Wharton students, bioengineering students, linguistics students, history students, Jewish studies majors, folklorists, sociologists -- these are some of the people who take Yiddish at Penn.
So what did you think, that Yiddish was a dead language?
You thought wrong, and you clearly haven't met Dr. Kathryn Hellerstein, Penn's Yiddishist and one-woman Yiddish-language industry.
"Yiddish is still a productive language," Hellerstein said. "It's still creating and absorbing words from modern life." That's because Yiddish is still a spoken and written language. Some Hassidic Jewish sects here and in Israel speak it, as well as a small but fervent number of secular Yiddish devotees in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The Forward in New York still has a Yiddish edition, and the Internet has a Yiddish discussion group, Mendele, with several hundred subscribers -- academics, enthusiasts, linguists, Klezmer-world people and Yiddish-speaking Hassidim.
Hellerstein, herself, is not a native Yiddish speaker, and her original life plans included being a poet and an English scholar. She has done, and still does, both of these things. The Yiddish scholarship and translation of Yiddish poetry came as a surprise.
She was brought up in a rather secular Jewish environment. She went to a Protestant prep school with daily chapel and the Lord's Prayer. Hellerstein's maternal great-great grandfather was the telegrapher who telegraphed Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. He became a Lincoln Republican and started a newspaper in Nebraska to make his voice heard. His voice was not Yiddish. Her paternal grandparents died when she was young, so Hellerstein, when she committed to learning Yiddish, remembered hearing only fragments of the language.
So, you want to know what she wanted with Yiddish? Tradition.
She was searching for her tradition.
But why she was searching for that tradition was because of ... Ezra Pound!
At Stanford, where she got an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature while preparing for life as a poet and scholar, she read what almost all young American poets and scholars of modern American literature read -- Ezra Pound's "ABC of Reading." Hellerstein recalled that he advised aspiring writers and poets to "translate to learn your tradition." The advice spoke to her, and so did a professor who agreed with Pound.
"Where could I fit into the canon that included Pound and T.S. Eliot? Where does a Jew fit in?" she wondered. "I decided my tradition was a Jewish language. I had gone to temple, to Sunday school, I'd been to Israel, but I didn't know anything about my own literary tradition." So she decided to learn Yiddish.
Learn it she did. She became a translator of Yiddish poetry, and she now teaches Yiddish language and literature courses at Penn, after having taught English and American literature at Wellesley and at Haverford.
"Yiddish has been taught at Penn -- mostly by graduate students -- since the '70s," Hellerstein said. The courses are listed in the Germanic languages department and the Jewish studies program. Some are also cross-listed with comparative literature and English.
But Hellerstein takes her pursuit of her tradition beyond the classroom. She advises the student Jewish literary magazine, Ma'ayan. (She led a discussion after giving a reading of her work with Ma'ayan student contributors at Writers House, Tuesday, Nov. 19.)
She is stretching the reach of Yiddish beyond the classroom to the Internet by overseeing an independent study project -- of a "computer major and a biochemistry student who learned Yiddish with me" -- to put an English-Yiddish dictionary on the World Wide Web. The plans are ambitious. They hope to include an audio-visual component of native speakers pronouncing words, with close-ups of their lips and mouths.
She and a professor at the University of Maryland have also set up a pen-pal or "feder-fraynt" exchange between their Yiddish classes. And she's stretching the reach of her students from the classroom to South Philadelphia, where she set up a Yiddish mentoring program for her students -- a sort of live language lab. It started after she brought her students to a concert of the Workman's Circle (a pro-labor, Yiddish language cultural organization) choir at a South Philadelphia Jewish senior citizen center.
"One student felt like he had a whole table of Jewish mothers and grandmothers around him," she said. "I've never seen him smile so much." Now several of her students have been adopted by Yiddish mentors from the center with whom they converse.
Hellerstein had her own Yiddish mentor who initiated her into the joys of Yiddish poetry. While at Stanford, young Hellerstein sat at her mentor's table in Berkeley nearly every Friday morning from the mid 1970s until 1982. Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman was in her 80s, Hellerstein in her 20s.
"We read poetry in Yiddish," Hellerstein said. "She went over my translations and yelled at me. We laughed a lot together. I learned so much from her about her poems, my poems."
The tradition Hellerstein adopted has a rich body of work. Poets wrote in Yiddish as early as the 1500s, and modern Yiddish poetry starting in the 1880s has roots in theater, the labor movement, literature, folk poetry and folk songs, she said. She's translating women's poetry right now for an upcoming anthology of women Yiddish poets, and a book of translations of Kadya Molodowskky's poems is forthcoming.
And by translating the work into English, she is embedding her tradition into the canon that includes Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
II
Before me--an old prayerbook
With yellowed leaves bent at the corners,
Marking women's prayers about dew and rain,
Marking the Binding of Isaac
And Nimrod's fiery lime-kiln.
Tears fell quietly there
And made each leaf soft,
As soft as a heart grows with a prayer.
Fingers that followed the prayers beginning
"May it be Thy will,"
Darkened those lines recited seven times.
And who will now, God-fearing,
Carry the prayerbook under her arm?
Who will turn the yellowed leaves?
Perhaps I shall carry it to my green-covered table,
Place it in the middle,
And when a drought falls upon my heart,
Take the prayerbook to my burning lips.
Kadya Molodowskky
English translation by Kathryn Hellerstein
II
An alter sider ligt far mir,
mit bleter gele ayngeboygene in rogn.
Bay tkhines vegn tal un moter,
bay der akeyde yitskoks
un bay dem brenendikn kalekhoyvn fun nimrod.
Es zaynen trern dort gefaln shtile,
un veykh gemakht dos blat,
vi veykh a harts vert bay a tkhine,
un yehi ratson's ale zaynen
oysgetaytlt mitn finger.
Un shvarts farlofn fun dem zibnmolikn zogn.
Iz ver vet itster dem sider gots-forkhtik
untern orem torgn?
Un ver vet ibermishn gele bleter?
Efsher gor zol ikh im nemen af mayn grin gedektn tish avekleygn in mitn,
un ven a trikenish vet faln af mayn harts
dem sider nemen tsu di brenendike lipn.
Kadya Molodowskky
A volume of translations by Hellerstein of Kadya Molodowsky's Yiddish poems is forthcoming. This poem was written in 1927.
Return to Compass Features for December 10, 1996