The crack of the bat and the smell of freshly shorn grass still inspires memories of Ebbets Field and the old Brooklyn Dodgers for Wallace Bernstein.
He can still picture Duke Snider patrolling center field, the scent of Nathan’s hot dogs and the words to the anthem of the national pastime:
“Nem mikh mit tsu der ball geym!
Tsum oylem lomir dokh geyn,
Koyf mir di neislekh un kreckerjek,
Vil ikh keyn mol fun dort nit avek!”
“Actually, I can speak Yiddish much better now than I could as a kid,” admitted the San Rafael resident, just minutes after crooning “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the mamaloshen, or mother tongue.
Bernstein, having warmed up his vocal chords, offered to sing a Yiddish version of “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” as well as put a Yiddish spin on some Shakespearean sonnets.
Although both offers (as well as one to recite the Gettysburg Address in Yiddish) were politely declined, Bernstein made his point — he’s hooked on Yiddish.
Bernstein, who’s a founding member of the Marin Jewish Community Center’s Keep Yiddish Alive Club, is not alone.
There are Yiddish flashcards, Yiddish magnetic poetry sets, Yiddish Web sites and Yiddish cowboys. If that weren’t enough, Harvard University recently added a chair in Yiddish literature.
And the 7-year-old Keep Yiddish Alive Club, which charges no dues, regularly draws more than 30 people to its monthly meetings at the MJCC in San Rafael. Activities include Yiddish films, Yiddish story-telling sessions and Yiddish culture programs.
Yiddishkeit has entered the zeitgeist, it seems.
According to Phil Kutner, a Yiddish guru from San Mateo, the reasons why Yiddish has crept back into the cultural lexicon are manifold.
He cited an interest in roots, the revival of klezmer and cyber technology.
“The Internet has really helped out the Yiddish cause,” said Kutner, who publishes an Anglo-Yiddish newsletter and features Yiddish activities on his own Web site, www.derbay.org. “It’s basically allowed people to form virtual shtetls.”
Kutner, who has spoken often at Keep Yiddish Alive meetings, said there are more than 300 Yiddish clubs worldwide, many of which are listed in Der Bay.
Although Hebrew remains the lingua franca of the Jewish people, Yiddish — comprised mainly of old German, with fragments of Slavic and Hebrew — is not far behind, Kutner suggested.
“Go into any convenience store in the world, where the owner is Jewish, and the person will know some Yiddish,” said Kutner. “In the ancient times, Hebrew was spoken among the intellectuals, and Yiddish was spoken among friends and between the sheets. And that’s why, even in Israel, Yiddish is making a comeback — because it’s truly a language of the people.”
The comeback of Yiddish in the Promised Land is already at hand, according to Jerusalem-born Zipora Langberg. The San Rafael resident, who’s been attending Keep Yiddish Alive meetings for three years, said Yiddish was frowned upon when she was growing up.
“I’m a fourth-generation Israeli, and although we all spoke Yiddish at home, Hebrew was the language spoken publicly,” Langberg said. “That’s because Hebrew was the language of patriotism, of reclaiming the land and of the sabras.
“Yiddish was never thought of in those terms.”
But Langberg, who considers Yiddish the most expressive language she knows of, said she’s getting back to her roots, like many members of the Yiddish club.
“It take me back to my childhood days in Beit Yisrael,” she said of her neighborhood outside of Tel Aviv. “It brings back memories.”
For Yiddish club member Judith Lubeck, who organizes most of the meetings, those memories are of the “Los Angeles shtetl” she grew up in.
“Everybody spoke Yiddish,” recalled Lubeck of her Boyle Heights childhood home. “You had all the bubbes clucking away in Yiddish, sharing neighborhood gossip,” said the San Rafael resident.
For Lubeck, participating in the club gives her a communal feeling that spans across generations and continents.
“We’ll hold a meeting, and people will tell stories in Yiddish, and then they’ll mention some small Polish village where they came from, and somebody from the back of the room will say, ‘That’s where my ancestors are from!’
“It just goes to show you what a small world it can be — and if we were all sitting in our houses and never got together, we wouldn’t know all this.”
But at meetings, just as anytime a bunch of Jews gather to hash out ideas, there’s a lot of kibitzing and kvetching going on.
“It’s who we are as Jews,” said Lubeck, laughing. “There’s power, drama, and intensity…and never one final answer.”
Bernstein also noted that there could be 30 different Yiddish interpretations of a word, depending on the amount of people that showed up for a meeting.
“But the real joy of the club,” he said, “is when people get their tongues and lips around all these precious, historic words, I get a tremendous amount of pleasure from keeping such a beautiful language and heritage alive.”