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Oylem Goylem - Text fragments Oylem Goylem – Text fragments(...) In exile, one loses many things, first of all one's own language. In the first generation, it begins to falter, in the second it loses focus, and by the third generation, it is probably swallowed completely by the linguistic territory. This is not wht happened to the language we are singing to you about. On the contrary, Yiddish drew its vitality from exile and lived from and for exile, simmering like crushed grapes in the Spring. When he chanced to meet this language along his path, and while addressing an audience made up of the Jewish bourgeoisie of German language and culture, a great wise man from Prague spoke of it thus: "Before hearing the first verses by these Oriental Jewish poets, I would still like to tell you, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that you understand much more Yiddish than you think.....but this cannot happen while some of you have of this dialect a fear so strong, I can practically read it in your faces. .....Yiddish is the youngest European language, it is not yet four-hundred years old and, actually, it is even more recent than that. It hasn't yet formed linguistic structures as clear as are necessary to us. Its expressions are brief and nervous. It has no grammar. A few of its admirers have tried to write grammars for it, but Yiddish is spoken constantly and it finds no peace. The people will not hand it over to the grammarians. It is composed exclusively of foreign words. But these words do not rest in its bosom, rather, they preserve the haste and the vivacity with which they were welcomed into it. Yiddish is traversed from one end to the other by peoples' migrations. All this German, Hebrew, French, English, Slavic, Dutch, Rumanian and even Latin which lives within it, is soaked with curiosity and lightness. It takes a certain amount of energy to keep the various languages together in this fashion. And that is why no person gifted with good sense will ever try to make of it an international language, even though the idea comes of itself. Only low-life and the slang of the criminal world use it with pleasure, as they are in need of single words rather than linguistic connections. And because, after all, Yiddish as a language has always been despised and scorned. These are the words of Franz Kafka. (...) |
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