It was Amos Oz, of all people, one of the outstanding symbols of the sabra, who was the first to speak of lost roots. Last year, when his autobiographical novel, "A Tale of Love and Darkness" was published, he gave an interview to Ari Shavit about what he called "the tragedy of the poor Ashkenazim." He said the absorption of the old Ashkenazi elites in the country was in fact a tale of difficult emigration. "People like my parents were distanced and orphaned of all they came from - family, roots, landscapes, cultures in which they felt they belonged," he said.
The feeling was shared by the 60 people who came a month ago to the Yiddish Writers and Journalists Association at Beit Levik in Tel Aviv for an evening that was the first of a series: "Young people talk about Ashkenazi identification." The thesis put forward was that like Mizrahi culture, Eastern European Jewish culture was crushed in the Zionist melting pot.
Almost provocatively, the invitations carried a quote from filmmaker David Ben Sheetrit about the oppression of the Mizrahim in Israel. "Who are the Ashkenazim? What culture did they create here? What are they leaving here?" Ben Sheetrit asked rhetorically in an interview with Ha'ir. "They burnt their world, they burnt their past and the amazing Yiddish, the Eastern European culture, they burnt the generation of their parents," he said. That evening in Beit Levik, the audience asked those questions of themselves.
The young people aged 20-40 who organized the evening came from all over the country after meeting through the nonprofit organization "The next generation - lovers of Yiddish," founded 13 years ago. For all, becoming familiar with the language was part of a journey to reinvoke their Ashkenazi identity.
"Over the years, Ashkenazism has become empty," says Assaf Galai, 25, a student of Yiddish at Bar-Ilan University and one of the organizers of the event. "It's used almost exclusively to manipulate the daily discourse and in the media, but nobody knows what Ashkenazi culture is. The reason is that the Ashkenazim will never define themselves as such, but rather as Israelis. That's the great paradox. The Ashkenazim were the first to wipe out their past. Now, my generation wants to continue the historical continuum."
The young journalist-author Nir Baram spoke about a "double murder" committed by the Ashkenazim - the erasure of both the Mizrahi culture and their own culture. "Unlike the Mizrahi culture, which was clearly oppressed, the Zionist Ashkenazim murdered their own culture with their own hands," he says. "Therefore, dealing with their heritage is more complicated, compounded by double feelings of guilt."
The public debate about Mizrahi identity in the hands of the media and the Mizrahi politicians of the last decade forced Ashkenazim to examine their identity freshly, says Baram. As Israel became a culturally pluralistic society over the last decade, characterized by Mizrahi protests against Zionism's erasing identity, the Ashkenazim remained silent. "The cries of the victim will always overcome the difficulties of those who turned them into a victim," he says. "Therefore, while all the cultures in Israel dealt with their identities and reconstructed the cultures that the Zionist enterprise tried to erase, there was no discussion of contemporary Ashkenazi culture, or about the Ashkenazi culture that was left behind. Ironically, it's the Mizrahi campaign that is leading the cultural liberation of the Ashkenazim."
The older people in the audience were angered by Baram's thesis. "There definitely was intergenerational tension," he says. "The young people came, looking for identity and asked questions. The older people, the 50-year-olds who were born with the state, felt the need to defend the basic Zionist narrative. They are more shackled to Zionism than we are."
There has been a burgeoning of interest in Ashkenazi culture in recent years. In 1998, when comics artist Yirmi Pincus started writing reviews of Yiddish theater in Ha'ir, everyone thought it was "just another one of his strange jokes," says Baram. "But now, the Yiddishspiel Theater is up against regular theaters for prizes."
Pincus defines Ashkenazism as "a dominant and natural element in my identity," and deals with it a lot. The heroes of his comic books "Crumpet Ladies," which he published two years ago, come from Eastern European culture, and some of his stories are based on memoirs by family members.
Filmmaker Eitan Anar, on the other hand, says it took him time to be free of the inferiority that he felt about his Eastern European roots. "I'm envious of Moroccans, Yemenites and Iraqis because they are comfortable with their heritages," he says. "But I feel guilty that the shtetl is part of my roots. Since childhood I was taught about the poor villages that were ultimately destroyed by the Nazis. Somehow, their going like sheep to the slaughter seemed to us to be the natural result of their shtetl behavior."
