An Interview from the pages of Di Tsukunft (Vol 113 – 2010)

Yiddish Is a Bouquet that Blooms in the Heart: an interview with Chava Lapin by Boris Sandler

We met with Chava Lapin at the YIVO, where she goes twice a week to volunteer in the archives. She held a cup of coffee in one hand and with the other, she indicated our path through the winding back corridors of the building that led us, eventually, to the archive where several women of a certain age were busy with the card catalogs and indexes. Chava introduced us all.

Three of the women I already knew well: Chana Mlotek, Nina Rogow, and Hinda Jacobs. For them, the archive materials are not simply faded papers and yellowed photographs. They themselves, throughout their lives and through their activities in the world of Yiddish, had each in her way contributed to this very YIVO archive.

Chava Lapin is well known in Yiddish circles the world over as an experienced teacher and cultural activist. For years she led the Yiddish educational department at the (then) Workmen’s Circle, and for many summers she taught Yiddish courses in the various seminars and programs in Europe and the United States.

As we say in Yiddish, af a vort iz Khave nisht karg – Chava doesn’t spare words. But it’s another matter when one approaches her with questions about her own life. However much she dismissed these questions, though, I plodded on and took a whole hour out of her workday at the YIVO for the good of our column A Figure in the Landscape of American Yiddish.

Chava:
You ask about my home? Alright. My father was born in Warsaw. His name was Henoch Petrushka. He was one of the youngest children in their home. But the oldest had been been born in Poland, in Ostrove, Ostrów-Mazowiecka. My grandmother was from Brok and [Yiddish writer and lexicographer] Nokhum Stutshkov knew and remembered her.  One time when I went to see him, he asked a few questions and then said “You must be Khaye-Dine’s grandchild – you have the same gift of gab.” My grandfather was from Ostrov…. My mother was from the shtetl Koseve, not the Kosev in Ukraine that they sing about in the song [Fun Kosev biz Kitev], but from Kosów Lacki, in the Siedlce area, three Polish miles from Treblinka.

My father emigrated to Canada in 1926, my mother a year later. Mind you, they had already married in Poland. But Canada wasn’t then allowing in families, not wanting them to become a burden on the government. There was no social safety net yet. Even the HIAS at the time considered it a great favor if they provided you some kind of support. So my father stayed with his brother, who had already settled in Montreal. My mother was the first in her family to come to Canada, but later she brought her sister and two brothers, so the house was an immigrant home.

Of course you’ll ask: what kind of education did we have? My father, who was born in 1901, went to kheyder until age 13. Then the war broke out and that was the end of kheyder. His family had a shop, and he had to help out there because his older brothers were either drafted or fled the draft. So he studied on his own. He was one of the last students of Reb Menachem Bomze, a renowned Torah scholar in Warsaw and, if you’d like to hear even more pedigree, my uncle, that is, one of my father’s brothers, was Symcha Petrushka [who translated the mishnayes into Yiddish and created the Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore]. Whatever the case may be, my father was a passionate Torah scholar. He pursued his studies and had great respect for study, for knowledge. All of the children in that family, whether they became Socialists, Communists, or Religious Zionists––whatever lifestyle they pursued––they all maintained that priority: you have to study, you have to learn from every source. My mother had learned to read thanks to a rebetsin, if I recall correctly. And once or twice the rebetsin taught her addition and multiplication––and that’s that! She didn’t attend any other schools. Nonetheless, she was able to read books in four languages. And if she didn’t know a word, she also knew her way around a dictionary. Nowadays, if you haven’t graduated high school, people think you haven’t achieved anything.

Boris:
And what was your education? How many children did your parents have?

Chava:
I am an only child, one daughter, a lone flower in the garden, my father used to say. I was enrolled in the daily Yiddish folkshul. In 1939, I entered their kindergarten and I studied there til seventh grade, to the end of the elementary school program. After that, a year of evening classes in the middle school and a year of “higher courses” and then the whole evening program was dissolved. In 1948 there was still an elementary evening school, but the higher classes had closed. So at 14-15 years old, my formal Jewish education ended.

The Peretz Schools also ran a day school. Years later, the two day schools united and opened a cooperative day middle school, the Bialik School.

