his eyes, his shoulders, his hands, his legs, and when he says “Dos iz a stelye” and points to the ceiling, he points out the word with his whole body and does not just make sounds with his mouth. He has all sorts of tricks. For example, he throws a ball to one of the students and then says a word to him in Yiddish, and the student has to say the equivalent word in English, or Vladimir says a word in English and the student has to respond with the Yiddish word.

“Pilke,” says Vladimir with complete concentration and throws the ball to the older woman sitting to Miriam’s right. The old woman bursts out laughing and shrugs her shoulders. Vladimir smiles and says, “You’re holding it in your hands.” “Ball!” the woman calls out triumphantly and tosses the ball back to Vladimir. Miriam stands at the ready and goes over the words in her head: shtol, padloge, tir, fenster, stelieh. Please, let him just not ask how to say “table,” because that one, for some reason, she just can’t seem to remember. Vladimir tosses her the ball and says, “window.” “Fenster,” says Miriam with relief, and throws the ball back.

She looks around, moving her gaze to the door, the blackboard, the tables and chairs, the windows, the ceiling, the floor. The classroom is not the same place in Yiddish as in English. In English it is as it appears—new and clean, shiny and cold, just like the dozens of other rooms in the building, but in Yiddish it becomes something else, it turns into a classroom from some far-off past time, a bit dusty, with rickety tables and chairs, and with walls that are not quite white and one cracked window. In Yiddish it becomes their classroom, the Beginners A class, a class with its own personality that is not like the Beginners B class at the end of the hall or the advanced students’ class on the second floor. Now the indefatigable Vladimir pulls out another game. On a piece of paper, he writes down one of the words that he has taught and the class has to guess which word it is. There is a prize for the winner, Vladimir promises, his eyes sparkling.

“Tish,” the older woman sitting next to Miriam ventures, and Vladimir checks what is written in the note as though he doesn’t remember what word he had written, then shakes his head. “Tir,” comes the tentative answer from a heavy-set woman who had come with her young son. Vladimir glances at the note and shakes his head. “Fenster” is the suggestion from a balding man who Miriam had decided is from New York and not married and has come to look for a girlfriend. Vladimir looks at the note and his face lights up in a broad smile. He shows the note to the class so they would know there was no collusion between him and the winner. He goes over to the balding man and holds out two fists toward him. “In one hand is a kopike, which is small change,” he explains to the class, “and in the other hand there is a ruble, which is already something more serious.” The balding man hesitates and finally points to the right hand. “Kopike!” Vladimir announces. “It’s okay,” he says, handing the balding man the small, worn coin and patting him on the shoulder.

The older woman to Miriam’s right laughs again. “Isn’t he terrific?” she asks Miriam, tilting her head toward Vladimir. “Yes,” Miriam nods, “he’s an excellent teacher.” Vladimir begins teaching a song in Yiddish, a song with a lot of “ai-yai-yai.” He is not a trained vocalist, but the main point is to learn the vocabulary, and he does in fact direct his efforts toward the words and not the melody. He pronounces the words very deliberately and draws them only here and there into the melody, and that is sung just out of obligation.

Vladimir came to America from Birobidjan. And how did he make it to America? He got there because of Yiddish. He was a teacher of English and German, and he took a course in Yiddish. Because of that Yiddish course he came to a summer course in Yiddish in New York. And how did he get into the summer course? One of the higher-ups in the university saw on his application that he was from Birobidjan and recalled that when he was a youngster, his mother used to donate money to the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidjan. Because of that he approved Vladimir’s application for the summer course and made sure Vladimir got a U.S. entry visa. While he was in New York for the summer course, Vladimir made the right contacts to be able to immigrate to the U.S. and bring his family over as well.

“In our next lesson,” says Vladimir, “our topic will be: family.”

Out in the hallway, Miriam sees the attractive guy from Beginners B. She watches his lovely face, his brown eyes, his long, thin body. Down there, under his pants, his dick is hiding, flaccid and asleep, its head slumped over his balls like the bald head of the old man drowsing in the middle of class in Beginners A. Deep down inside her, Miriam feels that trembling, that hungry quivering.

