Yiddish has the odds stacked against it \u2013 the vast majority of its speakers were murdered in the Holocaust, its use was repressed in the postwar Soviet Union, Israel favoured Hebrew over it, and it faced the challenges that any immigrant language faces in a new country, including in Canada. Yet, Yiddish lives on, and can continue to do so, and even flourish, contends Rebecca Margolis, director and Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilization at Monash University, in Australia.<\/p>\n
Margolis, who is originally from Canada, will be in Vancouver to launch her new book, Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission<\/em>, at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture on May 23, 7:15 p.m. Introducing Margolis will be the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir with the song \u201cYomervokhets,\u201d a Yiddish translation of \u201cJabberwocky\u201d by Raphael Finkel, set to music by the choir\u2019s conductor, David Millard.<\/p>\n The event is particularly special, as Margolis uses the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir \u2013 in which I\u2019ve sung for more years than I can recall \u2013 as one of many examples of a \u201ccreated language space.\u201d Such spaces are \u201csites that are deliberately created to support the continuity of a language that is not commonly a mother tongue or widely spoken,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>The small section that features the choir cites the work of local Yiddish scholar and translator Faith Jones, who is a member of the choir as well, and the book references a paper that she and I wrote together in tandem with the 2019 online exhibit marking the choir\u2019s 40th anniversary. I have to say it was an exciting surprise to find a paper I co-wrote quoted, but it\u2019s a quote from Faith\u2019s 1999 thesis on the Yiddish library of the Peretz Centre (the choir\u2019s home, too) that helped me clarify some of what draws me to Yiddish. In commenting on the intersections between Yiddish, politics and identity, Faith wrote that \u201cwhat these strands have in common is the belief in the power of human beings to alter the course of history. In left political life, in feminist theory, in the movement for lesbian and gay equality, in the political culture of secular humanism, it is not the past which is romanticized, but the future. Yiddish does not offer the path to the past as much as to a collective future which is linked with the past: a better future, but better because of human endeavour.\u201d<\/p>\n