I’m sitting on a lawn chair in our backyard in Skokie, my relatives all ringed around me, the sun beating down on our heads, mottled through the leaves of the trees overhead. There’s a lot of boisterous conversation going on around me, but I sit there staring straight ahead, the idiot American granddaughter. They talk around me, over me, under me, like I’m a vegetable. I don’t understand a word they’re saying. They’re speaking Yiddish.

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I’ve made a concerted effort not to learn Yiddish. For some reason, from the moment I hear it as a small child, I cast it off, decide it’s not for me, that it’s a relic of the Old Country. I resist Yiddish, fight its penetration into my brain tooth and nail. I give my mother a blank look when she tries to speak to me in it. I make her translate.

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I give myself several reasons for my antagonism. First of all, I decide right off the bat that it’s a dead language, so there’s no reason to learn it. After all, only the grown ups around me speak Yiddish, none of the kids. I figure I can wait this thing out. I’ve also absorbed my parents’ desire to be American in all things, to cast off the Old World and embrace the new, and so I cast off the Old World’s Yiddish and embrace the New World’s English. Of course, they don’t mean to do that with language; they want to be able to speak to their children in their mother tongue. And, last of all, since Yiddish is used to hide everything interesting and tantalizing from me, I have a certain amount of hostility towards it.

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My refusal to learn Yiddish causes some problems because one set of grandparents, my father’s parents, never learns English. They resist English as well as I resist Yiddish, eventually dying without letting a syllable touch their lips. And why should they learn it anyway? Yiddish serves all their needs; they commission their sons and daughters to learn English for them, to handle all their transactions with non-Yiddish-speaking merchants, to handle their communications with the outside world. These two grandparents of mine seem to know that it just might not be worth the time and effort to learn such an elaborate, messy and confusing language like English before they die.

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My Dad’s parents are determined to spend their days in America relaxing and enjoying their new status as “senior citizens” in this new country, even if those days stack up together into years and even decades. They never get over the novelty of safety; never take it for granted. They never stop marveling at the amazing American innovations. The convenience of grocery stores - so much better than starving! The traffic signals on every street corner regulating the cars - so much better than cars and horses and wagons all insisting on going at the same time! The mild weather in Chicago compared to Poland and Siberia - a heat wave!

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Just because I can’t speak Yiddish doesn’t mean that I can’t understand some of it. I do understand adjectives and imperatives and direct commands and reprimands. If my mother is mad at someone and decides to hurl an insult under her breath, I can understand that too, the goniffs, the schlimazels, the yachnehs. But the regular conversational ebbs and flows, the make up of ordinary sentences with nouns and verbs, that escapes me.

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My other grandparents, my mother’s parents, learn English, my grandmother better than my grandfather. She understands every word I say; there’s no escaping her, tricking her, or pulling a fast one on her. She’s watching me all the days of my life with eyes magnified by her glasses and ears sharp with the nuances of five languages. All this while my grandfather sits nearby in a suit, his fedora always on his head, even inside the house, practicing the words he has just learned on me.

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“Linda, mameleh, tell me again. Beetles are bugs, nu? Monkeys are animals. But now the Monkees and the Beatles sing songs on the radio? How can this be?”

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Holocaust Memorial Day reminds me of my grandparents, all Survivors, and the Yiddish in our family, now long gone, so today I ran a blog post that is an excerpt from my book,  Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, available on Amazon.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie is available on Amazon and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors. She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.