At dinner she joins Vladimir’s table, because she saw that a few of the people from the beginners’ class were sitting there, and that reassured her that they wouldn’t be speaking Yiddish. At some of the tables, especially those with old people sitting at them, they speak only Yiddish. Miriam discovered that there was an unwritten rule over this weekend: anyone who can speak Yiddish speaks only Yiddish. It is natural for her to see the old people speaking Yiddish, but it seems strange and even discordant to see young people her own age chatting with one another in Yiddish, asking in Yiddish for someone to pass the water or the salt. And the weirdest thing is to see the weekend’s organizers, also young people themselves, speaking into their walkie-talkies in Yiddish.

Vladimir smiles at her and asks her, in English, how she was. She says she is enjoying herself a lot and that she feels she has already learned a lot. Next to Vladimir sits the heavy-set woman from Beginners A and her son. The woman is constantly encouraging her son to ask Vladimir how to say “fork” and “plate” and “glass” and “bread” in Yiddish. Patient Vladimir answers all the questions, and the youngster writes down all the Yiddish words in the notebook his mother had taken out of her bag. I hate her, Miriam thinks. Why doesn’t she let them enjoy their meal? A young man dressed in white goes over to Vladimir and speaks with him in fluent Yiddish. He has a thin, ascetic face and flashing eyes, and his hair is curly and wild. He must be an artist, Miriam thinks, maybe an actor. And in fact, after he walks away, Vladimir says that that was Pesach, and he does stand-up comedy in Yiddish and reads Yiddish writers’ works aloud.

The food is not bad, but the main thing is that there is a lot of food, and Miriam is hungry. She fills her plate and takes a bowl of salad as well, and a bowl of soup, two rolls, and chocolate cake. When she finishes all the food except the cake, Miriam goes to get coffee. When she gets back, she sees that Vladimir disappeared and in his place sat a guy from Beginners B. The heavy-set woman was talking with him, and she was just asking him whether he knows Yiddish from home. “A little bit,” the guy says. “My mom knows Yiddish, but she only spoke to me in English.”

“Isn’t that too bad?” asks the heavy-set woman. “I know so many people whose parents know Yiddish but spoke with them only in English, as though it were some kind of shame to speak Yiddish. What’s to be ashamed of? That’s our heritage. Just two generations ago everybody spoke Yiddish.” The guy nods his assent. “That’s why I brought Jerry here,” says the heavy-set woman, caressing her son’s head, “so he would learn Yiddish already from a young age.”

Fuck you, thinks Miriam. Fuck you, you stupid, fat woman. Let your kid play baseball in English. What does he need Yiddish for? He’s a kid in America in the year 1996, not a kid in a shtetl.

“I’m actually really sorry I didn’t learn Yiddish at home,” says the guy, “but it’s never too late. Do you know Mikhl, one of the organizers?”

The heavy-set woman shakes her head.

“He started learning Yiddish two years ago,” says the guy, “and today he speaks it fluently, as if it were his mother tongue.”

Oh, no, Miriam thinks, this guy’s another gung-ho Yiddishist. In a minute he’ll take out a dictionary and start to bother people in broken Yiddish.

The guy smiles at her, sticking out his hand, “I’m Michael, but my Yiddish name is Mikhl.”

Miriam extends her hand and says, “I’m Miriam. I don’t have a Yiddish name.” He shakes her hand energetically. His palm is warm and something howls inside Miriam, something wants to touch more, to touch his whole body, to touch beyond his body, to touch what lies beyond all bodies, to touch bodiliness.

“Of course you have a Yiddish name,” says Michael, or Mikhl. “You’ve got to have a Yiddish name. All of us have Yiddish names. We all came from there.”

From where, thinks Miriam, from New York? But she decides to be nice. “My parents called me Miriam, that’s all. They didn’t know Yiddish and weren’t interested in their heritage. They were both born here and wanted me to be an American like everyone else.”

“Yes,” sighs Michael, or Mikhl, “it’s such a shame that our parents were alienated from our heritage, and for what? To live in a big house in the suburbs and to barbecue on Saturdays, for an empty life.”

Oh, no, thinks Miriam, he really believes in the revival of Yiddish and all that, but his body, his body sends off a different vibe.

