The Connection

Why care about Yiddish? "It connects us,"
says one of its biggest advocates.

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM

AppleTree Editor

W

hen Adrienne Cooper
remembers the long-ago
words of her grandparents
— words of the anguish of Jews liv-
ing in anti-Semitic Eastern Europe,
of struggles endured by new immi-
grants to the United States, of warm
and comforting Shabbats, of fresh
challah and sweet, dark wine — she
remembers them exactly as they were
said. In Yiddish.

Yiddish performer Adrienne Cooper

"In a consumer culture like ours,
it's difficult for families to convey
their value systems and what makes
them special," she says. "For Jewish
families, part of what makes us spe-
cial is our heritage, and Yiddish is
such a part of that heritage. It's
everything that is endlessly lovely,
hard, charming, tragic, beautiful,
painful and historically important. It
was part of the immigrant milieu, .
part of everything that was destroyed
in the Holocaust. It was the lan-
guage of our grandparents."
Cooper is director of the Center
for Cultural Life at the Workman's
Circle national office in New York.
She's also an international educator
and finger who performs with
Mikveh and the Klezmatics, and a
devoted advocate for Yiddish lan-
guage and culture.
Of course, she hears it all the time:
"Yiddish, today? What on earth for?
Hardly anyone even speaks it.

What's the point?"
"It connects us," she says. "We
become part of the sounds, the
tastes, the songs, the-comforts of a
really intimate, early Jewish experi-
ence."
Which is why, she explains,
Yiddish culture can serve as "an
anchor," like religion, that recon-
nects Jews to their community, and
their history.
"A lot of young Jews today are
experiencing -a cultural loss. They
want to know, 'What's specific about
my Jewish inheritance?"' she
says.
"Yiddish is a sweet way to
learn that, and an important
part of Jewish literacy. It's part
of our heritage of social justice
and our modern political expe-
riences. All those Jewish move-
ments that led to revolutions
and the foundihg of the State
of Israel and liberalism — these
were heroes, and they all spoke
Yiddish."
"Yiddish is like a secret hand-
shake," Cooper adds, "through
which you get to enter back to
Jewish culture."
Interestingly, Yiddish cul-
ture is usually part of a secular
culture, though another group
shares their passion for the language.
Some anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews
also speak only Yiddish.
"They do this to separate them-
selves," Cooper says. "But we see
Yiddish as a path to our past, a his-
torical resonance combined with a
modern identity.
"We [secular and the anti-Zionist
Orthodox] Jews both look at the
same thing, but we see a completely
different use for it."

Generation To Generation

Cooper first learned Yiddish from
her mother, who sang Yiddish songs
and taught her to read Yiddish so
she could enjoy her grandparent's
weekly letters in the original.
Cooper then taught Yiddish to her
own daughter, Sarah Gordon, "and
she was really raised in a klezmer
community." Sarah participated in

THE CONNECTION

on page 64

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