Boy was that ever true. My mother’s family were Litvak’s and you cannot imagine with what contempt they used the word “Galizianer” (their word for Poles, although it really means Galicians).
My parents were careful to use Yiddish infrequently enough to avoid us learning it. When my youngest was 2 1/2, we spent a month in Israel. A wheel fell off his stroller. Someone suggested taking it to a repair shop in the area of Jerusalem where Chasidim spoke Yiddish, reserving Hebrew for prayers. I was able to communicate with one guy using my poor excuse for German. They are certainly mutually comprehensible to some extent.
I know that my two grandfathers, one born in Lithuania and the other in Russia were certainly able to communicate with each other in Yiddish.
My mom (82 years old) is fluent in Yiddish. Her grandparents barely spoke English and it was the only way that she could communicate with them. My uncle is 76 and can understand Yiddish but can’t really speak it. He had far less time with their grandparents. As she explained it to me, one of the main dialects of Yiddish was more working class and the other was used more by the educated. They were very mutually intelligible. Her mom’s side of the family spoke one and her dad’s the other.
On the mutual intelligibility issue, despite the very close relationship between Yiddish and Standard German, I (as a native German speaker) find it difficult to understand lengthier texts in Yiddish. Of course the syntax and many words are the same; this I understand easily. But Yiddish has adopted a large number of loan words from other languages, especially Hebrew. To me, Yiddish sounds like a German dialect with a somewhat odd pronunciation that still lets me understand those words that have a German root, but where sentences are interspersed with lots of Hebrew (or adapted from Hebrew) words that I wouldn’t know. In some cases, Yiddish words have later been incorporated into colloquial German. But the number of Yiddish words that are not intelligible to a German speaker, despite Yiddish’s relation to German, is still significant.
ParallelLines, you posting Cecil’s answer to this thread makes me think about the other thread about how the Straight Dope can’t get new users/young people.
The answer to the OP’s question was answered already, yet people are still going on and on about it to the point of deconstructing the question or going down memory lane. I know we are used to it, it is part of the charm and DNA of SDMB, and going into different directions is par for the course on here, but I can just imagine a new user not having any confidence in this thread to get an answer. It just goes on and on, like old men reminiscing, contradicting each other, and using personal family anecdotes.
Quora and Stack Exchange already figured this out on their forums: the OP would mark a response as “answered” and it would be highlighted. Other forums would lock a thread if a question was answered. But here, posters will continue to beat a dead horse.
“Most of the Jewish immigrants to the New York metropolitan area during the years of Ellis Island considered Yiddish their native language. Later, Yiddish was no longer the primary language for the majority of the remaining speakers and often served as lingua franca for the Jewish immigrants who did not know each other’s primary language, particularly following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yiddish was also the language in which second generation immigrants often continued to communicate with their relatives who remained in Europe or moved to Israel, with English, Spanish or Portuguese being primary language of the first and Russian, Romanian, or Hebrew that of the second.”
If anyone is interested in a fascinating story of one man’s 25-year effort to save Yiddish literature, read Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA.
Lansky was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1980 when he came up with an idea that would take over his life and change the face of Jewish literary culture: He wanted to save Yiddish books. With few resources save his passion and ironlike determination, Lansky and his fellow dreamers traveled from house to house, Dumpster to Dumpster saving Yiddish books wherever they could find them—eventually gathering an improbable 1.5 million volumes, from famous writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.B. Singer to one-of-a-kind Soviet prints. In his first book, Lansky charmingly describes his adventures as president and founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, which now has new headquarters at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. To Lansky, Yiddish literature represented an important piece of Jewish cultural history, a link to the past and a memory of a generation lost to the Holocaust. Lansky’s account of salvaging books is both hilarious and moving, filled with Jewish humor, conversations with elderly Jewish immigrants for whom the books evoke memories of a faraway past, stories of desperate midnight rescues from rain-soaked Dumpsters, and touching accounts of Lansky’s trips to what were once thriving Jewish communities in Europe. The book is a testimony to his love of Judaism and literature and his desire to make a difference in the world.
One interesting example is Isaac Asimov, who with his parents and sister emigrated from Russia when he was three-ish. Asimov spoke Yiddish and English - apparently because while his parents knew Russian, they had no use for it in the States, but did have the need for both English and Yiddish.
As you say, it’s a feature rather than a bug of the board. I find that most GQ questions are answered either quickly (in this case) or not at all, with the rest of the thread being amplifications, anecdotes, or the like, exactly as you have said. Which is an advantage of the moderation in the GQ - good focus until the basics are answered and if someone does stumble across this forum of the SDMB, they’re unlikely to miss much.
But to be honest, I think most people who were already not a part of the this community would have gone to wikipedia first, and a google search second if they didn’t find an answer. Which is honestly what I do. With the given that Quora and Reddit are normally about 50/50 the content of said google search. But, somewhat like the dope, with Quora I find that after I’ve read the ‘best’ answer, I will read down the list of answers because the amplification may well be more pertinent (and/or interesting) that the most factual answer.
Which may a factor of my age, since I’m on the lower end of the ‘average’ board age in the still (just) sub-50 set.
Since I’m here (again), I guess I’ll add anecdotes as well. My grandmother spoke Yiddish fluently, my father less so, but while raising us with weekly temple visits, Yiddish was not spoken or taught in the household. My grandmother though was happy to use it when berating my father for any perceived flaws in the raising of us (the grandchildren). My father is a man of many flaws, but seeing the way his mother treated him for raising us with limited (but present) discipline and a lot of love made me understand how much of an effort he made to do things differently. And I think (he is not really willing to speak about it) is why Yiddish wasn’t part of my and my brother’s life - he didn’t have particularly good associations with it.
And what she would have said of me marrying a shiksa, well the less said the better!
** see how I worked the OP back in there? And yes, she would absolutely have used the term**
Odd. I was aware that Yiddish “evolved” from German way back when. I can see it spreading across the borders of Germany, considering those borers too were “fluid” I’m curious how it became the language of, for example, Russian Jews. Was there that much cultural/ethnic mixing in Europe in previous centuries?
A big chunk of “Russian” Jews came there during a period of persecution in Western Europe. I think that most of the “Russian” Jews moved first to Poland and Ukraine and moved into Russia proper under the influence of Russian imperialism.
More like, as Russia expanded they suddenly acquired these funny people called “Jews”. Russia actually put barriers to Jews moving further into their territory.
Jews moved around quite a bit in the past trying to avoid things like pogroms. In some places there were also significant barriers to owning land which also made them less attached to place.
Once had someone tell me that their European relatives didn’t trust Jews because they didn’t own land in the area. I pointed out that at times it was illegal to sell land to Jews, with severe even for Medieval times penalties, which sort of made it impossible for Jews to own land in the area. Uh… yeah… the guy I was talking to got it, his two older from-the-old-country aunts didn’t see the problem there.
As the Golden Horde receded, The Ukraine was the Wild West of the Late Middle Ages, a place were, if they could escape European serfdom, people could enjoy freedom of movement and enterprise. The Jews in Germany had been heavily persecuted, and when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth conquered large sections of the the Ukraine, the Yiddish-speaking Jews made for a ready merchant class and civil service in its development. When the Poles were pushed back out in the 17th Century, life became very tricky for the Jews of Eastern Europe. Taras Bulba is a fun Hollywood movie with Jewish actors Tony Curtis, Abraham Soafer, Sam Wanamaker and probably others, and a score by lantsman Franz Waxman, but the source novel by Nikolas Gogol stinks of antisemitism. The 2009 Russian version is jaw-droppingly truer to the original.