Kvelling, Shepping and almost Plotzing

Oy. I am kvelling today and also shepping nachas. At the same time, I'm so verklempt that I could just plotz.

Allow me to explain.

Yiddush, like all languages, really, is a hybrid tongue. It was born a thousand years ago out of Middle High German, eventually incorporating words from Hebrew and the various languages of the countries in which it was spoken. It was the language of the ghetto, the primary tongue of Central and Eastern European Jews who lived in homogeneous communities inside walls built for them by their gentile "hosts". Before WWII, Yiddush was spoken by 11 million people. It followed the Jews who fled Europe to Israel, the Americas and elsewhere, but thanks to assimilation, use of the language has been decimated. No more than about a million people speak Yiddush today.

Beginning in 1897, there was a legendary Yiddush daily newspaper published on Manhattan's Lower East Side called the Forverts. By the 1930's they also had a Yiddush radio station, WEVD, that was listened to by thousands. In 1990, it converted to publishing a weekly, English paper known as the Forward, which covers stories of interest to the International Jewish community. I recently visited the Lower East Side, which was still an entirely Jewish neighborhood when I was a small child and used to get most of my clothes there. I happened to take a photograph the Forverts building. The paper's Yiddush name is still carved into the stone facade, but on the side, in bright red paint, it says only "FORWARD". The Yiddush signs that once hung all over the streets of the neighborhood are mostly gone, or covered with graffiti. The few that were preserved can be seen inside the once grand and recently renovated Eldridge Street synagogue, also built in 1897.

Today, Europe has many fewer Jews than it did 100 years ago; many of the old ghettos are now ghostly museums of a lost culture. All (North and South) American Jews speak English, and so do almost all Israelis, for that matter. With a few notable exceptions, most Jews no longer live in tightly knit insular communities, able to use their own community language. And yet, the Yiddush language is still alive, and is even enjoying a resurgence, and not only among Jews.

I was listening to a book on tape yesterday, written by Sue Miller and read by the WASPy actress Blair Brown, and I noticed that she pronounced "spiel" as an English word, without sounding the "sh"(the sound of the letter "shin") in the first syllable. I wondered if Blair thought she was saying an English word, whether she had heard "shpiel" uttered in Hollywood, and thought it was a different word, or perhaps a mispronunciation, possibly related to the presence, in the mouth of the person speaking, of a still remaining bit of bagel, with a schmear.

I often hear non-Jews in the Midwest, where I live, use the words "shmata", "maven", "chutzpah" and "shlep". While in Florida, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York, I am more likely to hear the additional use of "nosh" "gonif" or "megillah". Many of these Jewish words appear in English dictionaries. However, I think few non-Jewish people fully appreciate the wide array of meanings that can be communicated merely through inflection, whereas Jews use this inflection in their English-language conversation all the time.

My friend Sandey (who am I kidding, Sandey is not just a friend, but the bubby who arranged our shiddach!) recently read of my kvelling on facebook and responded by writing a post that I should "keep shepping". So, then, I found myself trying to explain the subtle difference between kvelling and shepping nachas to my darling husband, Paul. I was having a bit of trouble, so I tapped my finger on my favorite helper icon on my iphone, the blue one with the white lower case "g".

There on my iPhone, with the help of google, I discovered there are some mensches in the blogosphere devoting themselves to helping non Yiddush speakers understand, appreciate and navigate the Yiddush language; I was immediately drawn in. Eventually, Paul sighed, and wandered off to take a shower, and I drifted toward my computer to share with you.

There is a simply wonderful chart on www.bubbygram.com parsing the many ways the same sentence can mean so many things, depending on where the speaker places the emphasis. I was simultaneously mortified and relieved, after reading her example, and also, grateful to the Fine Arts Fund and the other contributors who make it possible for my orchestra to give free concerts. Here, you will see what I mean:

I should buy two tickets for her concert? meaning "after what she did to me?"
I SHOULD buy two tickets for her concert? meaning "what, you're giving me a lesson in ethics?"
I should BUY two tickets for her concert? meaning "I wouldn't go even if she were giving out free passes!"
I should buy TWO tickets for her concert? meaning "I'm having enouch trouble deciding whether it's worth one!"
I should buy two TICKETS for her concert? meaning "She should be giving out free passes, or the hall will be empty!"
I should buy two tickets to HER concert? meaning "Did she buy tickets to our daughter's recital?"
I should buy two tickets for her CONCERT? you mean, they call what she does a "concert"?

So, being a Jew, I immediately react to all of this by worrying "oy gevalt!? which of my so-called friends have been thinking, or G-d forbid, saying these things to each other when I ask them to my concert? or when I tell them Max is in a show with $20 tickets? oy vey is mir, do they think I'm a shnorrer? or that I have a lot of chutzpah? or do they, G-d willing, understand that we performers are just wasting our time if we don't have an audience?

This is beyond language, vocabulary or inflection. This is the Yiddush soul.