"Davka: Eretz yiddish vetarbuta" ?("Davka: Yiddishland and its Culture") edited by Benny Mer, Vol. 1, Beit Sholom Aleichem, 53 pages, NIS 30
"Lemele: Original Yiddish Songs," CD of songs by Chava Alberstein, musical arrangement and production: Ales Brezina

"Lemele," Chava Alberstein's new CD of Yiddish songs, plays nonstop in my car, accompanying me on journeys short and long. Up until recently, I was not a great fan of Yiddish songs. But "Lemele" did something to me.

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I grew up in Brzezany in eastern Galicia, where parents and grandparents spoke mainly Yiddish, although most of the children who were born to middle-class Jewish families before World War II spoke Polish. I remember Yiddish as the language spoken around me. My aunt Malcia, who graduated from the local Polish high school and belonged to the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, sang me lullabies in Polish, although I distinctly remember a certain Yiddish song that began with the words "Arum dem fayer halutzim zingen" ("Around the campfire, pioneers sing").

After the war, we lived in Lodz for a few years. I continued to read and speak Polish, and after that I learned Hebrew at the Zionist Hebrew school I attended. My first real encounter with Yiddish was when I was chosen to be the child narrator, describing his life in the Holocaust, in "Unzere Kinder" ("Our Children"), a film by Natan Gross featuring the Yiddish comedy team Dzigan and Schumacher. The text was written out for me in Polish letters, although I managed to make it sound natural. At school, I also acted in a play by Avraham Goldfaden, "Shulamis" - performed in Yiddish, of course.

After moving to Israel, I continued to hear Yiddish from time to time, but never spoke it. My use of the language was mainly instrumental, i.e., for research purposes. Only in the last year or two has a bit of sentimentality and nostalgia crept in, to the point where aside from listening to Chava Alberstein's "Lemele," I find myself enjoying the popular, if somewhat kitschy, hits of the Barry sisters.

The hunger for Yiddish that has gripped me of late seems to be related to age and where I am in life. Only a person who is getting on in years, a person with children and grandchildren, will be moved to tears by a song like "A Brivale der Mamen" ("A Letter to Mama") - especially if that person's daughter is faraway, across the ocean. Besides, as someone who has lived and worked more than three decades in the south of the country, light-years away from Yiddish, I have an emotional need to reconnect.

"Lemele" consists of 13 poems set to music by Alberstein, most of them by famous Yiddish poets. The Yiddish lyrics are accompanied by translations into Hebrew (by Benny Mer), French and English, with musical arrangements by the celebrated Czech filmmaker and composer, Ales Brezina. The CD opens with Binem Heller's poem "Guter Zikorn" ("A Good Memory"), and the choice is not accidental. It is symbolic of Alberstein's whole endeavor, taking listeners back to a world that no longer exists, but still fills the heart with pleasure.

Wide array of subjects

Not long after "Lemele," the first issue of Davka came out, edited by Benny Mer, an author, translator and student of Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"Davka is a Hebrew-language magazine that explores the culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe," the editor's letter informs us. On the editorial board are historian David Assaf, author Haim Be'er, literary critic Avner Holzman and professor of Yiddish language and literature Avraham Novershtern.

Interviewed for the first issue of Davka, Chava Alberstein told Mer that her work in Yiddish was "a debt to her parents and their friends, and all those amazing people." The worldview of Davka is very similar. "Davka is a magazine for people who are open to others," says Mer, a man who believes in the pluralism and cultural dialogue of 21st century Israel.

Personally I am not as optimistic. Perhaps the most prominent example of separatism and segregation in Israel is the Russian immigrant population, numbering a million people, most of whom continue to speak Russian and cling to a Russian lifestyle. On the other hand, maybe their children and grandchildren will assimilate in Israeli culture and return some day, at least intellectually and emotionally, to the language in which the Jews of Russia read, spoke and thought until the 1930s.

The first issue of Davka is devoted to journeys, and offers a wide array of subject matter and styles, from David Assaf's scholarly writing on traveling near and far, to Ruvik Rosenthal's fascinating observations on the Yiddish component in spoken Hebrew, and Yirmi Pinkus' comic strip "Malopolska" ("Little Poland").

Rosenthal, the author of a comprehensive dictionary of Hebrew slang (Keter, 2005) distinguishes between four types of Yiddish influence on Hebrew. The first is the outright use of Yiddish words, many of them personality-related. Examples are nudnik (pest), shvitzer (braggart), frier (pushover) and putz (prick). Then there are Hebrew expressions translated from the Yiddish, like "hot er gezogt" (so he said), or "nit oyf unz gezogt gevorn," which becomes "lo aleinu" in Hebrew (God forbid). Another category are Hebrew verbs derived from a Yiddish word, like lefargen from fargenin (to treat favorably). Finally, Hebrew uses Yiddish-style diminutives: Moshe becomes Moishele, Yitzhak becomes Itzik, and Reuven becomes Ruvik.

Rosenthal draws our attention to changes in pronunciation in the wake of Ashkenazi-inflected Yiddish. Davka, pronounced davka in Talmudic Hebrew, with the accent on the second syllable, has become davka in modern Hebrew, with the accent on the first syllable. This term, meaning "precisely this way," connotes defiance ("just because") when pronounced davka.

The magazine also discusses Yiddish literary works such as Yehoash-Solomon Bloomgarden's Palestine essays and the novels of Jacob Glatstein. The contributions of Riki Ophir and Zehavit Stern of the "Berkeley group" stand out here, and seem to indicate that the focal point of research in the field of Yiddish language and literature, among the younger generation, at least, seems to have moved from Israel to the United States.

Other little gems are the story of how Shlomo Lehrman, an engineer, translated "The Little Prince" into Yiddish and sold over 3,000 copies in Germany, as well as the semi-autobiographical contribution of literary critic Avner Holzman. In "Love Among the Ruins," Holzman describes how his parents met in Poland after the war. He goes back to a group photograph taken in April 1948 at a dedication ceremony in bombed-out Warsaw, at which a monument sculpted by Nathan Rapoport was unveiled in memory of those who died in the ghetto uprising. According to Holzman, this was his parents' first picture together; it provided the first evidence of a budding relationship that had begun in Lodz a few weeks earlier. If one needs any proof of how small the East European Jewish world was, I was at that ceremony, too - a 13-year-old member of a youth delegation sent from Lodz to Warsaw by Hashomer Hatzair.

Davka ends with "A Yidesche Piknik" ("A Yiddish-Style Picnic") - a collection of recipes by Shmil Holland, a historian and a chef, who will soon be opening a restaurant at the old railroad station in Jerusalem. Incidentally, the Polish word for blintzes is not malchiniki, but nalesniki. And speaking of that, the best nalesniki I have eaten since my childhood in Brzezany were the ones served up at Hotel Grand in Lviv (also known as Lwow, Lvov and Lemberg), where I stayed recently. If Holland gets their recipe, he can put me on his list of steady customers right now.

Whether Lemele, Davka and Shmil's restaurant are symptoms of a new cultural trend, only time will tell.

Shimon Redlich's book "Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919-1945" was published by Indiana University Press in 2002.