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.
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. There are very few compliments in Yiddish, its Jewish speakers fearing that anything beneficent or good would soon be squashed by the Evil Eye. What the language is particularly good for is cursing. ‘May you grow like an onion with your head in the ground’ looks tame in translation but believe me is pretty frightening when yelled by a Yiddish bubba.
Yiddish, too, is not confined to the Jewish community. We discovered that the former US secretary of state General Colin Powell learnt it as a teenager in the Bronx while working at weekends and summer holidays in a toyshop owned by a Jewish family — much to the surprise of many of the customers, who chattered away in Yiddish not realising that their indiscretions were being overheard by a black teenager.
Over on Radio Two on Saturday night we heard about another subculture in the Bronx that’s almost as dynamic as Yiddish, with its own artwork (graffiti), music (scratching and rapping), dance (breakdancing) and language (try deciphering most of the lyrics). Goldie, the jungle/drum’n’bass specialist who charmed us all on Maestro, is guiding us through the last 30 years of The Rap Revolution: How Hip Hop Changed the World. He traces it, rather surprisingly, back to Cab Calloway but it really took off in the south Bronx in the early 1970s when black kids with nothing to do but hang out on the streets started playing the tracks and patching the breaks to keep everyone moving and dancing to the beat.
Hip hop hit the mainstream almost exactly 30 years ago when the Sugarhill Gang topped the top 40 with ‘Rapper’s Delight’. It sounded a little bit funk, a little bit disco — ‘Ya start poppin your fingers and stompin your feet, and movin your body while youre sittin in your seat…Ya rockin to the rhythm, shake your derriere, Ya rockin to the beat without a care’. Not quite Dowland or Dylan maybe, but under Goldie’s direction it all sounded quite infectious, and accessible, and I was doing fine until we reached the late-1980s and the Beastie Boys when it all got so headache-inducing that I just had to switch off and retire to the sofa with a damp flannel.
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