Before you hear the first verses of these Jewish poets of Eastern Europe, I should like to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, how much more Yiddish you understand than you believe.
I am not really worried about the impression this evening holds in store for each of you, but I do want it, if it deserves to, to make itself felt at once. Yet that cannot happen so long as Yiddish inspires in some of you a fear one could almost read on your faces. I am not speaking of those who treat Yiddish with disdain. But the fear of Yiddish, a fear mingled at bottom with a certain revulsion, is, if you like, something one can understand.
If we look at our situation with a cautiously distracted eye, we Western Europeans find it, indeed, so neatly ordered: everything there follows its quiet course. We live in a positively cheerful harmony, we understand one another when need be, we manage without the others when it suits us, and even then we never cease to understand one another. From such a state of affairs, who then could understand that confused tongue which is Yiddish, who then could wish to? Yiddish is the youngest of the European languages; it is barely four hundred years old, and in truth it is much younger than that. It has worked out no form endowed with the clarity we require. Its form is terse and swift.
It has no grammars. Amateurs try to write some, but Yiddish is spoken constantly: it never comes to rest. The people does not hand it over to the grammarians.
It consists only of foreign words, but these are not at rest within the language; they keep the liveliness and the haste with which they were filched. Migrations of peoples run through Yiddish from end to end. All this German, this Hebrew, this French, this English, this Slavic, this Dutch, this Romanian, and even this Latin, is taken up inside Yiddish by curiosity and unconcern — it already takes no small force to hold languages in such a state. That, too, is why no reasonable mind dreams of making Yiddish into an international language, tempting as that might be. Only slang borrows from it, and this because it has less need of syntactic relations than of isolated words. And for this further reason: that Yiddish has long been a despised tongue.
But amid this agitation of the language there reign, on the other hand, fragments of known philological laws. The beginnings of Yiddish, for example, go back to the time when Middle High German was in the act of turning into modern High German. There was thus a possible choice between two forms: Middle High German took one, Yiddish took the other. Or Yiddish derived certain forms from Middle High German more consistently than modern High German itself. Thus the Yiddish form mir seien (modern High German: wir sind) is derived more naturally from Middle High German sin than is modern High German wir sind. Or again, Yiddish stayed fixed to the forms of Middle High German in spite of modern High German. Once a thing had entered the ghetto, it did not leave it so quickly. That is how forms such as Kerzlach, Blumlach, Liedlach were preserved.
To this are added, further, the dialects of Yiddish, which pour into this philological formation made of arbitrariness and of laws. For the whole of Yiddish consists only of dialects, and even the written language, although the rules of writing have been largely agreed upon.
In telling you all this, I think, ladies and gentlemen, that I have provisionally convinced most of you that you will not understand a single word of Yiddish.
Expect no help from the explanation of the poetic texts. If you are not in a position to understand Yiddish, no immediate explanation will be of use to you. At best you will understand the explanation and expect to hear something difficult. That will be all. I can tell you, for example:
Mr. Löwy is now going to read you three poems, which is indeed what is going to happen.
First, Die Grine by Rosenberg. The Grine are the Grünen, the “greenhorns” of the emigration, the newcomers in America. This poem shows a small group of Jewish emigrants walking through the streets of New York, their grubby baggage in hand. The crowd, of course, gathers around them, regards them with astonishment, follows them and laughs. Exalted, carried beyond himself by this spectacle, the poet addresses, over and above these street scenes, the Jewish people and humanity. One would think the group of emigrants stops while the poet speaks, although he is far off and cannot hear him.
The second poem is by Frug and is called Sand and Stars. It is the bitter exegesis of a biblical promise. It is said that we shall be like the sand on the seashore and like the stars in the sky. Trampled like the sand, we already are; but when, then, will what is said of the stars come to pass?
The third poem is by Frischmann and is called The Silent Night.
It is night; a pair of lovers meets a pious doctor on his way to the temple. They take fright, fear they will be betrayed, then reassure one another.
As you see, such explanations explain nothing.
Compressed by these explanations, you will try to draw from the reading what you already know, and you will not see what is really there. Fortunately, anyone who understands German is also able to understand Yiddish. Seen from afar — from very far off, of course — the intelligibility of Yiddish is constituted by the German language itself; that is an advantage German has over all the languages of the earth. In return, and rightly so, it gives German a disadvantage. For one cannot translate Yiddish into German. The relations between Yiddish and German are far too delicate, far too charged with meaning not to break the moment one wants to bring Yiddish back to German: what has been translated is no longer Yiddish, but a thing devoid of reality. Through translation into French, for example, Yiddish can be conveyed to the French; through translation into German, it is annihilated. For toit is not exactly tot, and Blut is by no means Blut.
Nor is it only from this distance imposed by German that you will be able, ladies and gentlemen, to understand Yiddish. You will be permitted to draw a step nearer to it. At a time of which one may say at least that it is not very far removed, the familiar commercial tongue used by German Jews appeared as a first degree of Yiddish, drawing near to it or away from it according to whether they lived in town or country, farther east or farther west, and many intermediate shades have remained. That is why the historical evolution of Yiddish might have been followed just as well at the surface of the present as in the depths of history.
For Yiddish to come quite close to you, it is enough that you meditate on the fact that, beyond your knowledge, there are still active within you forces, relations of forces, that make you capable of understanding Yiddish by feeling it. It is only here that the commentator can come to your aid; he does so and reassures you in such a way that you can no longer feel set apart, and that you grant you are no longer permitted to complain of not understanding Yiddish. That is the essential thing, for with each complaint, understanding takes flight. But stay silent, and you will suddenly find yourselves in the very midst of Yiddish. And once you have been moved by it — for Yiddish is everything, the word, the Hasidic melody, and the deep reality of this Jewish actor himself — you will no longer recognize your former calm. It is then that you will be able to feel what the true unity of Yiddish is, and you will feel it so violently that you will be afraid, no longer of Yiddish, but of yourselves. You would not be able to bear this fear if Yiddish did not at once impart to you a confidence in yourself that can stand up to the fear and shows itself stronger than it. Enjoy it as best you can! Should it be lost, tomorrow or later — and how could it endure on the strength of the memory of a single evening alone? — I wish you the power to forget the fear as well. For we did not mean to chastise you.
(Trans. A. Vialatte, Gallimard)