German and Yiddish

It's been an unbelievable semester so far. I can't decide if this tops my last semester at Colgate or not. As one professor pointed out, I'm experiencing different kind of stress so I'm actually very happy and upbeat many days.

I'm finishing up my MA thesis on Shanghai Jews' post-war immigration and resettlement in San Francisco. It's going excellent, thank you very much.

I'm focusing on languages. No. More. Seminars! It's been amazing in a way because I'm really starting German in an intensive First Year German course, and I'm continuing my Yiddish readings. So it's been a blast comparing the two languages and "re-learning" Yiddish grammar in my German classes. My Yiddish teachers weren't all that terrific in their pedagogy to help me learn Yiddish grammar. So I was happy for a repeat course on Germanic grammar and boy, do these German teachers explain it so well! Even though it's been six weeks, I'm just so amazed how much better I can understand my Yiddish readings and improve my translation skills. I'm reading Sholem Asch, a very well-known writer who immigrated to America from the Pale, and he wrote Yiddish using German pronunciation. So I'll see aleph and heh in places where they wouldn't be in Standard Yiddish (developed after WWII). Now I read the sentences aloud and listen to myself sound the words out.... usually I can actually figure it out in German! And if my Yiddish dictionary doesn't have the word, even if I've re-written the word in standard Yiddish, I'll take the German pronunciation and transliterate it, and then look it up in German. Works nearly every time. Works every time.

I love my German course. It's fun and it's really nice to be in company of 3 other graduate students plus 9 undergraduates (mostly freshmen). The teachers are so different in their approaches to teaching us German. One is an American Jew who is super-involved with theater so she loves it when we act out dialogues. The other is a native Berliner so she's got that "hot" high German accent that I heard when I was in Berlin two years ago. She's more quiet but excellent at teaching grammar in a systematic manner, as well as teaching us idiomatic German and expressing ourselves. For example, you don't say "Was?!" (What?!) but "Wie bitte?!" ("Pardon?!"). Both of them just love talking about Deutschland. The former tends to do comparisons between German and American behavior. The latter, well, Berlin's her home.

I'm just so surprised how quickly I can pick up German all around. I've actually used my German to do some more archival research for my thesis. Now I can read Aufbau, a German-Jewish newspaper published in the US, to find out what happened with Shanghai Jews and what German Jews in the US knew.

Today, the American Jew teacher and I had a big discussion after we laughed at keyboard differences and went over my questions regarding my quiz and paper. We talked about German today, how I, as a Jew, felt about German language, and exchanged impressions and works. She made me think about how different would my Literature of the Holocaust course be different had my professor included some plays. The instructor asked that maybe I should come to her theater class to talk about my impressions of Berlin. I told her that I had written a blog from when I was in Berlin.

I just read through the entries just now. I must say... Wow. I still remember Berlin but, wow, there were a lot of things that I didn't remember! It was so amazing to see how I felt with certain things, people, and places. I went from "no way in hell I'm living in Germany" to "I want to live in Germany." I grew up a lot during that week. I didn't realize how much I felt at home in Germany in a way that it's scary that I can feel at home both in Germany and Israel. I mean, I had always thought Israel would be the only place that I could call home. But... Germany.... you just can't ignore what Jews contributed to German culture and history. It was as if Germany was "Israel" before the war where so many Jews could live in relative peace and without fear.

And on the way home today, I realized how much "my" Shanghai Jews inspired me to learn German and want to learn it in a good way. These were real German Jews who loved their hometowns in Germany. They had a very vibrant German speaking culture and language in Shanghai that lasted until after the war. When you just sit there and listen to their German accents and talk about Shanghai, there's that strong sense of feeling connected simply because they shared a common language and culture that helped them to preserve through the war. Yes, some came to do little with German when they found out about the Nazis, but just listen to them speak and you just realize that German language experienced beautiful moments during World War II.