Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture

6. Fading Tradition: On a Dying Language and Lore

248 6 Fading Tradition On a Dying Language and Lore Why would a group transplanted to a new place and concerned about preserving its traditions not pass down its lore to the next generation? That question troubled me because I had to account for a situation that broke with the prevalent presumption among professional observers of traditions, or ethnographers, that elders in a community seek to engage youth in a natural cycle. A preservationist appeal that typically resonates from ethnographic writing is that the senior bearers of traditional wisdom seek young apprentices to carry the torch of tradition into the future. After all, is not the power of tradition its ability to carry on the values and meaning of one’s cultural life? Do not people gain a sense of immortality by knowing that they are part of an unbroken chain from the past to the future? This question especially concerned me, as an educator looking for continuities in language and lore over time, because my own mother was part of an immigrant cohort that, despite their pride in their language-based Yiddish culture and their efforts to enact it in everyday life, preferred that it die with them. Yet, as a son of Holocaust survivors, I was taught the importance of saving precious cultural roots to renew the tree of life. Much of the speculation about the death of Yiddish and the culture revolving around it was assuredly triggered by the end of the millennium . With the beginning of the twenty-first century and its metaphor of a fresh start in sight, many linguistic pundits declared that moment to be a terminus for Yiddish in Jewish history. Benjamin Harshav’s book The Meaning of Yiddish (1990), for example, closes with the headline-like chapter title “The End of a Language.” His proclamation frames a tidy On a Dying Language and Lore 249 historical evolution from origins in medieval Europe to development in eastern Europe and transplantation in America. Following were various artistic revivals in twentieth-century America in response to modernization and, ultimately, demise under the weight of assimilation. This historical outline commonly has a social reference to “secular” Jews— or, more accurately, nonpietistic Jews—for whom Yiddish is a primary mark of identity, a form of ethnic and artistic expression outside of religion. In the United States, it has a more focused reference to the generation of immigrant Jews who came from eastern Europe between 1884 and 1924, particularly in the momentous “great wave” years of 1904 to 1914. A set of social associations with this Yiddish-speaking group arose: they were wage laborers, urban (especially in the Northeast , including New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, which accounted for 86 percent of the foreign-born Jewish population between 1899 and 1910, with New York alone accounting for 64.2 percent), and artistic (through Yiddish films, novels, drama, and poetry). With the announcement of Yiddish as history, the implication is that assimilation to America among second- and third-generation Jews transformed Jewish culture and brought the language down. With this implication is the corollary that Jews’ geographic horizon shifted from eastern Europe to Israel, along with a linguistic shift to Hebrew and “ethnic” expression within English. One complication of charting a devolution of Yiddish in the late twentieth century is the contribution of Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe to a revitalized American Yiddish culture in the second half of the twentieth century. One indication is that the U.S. census between 1960 and 1970 recorded a 33 percent increase in the number of people claiming Yiddish as their mother tongue. In succeeding decades, the number dwindled. In the 1980 census, 315,953 persons acknowledged that they used Yiddish at home. That number dwindled by 157,000, or a drop of 50 percent, twenty-seven years later (Shin and Kominski 2010, 6). In 2007 Yiddish was seventeenth among languages other than English used at home in the United States—a sharp drop of eleven places from the 1980 census. Although the New York metropolitan area was still the leading center for Yiddish usage (76 percent of all Yiddish speakers), Miami and Los Angeles had concentrations as well (4 and 2 percent of all Yiddish speakers, respectively). Only a dozen of the fifty states had more than a thousand Yiddish speakers. A 250 EXPLAINING TRADITIONS prominent symbol for the emblematic use of Yiddish among Holocaust survivors, and in fact...