Three sides of my family came from Russia: Kiev, Odessa and Ykaterinburg. I knew all of my grandparents (who all grew up speaking English), and met one of my great-grandparents.
My grandparents could all fling Yiddish around, though I’m sure none of them were fluent, so I know a few words and phrases. But would their parents in Russia–upper-middle-class merchants, doctors, teachers–have spoken Russian or Yiddish? Or both? Everyone who might know is dead now.
I have the same sort of questions in my family. My fathers parents were originally Russian and/or Ukrainian. I do remember hearing them speak mostly English with some Yiddish but not anything else.
Personally, I would have assumed that they initially spoke Russian and learned the Yiddish and English when the immigrated, but I don’t know for sure. I guess I don’t know how far east Yiddish was regularly spoken.
My hugely uneducated guess would be that they spoke Russian for business and Yiddish at home and among friends. I once asked my mother and she did not have the slightest idea–her grandparents did *not *like speaking about The Old Country.
In Poland (which I admit is not Russia), the language could be Yiddish for both business and at home. I won’t give a cite for the latter (but will give a nod in the direction of my parents’ friends and relatives), but with respect to business, just look at pictures taken of a Polish city or shtetl where a Jewish business is evident. Many of the signs and the lettering on the windows, etc, are either bilingual (Yiddish and Polish) with Yiddish often being the more prominent one, or sometimes in Yiddish alone.
My great-grandparents were Lithuanian Jews, and my father says that they spoke Russian at home.
That’s not at all a crazy guess for that particular time and place. But for example, my paternal grandfather was born in Riga and came to the U.S. as an infant, and says they spoke German, not Yiddish, in the house. I asked a grad school prof about it (he is a historian specialized in ethnic issues in the Baltics), and he said speaking German was not at all unusual for Baltic urbanites of whatever ethnic persuasion.
I have an ex whose family was Jewish from various parts of Ukraine; the older, more rural ones spoke Yiddish in the home, but the younger, more urban ones spoke primarily Russian. Russian (or possibly Ukrainian, depending on where) would likely have been the primary language of formal education, though.
Eve, my grandparents were from the same area - Kiev, Odessa, as well as small shtetls in Lithuania and Poland. They all spoke Yiddish. My maternal grandparents both came to Canada as babies, so they never learned anything other than English and Yiddish. My paternal grandparents both immigrated as teens or young adults. They spoke Yiddish, English, and Russian but refused to speak Russian in Canada. The only time they used Russian was writing to my great aunt, who never left Russia. I don’t know if this was due to a lack of written literacy in Yiddish, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
My grandmother’s family spoke Yiddish. That was in a what is now Poland, that was part of the Russian Empire before WWI. Along with Yiddish they spoke German and a smattering of Russian and Polish. My grandfather seemed to have come in from somewhere in Russia, and Yiddish was the common language he had with my grandmother. My father was born in the US, but Yiddish was his first language. He didn’t learn English until he went to school, a common situation in NYC in the 1920s.
My mother’s parents were from a town that was sometimes in Poland and sometimes in Russia, depending on who had won the most recent war. They both spoke Polish and Yiddish, and probably knew some Russian. My father’s parents came from Belarus and spoke Russian and Yiddish. As far as I know, none of my grandparents spoke English before coming here.
The only grandparents I knew were my father’s mother and my mother’s father, both of whom were widowed, and had married each other by the time I was born. I don’t recall them ever speaking anything but Yiddish or English.
My parents, born here and English-speaking, spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want us kids to understand. Of course we never let on how much we picked up.
Interesting! I guess they were bilingual. All the documents I have are in pre-Revolutionary Russian (hard to get translated!), but of course gov’t. papers would not have been in Yiddish.
Why is pre-Revolutionary Russian hard to translate?
You may want to check out this fabulous, mostly volunteer-run Jewish genealogy site, especially the sectionwhere you can upload photos and documents to see whether anyone can help translate/identify them.
Several letters were removed from the alphabet during a post-Revolutionary spelling reform, plus then there are the antiquated historical terms that aren’t used in modern Russian. Also, I personally find old handwritten documents pretty difficult to decipher.
Happily, I had a friend in the CIA who found someone who could still translate old Russian–which is how I found that our last name was originally Shaknovich-Polchitsky, and my father’s paternal grandparents were actually “peasants!”
Somebody heard the name Shaknovich-Polchitsky and wrote down Golden? Boy, those guys at Ellis Island weren’t even trying.
Reminding me of the joke about the Chinese guy named “Sam Ting” who was in line behind Ole Olson . . .
Ditto for the Lower East Side in NYC, an area that has been subsumed by Chinatown.
My grandparents all spoke Yiddish. My maternal grandmother told me that the rabbi had taken a liking to her and taught her Russian. Although she came to the US at age 13 (around 1898), she still knew enough to help me with some math paper in Russian. But the family always described themselves as Litvok (that is, Lithuanian) and I don’t know exactly where they came from. My grandfather was some sort of cousin, so I assume came from the same place. He was only 1 when his family emigrated (around 1886) and my mother grew up not speaking Yiddish, which she eventually learned to be able to speak to her in-laws, that is my paternal grandparents. AFAIK, their only language was Yiddish (and very broken English). My father certainly spoke only Yiddish until he started school. All the kids on the street also spoke Yiddish. His parents were definitely Russian, but I don’t know from where exactly. None of them spoke much about the old country. My father’s parents emigrated as newly marrieds; all their kids were born here. Since the eldest was born in 1905, I assume they came some time around 1904, but they do not appear on the Ellis Island records. Were there other ports of entry? They would up in Philadelphia; I don’t know why. I do know why my mother’s grandparents ended up in Philly, but that’s another story.