Boris:
And in those days the government didn’t support these national schools?

Chava:
No, certainly not. Only later did they begin to support them when the French-speaking population’s national consciousness began to awaken.

Boris:
So one could say that thanks to the French speakers, the Jews got thrown a bone…

Chava:
Possibly, because of the Québécois French nationalism, other groups who demanded it had to be recognized.

Boris:
Why did Yiddish education falter?

Chava:
Firstly, it was after the Second World War, and it was a time when the city, the province, the entire country were flourishing. The economy had taken off. Besides the Yiddish elementary school, there was a Hebrew day school, the Talmud Torah. The Yiddish schools didn’t yet have a daytime middle school, but the Talmud Torah opened a two-year middle school, so there was a choice. Later, other educational institutions opened: Shaare Zion had a day school, and Adath Yisroel, too, both of them Hebrew schools. And right away the process began of moving from the old established neighborhood into the new neighborhoods, and the schools weren’t able to move that easily. And there were new interests. Soldiers came back from the war, they wanted to start a family life, a new generation arose…

Boris:
So there was a paradoxical situation: the better their lives became with each generation, the less they were interested in national spiritual values. But let’s go back to Yiddish studies. What was taught in the Yiddish day school?

Chava:
The Yiddish folkshuln were nationalist schools. Firstly, they were concerned with the land of Israel, and with Labor Zionism. The language of instruction was Yiddish, because everybody knew the language from home. History was taught in Yiddish. Hebrew literature, grammar, and even khumash and Tanakh were all studied in the original and then translated into Yiddish. Of course, general studies were taught in English. And in those days, we started studying French in third grade.

Boris:
I mention it because these days they say we try to teach children too much!

Chava:
Nonsense! Children speak the languages they are taught. The worst of it is how psychologists don’t sit in the classroom, but far away in some chamber and come up with ideas not based in reality. Then they throw down laws––You may do this and this you must not!

Boris:
But you yourself chose a profession outside of Yiddish…

Chava:
Yes. I looked back at my teachers, who were learned people, though they hadn’t God forbid learned in a university: Yoysef Kazhdan, Yud Yud Sigal, Volf Khaytsman, Shimshon Dunski, Shloyme Vaysman, Yoyne Braverman… only one of them, Shloyme Vaysman, had gone to and finished university because he was already in America. They studied on their own. As children they had studied in yeshives and they all had that same urge to realize themselves and round out their educations. Nowadays these people would be professors. But in those days, they couldn’t even imagine it. In McGill University in those days you could count the Jewish professors on one hand. They simply weren’t allowed in! So I went into biochemistry, even though there was at the time a new Jewish Teachers Seminary that held on another 7 or 8 years… I don’t remember precisely how long, because I had already left Montreal. Yes, I made myself a career in another field, but I never abandoned Yiddish. I continued to read, always hungry to learn more, and I lived a Jewish lebns-shteyger [way of life].

Boris:
What do you mean when you say “a Jewish way of life?”

Chava:
In my home, where I served as the head of the house and the mother, Shabbos was Shabbos. And yontev was yontev. It was traditional, albeit not crazy religious. I got married here, in New York, and set up a home with Shmuel. He passed away in 1973 at only 43 years old, unfortunately. He was a graduate of the New York Sholem Aleichem Schools [another Yiddish folkshul system]. And he had served in the army. He wasn’t sent to Korea, but served in America for two years. Interesting, there was a group of three in one garrison: Shmuel, Lloyd Altman, and Mordkhe Schaechter. Shmuel and Lloyd worked for the Religious Support Office in Fort Dix. They were aides, so to speak. The three of them created a school, a kind of seminar for Jewish soldiers. Mordkhe Schaechter taught Yiddish, Lloyd Altman taught Hebrew, and Shmuel taught history. And so all my life has been bound up in Jewish continuity and Jewish consciousness.

