We meet on Thursdays, six or seven of us. A religious woman who covers her cropped head comes and goes. We sit in a semicircle around our teacher, an Argentinean woman who speaks Spanish, Hebrew, a smattering of Ladino, English and Yiddish.
Many years ago, in a second-hand bookshop, I found a children’s first learner textbook in Yiddish. It was published in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1930 and with its owner must have escaped destruction by emigrating south. When I picked up the book with its frayed yellowing pages and faded cover, I noticed immediately that I could read Yiddish in its original Hebrew script. Today, because I attend the beginners’ class of the Yiddish Academy of Johannesburg, I can speak the almost-lost language my ancestors used for at least eight centuries.
Yiddish is phonetically spelt according to a system devised in the early 20th century by founders of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna, known as the ”Jerusalem of eastern Europe” before the Holocaust. The language is part Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and German. With the waves of Jewish migration as a result of pogroms and impending world war, it travelled to the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Palestine and Southern Africa.
To begin with, the immigrants who spoke Yiddish in South Africa lived in shacks in Doornfontein, were itinerant traders in the country and in spazas in Fordsburg, and worked as miners on the diamond diggings.
By the late Fifties, the language was a threatened institution. It was spoken in kitchens and at informal gatherings, but was derided by the country’s domineering Zionist organisations.
I grew up on the East Rand, where I attended Hebrew classes that included scripture readings and the colloquial Hebrew we would someday use when we had emigrated to Israel, like the good Zionists we were obliged to become.
At home, my mother spoke Yiddish to her Lithuanian parents, who moaned about our education. I often heard my grandfather complain: ”But they’re not learning any Yiddishkeit!”
In 2000, Joseph Sherman, Corob fellow of Yiddish studies at Oxford University, recounted the sad tale of the demise of South African Yiddish in Memories, Realities and Dreams: Aspects of South African Jewish Experience. In this, Sherman described the censorious attitude of the South African Board of Jewish Education, which outlawed Yiddish in South African classrooms as the inferior, non-literary language of the ghettoes. Hebrew was the language of the Zionist victors.
The situation in the Yiddish press was, according to Sherman, also complex. In the late Fifties, the local Yiddish cultural federation was staunchly Stalinist and pro-Soviet. As news of Stalin’s mass killings of Jews surfaced, so the local press was censored by ”a cast of Yiddish-speaking bourgeois, all profiting from a racially discriminatory capitalist system, striking ideological attitudes behind closed doors of a limited membership club”.
Fear of the nationalist government’s anti-communist witch-hunt drove some left-wing Jews out of the country and, as Sherman writes, others to absurd measures to disguise the origins of their Yiddish literature — even excising the names of Soviet publishers from their books.
Today, if one attends auctions and synagogue fetes, one can pick up Yiddish books published in Johannesburg in the first half of the last century. It’s a lost library of poetry, novels, comic sketches and reflective prose.
Because of the teaching that goes on in a side room of a synagogue in Oaklands (there is also a small Yiddish school in Cape Town), some of the rarities may some day be translated for a wider audience.
Some months back, I got a call from the Selwyn Segal hostel to say that a Yiddish book had been found in their storeroom. After making my way to a wooden Zozo in the grounds of the Jewish old age home, I held the book in my hands — a leather-bound tome of poetry about Johannesburg by David Fram, published in Vilna in 1928. The cover was beautifully embossed in a modernist design. There were illustrations signed by the painter Irma Stern.
”How much does it cost?” I asked the young volunteer, who could not read a word of Yiddish.
There was no price. The book is priceless.