Practicing Yiddish on Duolingo isn’t the revelation that my brain had assumed it would be after a lifetime of not knowing any of the mother tongue of my father’s parents. Maybe it’s the contrast that’s getting me: going to Pittsburgh back in June WAS something of a revelation, one that contained several amazing revelations within it, like a Russian matrushka doll. We got to go inside the house where Dad was born, and meet the completely lovely people who bought and renovated it, keeping much of the original woodwork that Dad remembered in the fireplace and grand stairwell; we got to meet Dad’s first cousin Alice and the widow of his other first cousin, Robert, along with all their assorted kids and some grandkids, a remarkable and smart bunch of cousins who welcomed us beautifully; and we got to visit the gravesites of some of the deceased relatives, giving Dad a sense of properly mourning them for perhaps the first time. Yiddish, I assumed, would be like that: an opportunity for reconnecting with the Yiddish-speaking ghosts of the family. And maybe once I begin studying in class, it will be! On Duolingo, though, not so much.
To be fair to the app, which is designed for shallow dips into language, Yiddish is an ancient tongue with a unique alphabet that in no way resembles English. You need to read anything at all, you’re already in the deep end. The app’s childlike and childish construction of lessons, wherein you complete small sets of questions and word matching games, each one punctuated by an audible “ding!” to tell you you got it right, is meant to create a steady drip-drip of dopamine in the brain in order to impel you to keep going. So, I keep going, matching the English words to the sounds I think the Yiddish alphabet makes. I get a lot of questions right, I hear the ding each time. But something is missing from my experience.
Yiddish is a cultural asset, a window into the emotional lives and souls of those who spoke it in the last century and before. Before July, when I left Twitter, I followed the Beinecke Library at Yale University, which maintains a robust archive of Yiddish books, artworks, and plays that its staff is steadily digitizing for public online viewing. Through the Beinecke’s website, I have been able to view children’s books with Yiddish lettering and artwork depicting shtetl life in the Pale of Settlement, with its goats and women in head coverings and old men with long beards reading from the Torah in small groups. I have seen first editions of books and plays written in Yiddish, typed on Yiddish typewriters (I’d pay a hefty sum to have the one my Dad says that Grammy Sylvia got rid of after Grandpa Abe died). The Beinecke archivists ensure that you can virtually page through manuscripts, and see even crumbling and yellowed pieces of paper with pencil sketches on them and Yiddish notes made by authors who probably never envisioned their work being seen worldwide. I have a nostalgic love for these writers, these artists and playwrights and poets, whose work documented and celebrated a highly specific type of cultural moment and landscape -- Eastern European Jewish village life, pre-Holocaust, pre-Stalin -- and having them belong to everyone in the world via the internet gives me an odd sense of wrongfootedness. It feels like I just now discovered an obscure but musically interesting subgenre of centuries-old music, started listening to it in carefully curated pieces, and now suddenly everyone is discussing it and I can barely find one of the albums. The feeling is bittersweet and a tiny bit envious, like something I thought was specially mine really isn’t.
Duolingo’s Yiddish lessons aren’t the balm I wanted them to be; they aren’t bringing me closer to my lost, never-known-to-me grandparents. They’re sprinkling lighthearted salt into the wound of separation. Seeing the language, the alphabet that streamed through the consciousness of my ancestors broken into tiny childish chunks of words separated from their meanings -- “ber”, “mame”, “ballon”, “leml” -- has a coarse, unfeeling quality to it. The little cartoon animals and people in Duolingo have sanded away all of the emotion -- all of the language-- in the language. I don’t blame the app developers. They simply responded to the demand that surfaced in their market research somewhere, a demand from folks like me who maybe want to reconnect with their European Jewish ancestry, who maybe want to be able to speak to an old person in their lives, who maybe want to revive a dead language in the hopes that it will revive some of their dreams of a better life, a life of cheap theater tickets and walking to shul, of radio plays and picture books for children, of poetry nights at neighbors’ apartments where ribald jokes and ranting screeds against the capitalist system will help them fall asleep happy, later. That’s all we want, we Yiddish wannabes, you know. But this? This Duolingo, this trippy little shallow scratch into the consciousness, this Pavlovian trickster of the neural networks, this doesn’t deliver. It doesn’t deliver the same gravitas, the same curated palimpsest of meaning and cultural connection that the Beinecke Library or, say the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research do. There’s no meaning to it, no connection to the greater Yiddishkeit culture that I want to gain entry to. There’s just a little bouncy owl, commanding me to match the English transliteration to the Yiddish words and phrases, humiliating me and cheapening the legacy of my ancestors with every Ding. But somewhere in my deeper brain, I know this: my ancestors would find this shit hilarious.
I never met my grandfather, and I only knew my grandmother until I was about three. But they spoke Yiddish to each other in the home, and around my father and uncle as they were growing up, when they needed to talk about things the kids shouldn’t know about. It likely occurred to them at some point, observing the world around them, that Yiddish, the language my grandfather made his living in, either wouldn’t survive the 20th century or would be much reduced in its usage due to the aging out of Yiddish speakers and the advance of Hebrew as the language of choice among most Jews. (Hasidic Jews still speak Yiddish, but they’re famously insular and don’t communicate much outside their own community.) No documents still exist that show any type of emotion on my grandparents’ part about the all-but-disappearance of their native language. They were survivors and adapters, my grandparents; their families had come to this country knowing assimilation, becoming Americans, would likely come at a high cost. The FBI came for them; the Communist Party they had thrown in with to create the world they wanted to see abandoned them; their relatives, fearful, faded from view until they had no one but themselves and their small cadre of comrades to rely on. Everything changed. World events unfolded. Mercy was hard to come by; hostility was everywhere. Why should they expect things to be different? Sentimental attachments to culture, to language, to joyful ways of expression must have seemed a luxury. Schmaltzy, really. They found their way to New York, and there they must have taken what joy they could in the Yiddishkeit that remained. But they never seemed like people who looked backward.
Duolingo’s uniquely flattening effect on global language acquisition, then, may actually have landed as comic relief to them. This language, that people agonized over, that they used in secret, for secrets, that was nearly exterminated along with so many Jews, that Stalin tried to ghettoize into a single region of the Soviet Union, that Israel refused to recognize? This language gets the dings and the boops and the beeps in this new app? The whole Yiddish alphabet, a system from the Middle Ages, not as old as Hebrew but still pretty old, as old as newspapers -- this alphabet can be seen on tiny cell phone screens? By children? Alongside Klingon? What a ridiculous way to have a revival. What a joke. What absurdity. Such mishegas.