As to the house itself? I kept kosher. My three children grew up in Yiddish. Among themselves they spoke Yiddish. And as for English, they naturally learned it. But even later as they grew older, the older brothers spoke the language of their childhood amongst themselves and they know it to this day. I won’t say that they are ready to get up and give a sermon of a half an hour in Yiddish, but if you pressed them and told them that for the next two weeks they have to speak Yiddish, they could do it. They never attended a Yiddish school. Not only because there wasn’t one around anymore, but also because we wanted to place them in traditional day schools, yeshives, that is, in today’s language. And all three graduated yeshive. Then, when they went to university, they read and wrote letters to their grandmothers in Yiddish.

Boris:
But what nonetheless brought you back to the field of Yiddish?

Chava:
To tell the truth, I never returned because I never left. At one time I taught a Yiddish class in our shul in the evenings using copied transliterated pages… so I was visiting someone’s home and Yosl Landis [the late Joseph Landis, the first Director of Jewish Studies at Queens College, and longtime President of the Congress for Jewish Culture] told me he needed a Yiddish teacher in Queens College, and I must come teach Yiddish there. And there I was, a widow with three children who had started working as a chemist only three years earlier. And I was also doing post-doctoral work. I was working on all fronts. So I said to him “What are talking about? I’m about to go to Japan to present at two conferences and I won’t be back til September 11th…” and he answered me “Don’t worry. I’ll handle your two classes for the first two weeks, and then you’ll start teaching!” I’ll tell you the truth, I worked like a beaver that summer. I took Weinreich’s College Yiddish and started studying for the first time in my life what “Yiddish grammar” meant. I’d never even thought about organized grammar, in any event, how to teach students to put together a sentence, or what each part of a sentence is called, what a preposition is––Oy vey iz mir nisht, a brand new teacher! When I walked into that classroom, I was more frightened than the students. And in those days the classes were quite large. In the evenings there were classes full of matriculated students who couldn’t make it to daytime classes; or others who were putting together credits for another goal––big classes of twenty-plus students. And we met twice a week. I had to take their workbooks home after every session and correct them––and it was some job. But thanks to that coincidence, I learned pedagogy.

Later, Wolf Younin [renowned Yiddish poet, dramatist, and philologist] told me that Columbia University needed a Yiddish teacher for the YIVO summer program. And I told him, I don’t even have a piece of paper stating that I’m qualified to teach. But the Lord helped and I made it through an advanced semester of Hebrew at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and they gave me a piece of paper. That piece of paper saved me, because it allowed me to show Columbia University that I wasn’t illiterate, and that I knew something. And I began teaching there in the summer programs in 1974. At the time, the courses were 9 weeks, four hours each morning with the beginners. And then after that, I’d head into the laboratory and work til 7 at night. The children, thank God, were at summer camp, so I could stretch myself like that. And that’s how I stayed a Yiddish teacher.

I got the hang of it and the more I did it, the better I got until I was teaching language and literature for advanced students. I had to go back to all the essays, stories, and books that I had read so eagerly as a child. I had to read a lot, and I read just as quickly in Yiddish as I do in English.

Boris:
And when did you become active in the Workmen’s Circle?

Chava:
That was an accident. I was working as a researcher in a lab with eleven colleagues, but in the late 1980s the funding dried up. In a word, I had to look for another job. That’s when God sent me Yosl Mlotek [then Director of Education at the Workmen’s Circle]. He suggested I come work at the Workmen’s Circle. So in 1989, I came in as a grine, a new immigrant, to the Workmen’s Circle.

When I arrived, there were still 11-12 schools (and in my time, they suggested an additional two schools!), mostly in the New York area but also across the country. But here, too, it was the same story. The schools were struggling. As long as there were parents who had themselves studied in a Yiddish school, who still had some sympathy, or a feeling of tradition; or those who didn’t want their children to study in a religious school––there was interest in establishing and supporting a school to serve their children with a Jewish education. And that’s that.

Chava:
If they had started such a school in the 1930s, or even in the 1940s, they’d have set roots and the school could have developed. In the 1970s, Motl Gildin and his friends had put a huge sum of money, effort, and hope into the idea of a secular day school on 12th Street. If I’m not mistaken, it was called the Bank Street Shul. But there was already no one to work with. Religious Jews who sought a meaningful education wouldn’t send their kids there. Besides that, there was the melting pot concept, that everyone should melt together and mix in order to become good Americans. And it didn’t help that the teachers’ union played a big role in the Workmen’s Circle. A lot of important players in the teachers’ union were made nervous by the idea of a day school…

Boris:
Why?

