A Language of Many Places

Yiddish was my father’s first language: his language of lullabies, of parents’ whispers, of family letters that crossed the Atlantic during those horrible years of Hitler’s war. And although his parents, living in Philadelphia, wrote to their soldier-son in Yiddish, he responded in English; by then, his mastery of the mameloshn, or mother tongue, had begun to wither. But his heart would express itself in the old ways until the end. Shlof gezunterheyt, shtey oyf gezunterheyt, vaks oyf gezunterheyt, he said to me each night, until I left for college. “Sleep in good health, get up in good health, grow up in good health.” When he moved in with my own young family decades later, the nightly blessing resumed. Days before he died, I heard him conversing softly with his mother and father, dead for 60 years, in Yiddish.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I would often find him in our wood-paneled basement, sitting on the sofa by the stereo system he’d purchased as an extravagance, headphones on and eyes closed, conducting a klezmer band or some cantor singing Yiddish folk songs. Our upright piano was in the basement, too, and my father would patiently listen to me race through the pieces my teacher had assigned—Bach fugues and Mozart sonatas, all played without a hint of artistic inspiration—until he’d ask, “Can’t you play something Jewish?” Sometimes he would sing a few bars of a favorite tune as encouragement.

I regret that I never gave my father the music he wanted to hear.