Writer Michal Govrin, in her book "Hevzeikim" (Flashes) writes about the possible contributions of Ashkenazi culture to life in Israel. The heroine of her story, which was published in 2002, is architect Ilana Tsuriel, who conducts conversations in her mind with her father, a year after he died. A Third Aliyah Zionist, the father speaks Hebrew spiced with Yiddish. "Through his voice, one can hear the voices of his father and grandfather who perished in the Holocaust," Govrin says. "In my eyes, that is the Jewish wisdom of life that we shoved underneath Hebrew and being Israeli. Zionists placed the Diaspora in contradiction to our presence and reality in Israel, but the worldview of Yiddish, which is full of softness and lacks any haste, could contribute greatly to our experience here. It's a process of cultural enrichment."
There indeed has been a surprising flowering of frameworks in which to learn Yiddish. Mendy Kahan, who founded Jung Yiddish, an NPO that runs a Yiddish cultural center in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv, says the interest in the language is especially strong among rooted Israelis, in their 50s, "who understand that the denial of their family heritage was a mistake. By throwing out Yiddish, we threw out a thousand years of Jewish cultural development in Europe. We didn't turn into kibbutzniks straight from Ibn Gvirol and the Rambam. It's our history."
Dr. Avraham Novershtern, who runs Beit Shalom Aleichem in Tel Aviv, says there's a constant rise in the number of registrants for Yiddish language classes. "We have 240 people now, and that's twice as many as we had in 2000. Most of the students are in their 40s and 50s, people who heard Yiddish at home but because of its negative image, they repressed it."
Nati Cohen, who lectures on Yiddish and the cultural history of Polish Jews at Bar Ilan University, reports an increase in the number of young students interested in the subject. "These are young kids for whom being Israeli is not enough, so they are seeking a link to another cultural connection," he says.
Zehavit Stern, a 30-year-old Jerusalemite, for example, regards Yiddish as a way to deepen her Ashkenazi roots. "This is the identity that exists at the seam between the nonexistent and being rejected," she says, "an identity that until now did not have any real significance other than seeming to belong to the right side of the tracks in Israeli society."
Stern, who is studying for a master's degree in Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University, founded with some fellow students a group called Der Kreiss (the circle), which organizes weekly meetings for Yiddish lovers. Among other things, the group initiated a series of evenings on subjects related to Yiddish culture, including exhibitions where young artists displayed works that relate to Yiddish culture, as well as an evening devoted to the Yiddish avant-garde movement of the 1920s.
Poet-translator Ilan Sheinfeld believes that it's not only the Zionist ethos that weighs heavily on the Ashkenazi culture, but the memory of the Holocaust. Sheinfeld had never visited Shedletz, his Polish mother's birthplace. "My parents are Holocaust survivors, but never spoke of it," he says. "So I never knew enough about the place where they came from."
In his book, "Shedletz," published in 1999, he tells the stories of the town. He says he was pushed into it by the feeling he's had since childhood, of being torn from his East European roots. "I have a black hole inside me," he says. "On the one hand, I live the Israeli experience that I know so well, and on the other, I don't know anything about my past as a Jew and as a member of a family of Holocaust survivors. The immigrants shook off the Diaspora because they could not cope with the great pain of the Holocaust," he says. "When my grandmother taught me Yiddish in my childhood, my mother was very angry - she did not want her son to know Yiddish. The Ashkenazim who came here after the Holocaust never spoke of the Diaspora, because the very memory horrified them."
Shaharah Blau, who teaches Holocaust studies in Haifa and founded the alternative Holocaust Memorial ceremony that takes place at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv, agrees that the Holocaust casts a giant shadow over Ashkenazi heritage in Israel. She says that under the circumstances, the Holocaust has become the Ashkenazim's greatest contribution to Israeli culture. "It wasn't Mottele Ben-Paissy Hahazan or Hershele from Ostroppoli (characters out of Yiddish literature) but Dachau, Auschwitz and Maidanek that became the main symbols of Ashkenazi culture in Israeli discourse," she says.
According to Assaf Galai, the moral duty of the second and third generation is to continue the cultural heritage that Hitler tried to destroy. "On Holocaust Memorial Day, everyone's discussing the horror and the death, and there's no attempt to understand who were those people who were erased, and what was their culture. Our goal is to preserve that culture.
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