Chava:
Because a private school supported by the parents in the organization would have taken away their support. And they, the union activists, were committed generalists. They stood by the good of their side as God-given rights, out of high ideals and out of socialism. The union did indeed look out for the teachers’ rights on the one hand, but on the other, it cut down the ability to grow and develop our higher ideals.

Boris:
Today there’s an effort to create a Yiddish teachers’ union for the younger generation…

Chava:
You refer apparently to Fishl Kutner’s initiative. On that, Fishl Kutner is a man of incredible vision and energy, and he has ideas that others haven’t come up with. He calls me no less than twice a week––what about this and what about that? My father used to call me Khananye the Nay-sayer. And still to this day I cry out “No!” and he, Fishl Kutner, stays stubborn and what does he conclude? That he’s right and it has to be tried. If it fails, well then, it fails. If you don’t try, you’ll never know. So he created a teachers’ union. I only hope the union will stand on its own and succeed. In the meantime, Fishl is the driving force. But the problem is that there’s no permanent body of teachers, and nobody can earn a living from it. If there were prospects for earning a living, there would also be qualified Yiddish teachers. So many of our Yiddish teachers these days aren’t qualified. They aren’t able to do much, and they know even less. They can talk a word or two of Yiddish. Thank you very much. But beyond elementary language and aside from “when do you use the accusative” and aside from “Etele-betele” nursery rhymes, you need to know something deeper. You have to have pockets full of Jewish knowledge in order to broaden the students’ knowledge as well as their understanding, so they won’t think that Yiddish is something in a book and what they’re learning is all in the book. Yiddish is a way of life, a philosophy, it’s a dream that we can build Jewish life in Yiddish. Why do you think Hassidim speak Yiddish? Because of ideology? No! Because for them, speaking Yiddish is a means to strengthen their Yidishkeyt. Nowadays we think that singing a song in Yiddish satisfies the requirement and eating a bagel with lox once in a while pays our annual dues for Yidishkeyt. Yidishkeyt is klezmer, gastronomy, and a dance. What? When? Yidishkeyt is either the main thing or leave it alone! You only know Yiddish by devouring books, talking, and writing––and not poetry where you fasten together three such words with four other words. Write three sentences of prose!

Boris:
Where do you think the Jewish establishment’s distaste for Yiddish comes from? It’s no secret that most of the establishment wouldn’t be able to name three Yiddish writers.

Chava:
It comes from several sources: firstly, the Enlightenment weakened Yiddish, and it entered the genetic code of the intelligentsia that Yiddish is shtetldik, parochial. It smells of pickles. Secondly, Yiddish was made into a flag and a gun for the Socialist and Communist movement. Yiddish became a weapon. Then they insisted “Yiddish is secular…” Who leads society today? Those who have power, influence, and money. So people regard Yiddish with practical eyes: Who needs Yiddish? You need a good profession, a living! And the main thing is to become an American, damn it all! And if a student does get interested these days, they study for a semester, maybe two semesters, and they’ve fulfilled their obligation. The ignorance on the part of the Jewish intelligentsia in regard to their own culture was huge even fifty years ago, even among those who were graduates of the Yiddish schools where classes were held 5 days a week, so let’s not even talk about today when everything is learned in dribs and drabs. Of course, there are certain people from that generation who can still read and write. But why should someone bother themselves to read Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish when you can do it in English. God forbid anyone exert themselves! Today we have to teach and we have to create enthusiasm, hislayves, so that from the ranks of those with mid-level knowledge, the ones who love Yiddish and understand that they have to work at it––we want them to be able to excel, and continue their studies so that from their ranks we can develop true experts. We must not give up––for then one abandons a millennium of Jewish life. Yiddish is like a bouquet that must bloom in the heart, and from the bouquet there will grow roots, and seeds for the future.

כּבֿוד איר אָנדענק

We hope you enjoyed Chava’s reminiscences and thoughts. May we all take her advice, and dive deeper into Yiddish literature and culture, and deepen our understanding. An oak has fallen, but she left many acorns for us to plant and nurture as we go forward in the world of Yiddish.