“Yes,” she says, “our parents came to a dead end, but maybe our generation will be able to change that.”

“Yes,” says Michael, or Mikhl, “I believe it’s not too late. Have you seen the family that speaks Yiddish? The parents have been speaking Yiddish to the children since they were born. They know English, of course, but the language they speak at home is Yiddish. I think that’s fantastic. It gives me hope.”

He really is Mikhl, thinks Miriam, but the question is whether Mikhl knows how to screw like Michael. “Maybe there’s still some hope,” she says. “Maybe it isn’t too late.”

One of the organizers passes by the table, speaking with great concentration—in Yiddish, of course—into his walkie-talkie. “This is Mikhl,” says Michael, or Mikhl, “I’ve gotta talk to him about the fair. It was nice to meet you.” What fair, Miriam wonders. Ah, of course, the book fair, Yiddish books, what else? There’s something about that in the program booklet.

After dinner, there’s a Yiddish culture program. At the beginning, Mikhl from the organizers reads aloud a poem in Yiddish, apparently a funny poem, because all the old people laugh. After that the teacher of the advanced class, a man of about seventy, reads a story by Sholom Aleichem, and now too all the old people laugh, but this time Miriam laughs too. She does not  understand a word, but there is something about the way he reads the story that makes her laugh. Suddenly she understands: the Yiddish of the advanced group’s teacher is a living language, but Mikhl’s Yiddish is a dead language. Mikhl lives in English, not Yiddish. He works, travels, eats, rests, screws, gets angry, happy, and scared in English. He is surrounded by life lived in English, not in Yiddish, so he can’t live Yiddish, and so the Yiddish he speaks can’t be a living Yiddish. The advanced group’s teacher grew up in a world that spoke Yiddish and lived in Yiddish, so when he reads that Sholom Aleichem story, life streams through him into the audience, and a world that has been lost is revived for a few moments of grace and radiance in its full vigor. It is life that was spoken to Miriam—not the words, but the life shining through them.

The teacher of the advanced group finishes reading, and Miriam claps with all her might, an applause of gratitude. The cultural program was over, and the audience begins to scatter. Miriam looks around her. Most of the older people stand up and leave the dining hall, and those still sitting around the tables don’t look like people who could revive a dead language. The magic is gone. The illusion of a life lived in Yiddish melts away, and the dining hall goes back to being a dining hall in English, part of a Christian university hosting a weekend for Yiddish enthusiasts. Miriam stands up and starts walking toward the exit, but she notices a few young people who stayed sitting around one of the tables. Mikhl from the organizers is there, and Mikhl-Michael, and another young woman from among the organizers, and one older man in a wheelchair, and the balding guy from Beginners A, and a young couple from Beginners B, and Pesach. Miriam moves over to that table and sits down next to the older man in the wheelchair. Pesach is addressing the group passionately: “Only in Yiddish do I really connect to that deep place. In English I live in the everyday world, but Yiddish is the language for depth.” He looks at Miriam, and it seems to her that he is examining her to see what impression his words have made on her. The old guy in the wheelchair smiles at her and points toward Pesach with a motion of his head: “He’s something, isn’t he?” “Yes,” Miriam says, “he’s really something.” Now Mikhl-Michael discovers her, and he smiles at her. She smiles back, and suddenly that trembling takes hold of her again, as if a storm is shaking her. Behind the smile lived flesh, flesh longing for flesh, as if everything were only the same matter poured into separate forms, and the separate pieces of matter want to come together again, to slip out of the forms they had been placed in and to again be formless matter.

“Ai, Yiddish, Yiddish,” Pesach sighs, “Ai-yai-yai. How about singing a niggun?”

“Yes,” answers Mikhl from the organizers with excitement, “a niggun, give us a niggun!”

“He’s something,” the old guy in the wheelchair exults toward Miriam, “really something.” Pesach shuts his eyes and tilts his head back, his right hand drumming on the table and his curly head bobbing from side to side. Suddenly his eyes light up, and he begins to sing:

                        “Zog zhe, Rebenyu!

                        Vos vet zayn, az moshiekh vet kumen?

                        Oz moshiekh vet kumen,

                        veln mir makhn a sudenyu.”

“What is he singing?” Miriam asks the old man.

