{"id":6828,"date":"2022-09-17T16:17:50","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T16:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/?p=6828"},"modified":"2022-09-17T16:17:52","modified_gmt":"2022-09-17T16:17:52","slug":"life-and-love-in-yiddish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/2022\/09\/life-and-love-in-yiddish\/","title":{"rendered":"Life and Love in Yiddish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hidden on the fifth floor of a colossal, decrepit Tel Aviv bus station, there\u2019s a little Yiddish library. It\u2019s a dimly-lit, heimish<\/em> (homey) place with a palpable warmth. Upon entering, you\u2019re greeted with a mass of Yiddish manuscripts, some lining shelves, others piled messily on top of one another. There\u2019s a drum kit on stage, kept company by an electric guitar, two pianos, a microphone, and various percussion instruments. It\u2019s as if a Polish shtetl and a Rolling Stones concert crashed splendidly in this tiny harbor of culture, creating a comfortable dissonance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The library\u2019s owner, with his wispy white hair, is somewhat of a human archive; history seeps through him. He is light on his feet, not pacing, but prancing. When I went to see him speak, his body did as much talking as his voice. He switched seamlessly between languages when he  serenaded my group with a Yiddish love song. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He explained to us that Yiddish and its survival is, simply put, a miracle. Yiddish is dissonant, both in its sound and in its origins, an unlikely combination of German and Hebrew, of European and semitic languages. Yiddish endured the Holocaust, albeit barely, which wiped out many millions of speakers. Years later, Yiddish prevailed once again, surviving Israel\u2019s attempt to make Hebrew the only Jewish vernacular. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this little historical oasis, surrounded by my ancestors\u2019 writing, I came to see Yiddish as a rich metaphor for life. It captures so much of what it means to be human because it contains a multitude of human experiences. It\u2019s thoroughly imbued with the tragedies and triumphs of generations of Jews. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I\u2019m leaving this summer with a new and profound appreciation for language. I am now more alert to the deep import that punctures our words, and the inherent weight that they all hold. Mostly, I am grateful that I could sit in a dissonant library, listening to a love song in a dissonant language, completely oblivious to its translation, and find it beautiful. Sometimes it’s not the meaning of words that we must cherish, but the mere fact that they\u2019re being spoken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/k-larevue.com\/en\/mendy-cahan-or-the-secret-yiddish-shelter-of-tel-aviv\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hidden on the fifth floor of a colossal, decrepit Tel Aviv bus station, there\u2019s a little Yiddish library. It\u2019s a dimly-lit, heimish (homey) place with a palpable warmth. Upon entering, you\u2019re greeted with a mass of Yiddish manuscripts, some lining shelves, others piled messily on top of one another. There\u2019s a drum kit on stage, kept company by an electric guitar, two pianos, a microphone, and various percussion instruments. It\u2019s as if a Polish shtetl<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":323,"featured_media":6831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[435,318,439],"tags":[],"coauthors":[474],"class_list":["post-6828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-news","category-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-09-17-at-12.16.37-PM-2.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/323"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6832,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6828\/revisions\/6832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6828"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}