Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe

A weird, bittersweet bit of serendipity was that when Fania Brantsovskaya passed away in late September, I happened to be in the middle of transcribing the Yiddish testimony she recorded for the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. I had gotten to know Fania during two stays in Vilne in 2003 and 2004, and she left a big impression, as she did on pretty much everyone who met her.

Much has been written about her remarkable life: her education in the finest Yiddish institutions of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” her heroic deeds as a partisan during World War II, and her archival activities documenting and preserving evidence of prewar Jewish life in Vilne, not to mention her astounding vigor. “When I was in the forest,” she told me once, referring to her time as a partisan, “they made me carry the machine gun ammunition so I wouldn’t walk too fast.” But what I want to write about, having recently listened very closely to over four hours of her testimony, is her particular Yiddish, which I am dubbing Yokhelish after her maiden name, Jocheles.

What is Yokhelish like? First of all, there’s no mistaking that it’s a kind of Litvish, or Northeastern Yiddish. It has the classic Litvish features: בעטן betn ‘beds’ and בעטן betn ‘to request’ are homophones, as are נאָך nokh ‘after’ and נאָך nokh ‘another’ — in all non-Litvish Yiddish dialects these words have different vowels. She also usually pronounces the khoylem vowel in words like גרױס groys ‘big’ and קױפֿן koyfn ‘to buy’ as /ej/: a pronunciation found throughout most of Litvish Yiddish, as well as much of Southeastern Yiddish in northern Ukraine.

In Yiddish dialectology vowels are the most important features used to distinguish dialects, but there are other aspects of dialect as well, such as vocabulary and grammar. In these areas too, Yokhelish is distinctly Litvish. She uses a number of Litvish participles, like געװעלט gevelt instead of געװאָלט gevolt ‘wanted,’ געלאָזן gelozn instead of געלאָזט gelozt ‘allowed,’ and געבאָרן geborn instead of געבױרן geboyrn ‘born.’ Other Yokhelish words that are particularly Litvish are אַװוּ avu ‘where’ and the verb לעבן lebn to mean ‘to dwell’ where other Yiddish dialects would use װױנען voynen. As for grammar, one of the most striking features of Litvish Yiddish is the absence of a neuter gender. This is not to say that gender in Litvish is simply a matter of masculine and feminine, as in French; indeed, Uriel Weinreich gave a lecture titled “The Seven Genders of Yiddish” based on Northeastern Yiddish. The degree to which Yokhelish exhibits these seven genders is something I haven’t analyzed; indeed, an analysis of how much the data from the Litvish speakers in the CSYE supports Weinreich’s schematization would be a fascinating and important study. But it is clear in any case that Yokhelish lacks a neuter; Fania does not use דאָס dos as a definite article.

Not only is Yokhelish obviously Litvish, but it is also typical of Vilner Yiddish. Unlike the Yiddish found slightly west of Vilne, in cities like Kovne and Shavl, Fania says יע ye, not יאַ ya, for ‘yes.’ Also, she pronounces כּמעט kimat ‘almost’ as /kamat/, something I have heard almost exclusively from Jews from Vilne. This was striking to me, because when I was in Vilne, I never heard this particular pronunciation from her. It seems likely she avoided using this hyper-local feature when talking to students.

If so, this isn’t the only example of her self-consciously shaping the way she speaks for the occasion. Throughout her testimony, there are little hints that she is not speaking completely naturally. I mentioned above that she does not use dos as an article, but this is not completely true. In over four hours of testimony, she uses it twice: in tape 5, she quotes a doctor asking װוּ ליגט דאָס קינד vu ligt dos kind (‘Where is the child?’). A few sentences later she reverts to her natural די קינד di kind, but then catches herself and repeats the phrase, this time with דאָס קינד dos kind. On the one hand, the absence of dos as an article generally shows that Yokhelish lacks a neuter, but this isolated instance shows that Fania is aware of it as a feature of “proper” Yiddish.

More prevalent is her use of the feminine dative singular in definite articles (דער der) and adjective endings (־ער -er). Litvish typically uses די di and ־ע -e for all feminine singular articles and adjectives, regardless of case. And indeed, so does Fania occasionally, often enough that it suggests that this is how she would speak more naturally.

What can we learn from all this? Why is it even noteworthy that Yokhelish is a variety of Vilner Litvish Yiddish when its speaker is, after all, a native and mostly lifelong resident of Vilne? It is noteworthy, I feel, because it shows the vitality of Yiddish dialects in prewar Eastern Europe. Nearly every survivor whose testimony I have transcribed so far speaks a kind of Yiddish that is typical of where they grew up.¹ Despite the Yiddish school systems in interwar Poland and the rise of more standardized Yiddish, it was nearly universal for Yiddish-speaking Jews to speak their local dialect. This is a striking fact.

Then what of Fania’s non-Litvish use of feminine datives? This is sociolinguistically revealing. Fania attended the Sofia Markovna Gurevitsh school and the Real-gimnazye, the finest Yiddishist educational institutions in Vilne, the epicenter of Yiddishism. It would make sense that in formal settings like a filmed interview, she would try to speak “correctly,” which for her meant standardizing her grammar, at least partially, striving to use feminine dative forms and once or twice throwing in a neuter article. It’s interesting, though, that “correct” grammar for her does not include having neuter nouns. It’s possible that for her, the lack of distinct feminine dative endings is more marked as vernacular or informal than the lack of neuter nouns. It’s also possible, and to my mind likelier, that’s it’s easier to adopt feminine datives, because a speaker of Litvish already has the categories of dative and feminine, and thus the algorithm is a simple one mentally, whereas memorizing the arbitrary list of nouns that are neuter in other dialects is difficult, especially when these nouns already have other genders in your native dialect.

The Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe offers a great opportunity to study Yiddish in the aggregate, as a relatively large set of linguistic data. But it also is made up of individual voices like Fania’s — each one unique, each one special.

Notes and References