“You don’t know mame-loshn?” the man asks. “I’ll translate for you. The Jews are asking the rebbe, ‘Rebbe, what will we do when Moshiekh, the messiah, comes?’ And the rebbe answers them, ‘When Moshiekh comes, we’ll make a little feast.’”

Pesach keeps singing, pounding his right hand on the table and moving his head back and forth, Mikhl-from-the-organizer’s lips move hesitantly as he tries to follow the words and join Pesach in the singing, Mikhl-Michael knocks on the table with his hand, his mouth slightly ajar, the young couple holds hands, the young woman from the organizers whispers something into the ear of the balding man from Beginners A, while the older guy in the wheelchair goes on translating the words of the niggun for Miriam: “And what shall we eat at the feast? Tell us, Rebbe. At the feast we’ll eat the Wild Ox and Leviathan, the Wild Ox and Leviathan, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we’ll eat at the feast.”

Through the power of the niggun, through the power of Pesach’s devotion, Yiddish begins to radiate life once again. All around stand the empty tables and the chairs, all of them the same, and a tired black cook looks over at them from the kitchen, but the table is in the midst of another place entirely, as though by the force of the niggun the table and those sitting around it are enveloped in the halo of an elevated life. Pesach’s ascetic face trembles, as though he is trying to shed the contours of his face, which would soon not be there at all, and where his face is, there would be an orb of light. Mikhl from the organizers is singing louder now, with more confidence. Mikhl-Michael closes his eyes and his head sways. The young woman rests her head on her partner’s shoulder, and he hugs her shoulders. The woman from the organizers and the balding man from Beginners A are silent, watching Pesach’s face. The older man in the wheelchair translates for Miriam: “And what shall we drink at the feast? Tell us, Rebbe. At the feast we’ll drink the old, preserved wine, the old, preserved wine, the old, preserved wine we’ll drink, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we’ll eat at the feast.” Pesach smiles with his eyes closed. Mikhl from the organizers smiles and turns off the walkie-talkie that was emitting the businesslike voice of one of the organizers. Mikhl-Michael opens his eyes and smiles at Miriam. The young couple snuggles together more closely until they look like one creature with two heads. The heads of the woman from the organizers and the balding man from Beginners A almost touch. The older man does not close his eyes, which are blue and clear. His hands do not rap on the table but rest on the arms of his wheelchair. He has no partner to snuggle up with or put his head toward. He translates for Miriam: “And who will teach us Torah at the feast? Tell us, Rebbe. Moses our Teacher, Moses our Teacher, Moses our Teacher will teach us Torah, the old, preserved wine we’ll drink, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we’ll eat at the feast.” The tired black cook looks over at them again from the kitchen. He must be waiting for us to leave already, thinks Miriam. He wants to close the dining hall. But Pesach pays no attention to the tired cook. He doesn’t notice anyone at all. He is entirely focused on the feast. There’s food, there are drinks, there is someone to teach Torah. What else do we need? If we are all made from the same primal matter that yearns to be liberated from the multiple forms it has taken and return to being one, maybe there is also one form that yearns to be liberated from that matter. And isn’t the form that the material takes on, this dining hall and this table and all of us around it—isn’t that the same form that has materialized as hundreds of rooms and hundreds of tables and thousands of Hasidim sitting around their rebbes and singing a niggun with them, form trying to free itself from matter? Isn’t the form’s struggle visible on Pesach’s face?

The older man continues to translate for Miriam, as though he is outside the circle, as though he is filling the role of a Greek chorus. Since he has stepped out of the circle of those moving and the circle of those active in the world, he has stepped backward into the role of narrator: “And who will play for us at the feast? Tell us, Rebbe. King David, King David, King David will play for us, Moses our Teacher will teach us Torah, the old, preserved wine we’ll drink, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we’ll eat at the feast.”

