My father’s grandparents- both maternal and paternal- came over together from the same small town in Moldova, a country at the edge of eastern Europe’s Black Sea. At their time it was called Bessarabia and had been recently acquired from the Ottomans by the Russians. My great-grandparents came before there was such a thing as Ellis Island. They and the rest of the huddled masses yearning to be free disembarked at Castle Garden, where Battery Park is now.
I don’t know if my great-grandparents spoke Rumanian or Russian. They certainly had no allegiance to the Czar. My dad says his grandparents fasted in order to appear sickly and underweight, to avoid the draft of the Russian Army. I do know that my great-grandparents spoke Yiddish, that arcane mix of Hebrew and German. I know because my dad’s parents spoke it and who but own their parents would have taught them?
My father grew up in New York in the presence of Yiddish, but was raised only speaking English. Often you hear of cases where the parents and grandparents spoke hushed Yiddish when they wanted to keep secrets from die Kinder. That’s my dad’s story, too.
My dad’s immigrant grandparents probably didn’t speak a word of English when they were dropped off at Manhattan’s southern tip. Undoubtedly they were quick learners: one grandpa went to New Jersey to work for Edison. He produced scores of patents for rechargeable batteries (did you know they had electric trucks in the very early 20th century!) and, of all things, universal clothes hangers. The other grandpa, slightly more of a schmuck, went on to become a mohel and a sidewalk huckster, selling small chunks of Octagon soap that he re-packaged, re-branded and sold at a steep mark-up to crowds of poor Lower East Side jews.
Their illustrious accomplishments aside, English was certainly not the native language of my Moldovan great-grandparents. Further, I can’t imagine they brought up their children speaking a language with which they had a shaky grasp; that’s simply not how language transmission occurs. You raise your children in whatever language you are most comfortable. My grandpa was born on the Lower East Side in a Clinton Street tenement. My grandma lived by Yeshiva University in Washington Heights. Both were surrounded by jews and people speaking Yiddish. Surely there was assimilation into American culture, but given the tight-knit nature of those jewish enclaves there was probably little pressure to raise children in English, a foreign language.
It hadn’t occurred to my dad that his parents were likely native Yiddish speaker, but it makes perfect sense to me. I never met my great-grandparents or even my grandparents, so I could never ask for myself. Ultimately, their Sprache has been lost between the cracks of Manhattan’s sidewalks.
Still, I feel like their history is close to me and I want to understand the language of their ghosts. I studied German, the closest you could get to Yiddish at Reed. I lived in Washington Heights and worked in the East Village; I paid my homage at the 10th street baths. When I can, I’ll learn Yiddish. In the mean time, I will visit the last Yiddish bookstore in Manhattan.
