Yiddish vitality

Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis.

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Schmooze, schlep, schlock — all words that have such an evocative, onomatopoeic meaning and all from Yiddish, a language without a country, an army or a navy, which refuses to die even after one-third of its native speakers were annihilated by the Nazis. On My Yiddisher Mother Tongue (Radio Four, Thursday) David Schneider, whose grandparents, a playwright and an actress, were part of the great flowering of Yiddish culture that occurred prior to the 1930s in Eastern Europe, gave us a potted history of the language and a dose of its inimitable flavour — the comic fatalism, the vibrant emotion, the whining, wailing exuberance of klezmer.

He took his mother back to the theatre in the East End of London where his grandparents used to work after fleeing Vienna. So much, though, has changed. What was once the Grand Palais is now Flick Fashions, the ornate decorations plastered over, the seats replaced by racks of jeans and T-shirts. But Schneider also talked to a Yiddish academic who explained that in spite of its seeming susceptibility to extinction the language has a vitality, a fluidity, a breadth of vision that can absorb other influences so that there’s now a Yiddish word for email and download (though not yet for podcast).

Schneider studied for a doctorate in Yiddish at Oxford and now runs a Yiddish cabaret in the spirit of his grandparents. He told us that Yiddish originated a thousand years ago as an urban German dialect among those Ashkenazi Jews who had settled in the Danube valley, and it then spread across Eastern Europe as far east as Vladivostok and south to Venice, absorbing Slavic and Baltic influences along the way.