Oh, King David, King David. Miriam is filled with hidden yearning, King David will play for us at the feast. Now Mikhl from the organizers and Pesach are singing together, sitting across the table like mirror images of one another. Now the Yiddish in Mikhl’s mouth is full of life, fresh, juicy, throbbing, full of love. Now the niggun is pulsing between them like an electric current. Mikhl-Michael is no longer Michael; he is Mikhl. This is clear to Miriam when she looks at him, as clear as the fact that a triangle is a triangle and not a square. She looks at him and knows his name—Mikhl. The woman from the organizers and the balding guy from the Beginners A group are now nameless, even though there are names printed on the badges on their shirts. They are nameless and they have many names. The young couple are a bride and groom. The niggun weaves a chuppah over their heads. The old man in the wheelchair is now only a voice, the narrator’s voice: “And who will say a few words of wisdom at the feast? Tell us, Rebbe. King Solomon, King Solomon, King Solomon will say a few words of wisdom, King David will play for us, Moses our Teacher will teach us Torah, the old, preserved wine we’ll drink, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we’ll eat at the feast.”

Because who are we, really? Matter that has solidified around a vagina or a penis, or a niggun trapped in matter? What is hiding underneath? It’s there that we’re striving toward, there that Pesach is striving toward with his pained expression, Mikhl is striving toward with his eyes shut, Mikhl is striving toward with his smile, the woman who was once, endless years ago, one of the organizers is striving toward, the balding guy with his determined brow is striving toward, the couple in their couplehood are striving toward, the voice too is striving toward that, as it says into her ears: “And who will dance for us at the feast? Tell us, Rebbe. Miriam the prophetess, Miriam the prophetess, Miriam the prophetess will dance for us, King Solomon will say a few words of wisdom, King David will play for us, Moses our Teacher will teach us Torah, the old, preserved wine we’ll drink, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we’ll eat at the feast.” Pesach hangs onto that last line: “oyf der sudenyu,” until he has expelled all the air from his lungs, as though he is refusing to return to this dining hall, so sunken in matter. When the niggun is over, Mikhl from the organizers opens his walkie-talkie and speaks into it in Yiddish. Mikhl-Michael smiles at Miriam, but this time it is a different smile, a smile that promises something and maybe demands something, too. The woman from the organizers whispers something in the ear of the balding man from Beginners A. The young couple pull away from each other, not even holding hands anymore. Pesach opens his eyes and looks at Miriam as if he were checking whether he’d impressed her, and the old man in the wheelchair tips his head toward Pesach and, his face aglow, says to Miriam, “I told you he was really something.”

At night Miriam dreams she is speaking Yiddish and the words have real existence in the world, the words are bodies, they have sex organs, feminine words with a vagina and masculine words with a penis; they screw. Miriam walks around among them crazy with lust, but there is no one she can have sex with. The old man comes by in his wheelchair, but to her he is just a voice, a disembodied voice. When she wakes up, she is still horny. She puts her hand on her clitoris and starts to masturbate. She tries to imagine Mikhl-Michael’s face, but she sees only Pesach’s head leaning back. She turns her head and sees the table, “a tish.” Pesach’s head disappears, but in its place appears not a face but just pure desire, dick in its dickness, a cunt in its cuntness, a fuck in its fuckness, matter in its materiality, a body, a body, a solid body, a body that produces excretions, a body that gives off a scent, the scent of bodiliness. The body exists, resting on the bed in its full weight, its full laziness, a floor is a padloge; how does Vladimir pronounce it? Pad-lo-ge, but now the body, not the word, not the language, not in English and not in Yiddish. Just sensuality, to touch, to smell, to taste, to sense weight, Michael, Michael, maybe the name will become a body? Now! Michael, now! Here is the body, the body, the body…

At breakfast, Miriam sits at the same table as Vladimir. “Nu?” asks Vladimir. “Are you ready for the class?” “Dos iz a tish,” says Miriam, rapping on the table with her hand. “Well done,” Vladimir cheers, “Well done.” Mikhl from the organizers goes by with his walkie-talkie and waves at her with his hand, and she waves back. Mikhl-Michael, carrying a tray, comes over to the table, and asks if he could sit down. Vladimir kids that this was the table for Beginners A, and Miriam smiles and says that Mikhl could be accepted into the Beginners A group as an honorary member.

“Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?” asks Mikhl-Michael.

“Very much,” Miriam answers.

“Pesach was amazing,” says Mikhl-Michael. “He must have the genes of a Hassidic rebbe.”

“I don’t like gurus,” says Miriam, “but yesterday was something else.”

