Yiddish and Yiddish Accents

[Queequeg]

I grew up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood and the first school I ever went to was Jewish, but in all that time I think I've only ever heard a Yiddish or Yiddish influenced accent twice in my life- an old Rabbi in one of my first memories, and an extremely old woman at a market in New York. Both of them likely were raised either in Europe or still largely Yiddish speaking.

Does anyone hear a real Yiddish accent on a regular basis in 2012? Is a Williamsburg or other New York Jewish accent as close as you get? Chicago has a large Jewish population but I have to think really hard for even non ironic usage of Yiddicisms.

What about Israel?

[Weijun]

In a nursing home?  Isn't the average native speaker of Yiddish in his 90s?

[Brazen]

Oh yes, there are plenty of very strong Jewish communities in London with plenty of good old-fashioned accents. Every other offspring being sent back to Israel to make a good marriage doesn't hurt either.

The closest to me is Golders Green. There's an eruv marked out so people can carry out tasks normally forbidden on the Sabbath.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2205486.stm

[mongers]

Oh yes, there are plenty of very strong Jewish communities in London with plenty of good old-fashioned accents. Every other offspring being sent back to Israel to make a good marriage doesn't hurt either.

The closest to me is Golders Green. There's an eruv marked out so people can carry out tasks normally forbidden on the Sabbath.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2205486.stm

Weird that they should get Gerry Adams in to help with the boundaries. 

[Razgovory]

Imagine JR has.  They still have some Yiddish speakers in New York.

[Valmy]

I hear the accent from Israelis on the internet sometimes.  Maybe former Soviet Union types?

[Queequeg]

Bump.

Really?  Nobody?  There's a pretty big Jewish population here too.

[derspiess]

It may surprise you to know that growing up in West Virginia I never heard a Yiddish accent firsthand.  But I've heard it from time to time in my travels, most recently last year at Chicago O'Hare.  Some dude was hilariously fussing at his wife at the gate next to mine.

[Queequeg]

It's probably my favorite accent. 

[katmai]

Such a spaz spellus

[Ideologue]

Is QQ fetishizing an ethnicity again?

[Zoupa]

You hear yiddish all the time in Montreal. Big communities in a few neighbourhoods.

[Syt]

I love Yiddish, because it's pretty easy to understand if you know German. The Jews in Vienna, though, speak either German or Hebrew.

[Admiral Yi]

Bump.

Really?  Nobody?  There's a pretty big Jewish population here too.

Dude, Jews are the most assimilationist minority we have in the US.  Jews have the highest intermarriage rate of any ethnic group: 50%. There is no way they're going to hold onto an immigrant accent for two generations.

You got the Lubovitchers.  Other than that the most ethnic you're going to get is New Jersey hausfraus who sound like Mike Myer on SNL.

[Capetan Mihali]

Yes, I have. 

My paternal grandfather was the youngest of his brothers by ~10 years, and his father and mother got off the boat from Poland as teenagers c. 1900-1905.  My very old great-aunts and cousins had Yiddish "accents" at the very least, and they all had at least some fluency in Yiddish, which I heard when I saw them as a kid.  (They'd be about 100-105 today.)  He was estranged from his brothers, and most of them died in the 1960s-70s anyways, so I never heard it spoken by a man in my family.

My cousin Mae, born about 1917, who lived in Brooklyn her whole life (only leaving greater New York a single momentous time, for a wedding in Florida) and worked at Macy's for 50 years, definitely spoke Yiddish from time to time and had a pronounced Yiddish accent -- noticeably different than a generic Brooklyn or old working-class NY accent.

My great-aunt Flo was quite assimilated and non-religious (she spent the self-described best years of her life living in Las Vegas during the Jewish mob years of the 40s and 50s), but as an old woman she lived in a neighborhood in Brooklyn with a lot of Yiddish-speaking Hasids.  So when we visited her, I'd hear them on the street, in shops, etc.  Actually, they were the bane of her existence, and she would constantly rant about how the "yiddles" gave her shit for pushing her shopping cart around on the Sabbath.


Hell, I heard some Yiddish back in November.  I got to my interview for a Bronx public defender organization way too early and was freezing cold with a fever, so I just rode the B train all the way from Yankee Stadium to Brighton Beach and back.   An old guy was yammering on his cell phone in mixed Yiddish and English once the train got above ground.

Oh and the most gripping story about Yiddish that I have, I didn't witness first-hand, but my pop and his siblings did.  My grandpa never used any Yiddish around his kids (except schmuck, putz, schvartze, etc.).  So they weren't even really aware that it was his first language as a child. 

(As an aside, he smoked 4-5 packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day for about 30 years, then "quit" and smoked 7 cigars/day for the next 20 years, claiming to inhale "every other puff."  My hero. :  I doubted that it was possible to smoke that much, but you could smoke everywhere back then, and he drove a cab for a long stretch, so unlimited smoking potential there.  And he'd wake up every hour or two for a cigarette at night.  Also, people didn't huff them like you do today at nearly $.50 a damn cigarette; you could just light one, take a couple drags, and then forget about it.) 

But when he was dying from lung cancer, in his delirium, he somehow reverted back to only speaking Yiddish to everyone gathered by his death-bed for his last few days alive.  Which I think really spooked them, least of all because he was virtually unintelligible to them.  Even spooked my grandmother a bit, since he never used Yiddish with her, and since she came from a better-off family than his, of furniture-makers in Worcester Mass., not growing up around very much Yiddish.

So that's my total anecdotes re: Yiddish, as well as my Jewish family story. 

Oh, I guess I did meet a few progressive Yiddish revivalists in their 20s-30s when I was in college, trying to keep the Yiddish newspaper going and doing oral history, etc.  And they could speak some.  But I don't really count that.