Vos macht a Yid?

I went to a small Farmer’s Market in Riverdale yesterday and there was a stand that caught my attention. Three young people from a Yiddish farm upstate New York. They didn’t have much to sell but they had a good story.

Here’s a look by Sam Frizell writing for Gothamist:

“It’s different to be Jewish in English than it is to be Jewish in Yiddish,” says Tsipore Angelson, 29, who grew up in a secular family and spent several years in China. Earlier this summer she learned Yiddish for a week on the farm and comes back to help out sometimes. She still speaks Yiddish at home with friends she made on the farm.

“The whole culture lies in the language,” she continues. “This is a vital culture that didn’t die. This is a language that young people want to be a part of.”

Here is a 1970 story by I.B. Singer. It was written in Yiddish and recently translated by David Stromberg:

Being a writer for a Yiddish newspaper means wasting half the workday on people who come to request advice or simply to argue. The manager, Mr. Raskin, tried several times to bring this custom to an end but failed repeatedly. Readers had each time broken in by force. Others warned that they would picket the editorial office. Hundreds of protest letters arrived in the mail.

In one case, the person in question didn’t even knock. He threw open the door and before me I saw a tiny man wearing a black coat that was too long and too wide, a pair of loose-hanging gray pants that seemed ready to fall off at any moment, a shirt with an open collar and no tie, and a small black spot-stained hat poised high over his brow. Patches of black and white hair sprouted over his sunken cheeks, crawling all the way down to the bottom of his neck. His protruding eyes—a mixture of brown and yellow—looked at me with open mockery. He spoke with the singsong of Torah study:

[Photo Via: It’s Never Summer; Half a Day on Sunday]