“Thanks to people like Pesach,” says Mikhl-Michael, “there’s a chance of reviving Yiddish. People like that can sweep everyone else along with them.”

Words, words, abstract ideas, “chance,” “sweep,” “thanks to”—empty, sterile concepts, but in contrast to that: shtul, padloge, fenster—these are full of potential. You say padloge and you know, you know Vladimir using his whole body to point to the floor, you know the floor, hard and straight underneath you.

“I’m going to class,” says Vladimir. “A teacher must not be late, and you too, don’t be too late,” he says to Miriam. He turned to Mikhl-Michael: “You’re responsible for sending her off to class in another five minutes.”

“No problem,” Mikhl-Michael smiles. “She’ll be there on time.” He sits there, playing with concepts, concepts like “being there on time.” He emits those words so that they can be arrayed around his head in a circle and protect him. It’s a double defense system—the first line is the words, the second line the concepts. A sophisticated defense system, and all for what? So that that thing won’t break out, that hot and heavy bodiliness. However, just as the words hide the bodiliness, so do they reveal it, and Miriam thinks the revealing words: vagina, dick, screwing, sucking, licking, coming, ass, boobs, I’m horny, I want to fuck, and behold: that bodiliness is revealed. To no avail Mikhl-Michael attempts to mobilize more concepts for his second line of defense. To no avail he speaks about “the problem of assimilation.” Opposite “the problem of assimilation” Miriam places “I want you to go down on me,” and the second line of defense crumbles, and now there’s nothing that comes between Mikhl-Michael and bodiliness.

“We’ve gotta get moving if we don’t want to be late,” says Mikhl-Michael, and he gets up from his chair carrying the tray. Miriam stands up too, and they walk side by side toward the moving belt that trays are placed on. In front of them passes the old guy from yesterday, moving his blue gaze along on the wheelchair. Who will do the catering for the feast? Miriam thinks. A Christian university will do the catering for us, Miriam the Prophetess will dance for us, King Solomon will speak words of wisdom, King David will play for us, Moses our Teacher will teach us Torah, the old, preserved wine we will drink, the Wild Ox and Leviathan we will eat at the feast.

On the way to the classrooms, Mikhl-Michael asks her where she lives. And when she answers, “Brooklyn,” his eyes light up. “I live in Brooklyn too,” he says, “Maybe we can get together to speak Yiddish.” He leaves her in front of the Beginners B classroom and says, “Good luck!,” as though she’s about to take a test or interview for a new job.

As she goes in, she sees that the class has already begun, and Vladimir is already sweating, running around the classroom with a ball in his hand and attacking the students with questions about what they had learned yesterday. “Floor,” he says and throws the ball to the heavy-set woman. “Padloge,” says the heavy-set woman and sends the ball back to him. “Exactly,” says Vladimir, “padloge,” and he points with his whole body toward the floor. Miriam sits down at one of the tables and tries to remember the words they learned yesterday. But Vladimir didn’t leave her much time to get ready and he tosses the ball to her and says “window.” Window? How the hell do you say “window”? Not stalyeh, not tavel…fenster! That’s it! “Fenster.” “Very good,” says Vladimir, “fenster,” and with his whole body, with everything he’s got, he points to one of the windows.

After they finish reviewing all the words from yesterday, Vladimir says today they would learn about the family, and he immediately begins to attack them with new words: tateh, mama, bubbeh, zeideh, schvester, schvieger, zun. The more words that are added, the more the imaginary family grows, suddenly filling the classroom. All of a sudden, in the classroom there are a grandfather and grandmother and their children and their grandchildren and their in-laws, and in the classroom there came to be all the connections of love, hatred, jealousy, anger, compassion, identification, and alienation that exist among various family members.

Once they have reviewed the new words with the help of a few games, and after someone else won a kopike when he guessed the word Vladimir had written in the note, Vladimir announces to the class that now they will put together a real family. He calls a few students to come and stand in front of the class, and each one of them is given a family role. The balding guy is the grandfather, a red-headed woman is the grandmother, Miriam is their daughter, and one older man is their son. Miriam has a husband, a tall fellow with glasses, and they have three children. The three children are married, and one of them has his own children, who are Miriam’s grandchildren. Now each member of the family has to present the rest of them in Yiddish, explaining how each one is related to him or her. Miriam feels it’s strange to find herself in the center of a family unit. Suddenly she has a husband and kids and daughters-in-law and sons-in-law and grandchildren. Suddenly she is the center of gravity in a family, no longer a lone satellite orbiting somewhere up there in space, unable to come closer or get further away.

“Tateh,” “mame,” “schvester”—these words are not empty, sterile concepts. They are the thing itself, they are full of life, they are the family. Maybe if she called her father “tateh” and her mother “mame” and her sister “shvester,” their family life would look completely different? Because how could Mom and Dad get divorced if they were “tateh” and “mame”? And how could her father not talk to her for a whole year if she were his “tokhter”? And how could she be so angry at her sister if she were her “shvester”? But on the other hand, she is comfortable with her dismantled family, comfortable with the freedom it gave her, while the words “tateh,” “mame,” and “schvester” do not promise freedom. They are tied to one another in an unbreakable bond, and it is impossible to think of one of them without bringing to mind the others.

What you call things influences the things themselves. Language doesn’t only describe reality; it creates reality. Yiddish is not only a language that disappeared; it is a reality that disappeared. It is a world that disappeared. Mikhl from the organizers might know by heart all the Yiddish words for the various family members, but his mother-in-law is his mother-in-law in English, and his whole family is a family in English, not a misphokhe in Yiddish, because there are no more families in Yiddish. Even that weird family in which the parents speak Yiddish to the children is a family in English and not a family in Yiddish, because it isn’t enough to call the father “tateh.” You have to have a world in which fathers are “tateh.” Even if she were to start calling her father “tateh,” he’d remain Dad in English, because while language does indeed create reality, that’s only on condition that an entire reality takes place in that language. When the language disappears, showing signs of life only in classrooms and on weekends, it does not have the power to create a reality, but rather at most it can give us a rare momentary peek at the world that once was, the lost world of language.

We are always in exile, Miriam thinks. First we were exiled from our land, and after we found a world in language, we were exiled from our language. And how long will our exile go on? True, it’s exile in comfortable circumstances, in a rich country, in a vast, broad land, in a country full of bodiliness, suffused with sex, a fertile country, but it is still exile. We are like a bird in a gilded cage, like a niggun struggling to burst out, and who will sing for us at the feast? Oh, Rebbe, who will sing for us at the feast? The air is full of music in English, the stores are full of food in English, the dance floors are full of dances in English, the universities are full of learning in English, the books are full of wisdom in English, and where are the Wild Boar and the Leviathan? Where is Miriam the prophetess? Where is Moses our Teacher? Where is King David? Where is King Solomon? The Wild Boar and the Leviathan have disappeared into a double burger with ketchup, and Miriam the Prophetess is Mary, and she works as a production assistant in a big broadcasting network, and Moses our Teacher is Mike, and he’s a successful advertising executive, and King David is Dave, a dentist, and King Solomon is Sol, a professor of economics, and where, oh where, is the niggun that will wake them, shake them up, bring them back from exile?

When she leaves the classroom, she sees Mikhl-Michael coming out of the Beginners B class. He smiles at her and asks, “How was it?”

“Ich hob”—Miriam replies—“ein schvester.”

“Ikh hob,” Mikhl-Michael responds, “eyn shvester un eyn bruder.”

“Ich bin a mame,” says Miriam, pointing to herself.

“Ich bin a tateh,” says Mikhl-Michael, pointing to himself. He reaches out his hand toward her and so they go, hand in hand, to the dining hall. The old man in the wheelchair goes by them and his blue eyes smile in Yiddish. They walk by Pesach, who is chatting in Yiddish with the teacher of the advanced group. Miriam doesn’t understand a word of what they are saying, but the words came as balm on her bones. She knows very well that the world that has been lost would never return, she knows that Yiddish is dead, but a great joy fills her when the music of the mame–loshn sounds in her ears. At the entrance to the dining hall they run into Vladimir, who is patiently answering questions from the heavy-set woman. “Nu, nu,” says Vladimir, “mamesh tateh un mame, mamesh tateh un mame.”