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You had an elementary teacher like Shifre Krishtalka. She was the "good teacher" whose class you couldn't wait to get to, where learning seemed like fun. Where the rules weren't as strict, and yet where discipline never seemed to be a problem. She was the one whose name stayed with you into adulthood, long after you'd forgotten your M.A. thesis adviser. She was the one who genuinely cared, who loved children and loved teaching and didn't let anything stand between her and her students.
And it is that love and commitment which led Mrs. Krishtalka, late in life and after a forty-some year teaching career, to become a writer, and why I am devoting this column to a book most of you will be unable to read. Almost ten years in the writing, Yiddish: A Living Language is the culmination of Mrs. Krishtalka's life's work. A complete pedagogical program for the teaching of the Yiddish language, encompassing three projected volumes and well over 900 pages, there is probably nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Volume I was released last month by the press of the Jewish People's Schools and Peretz Schools (JPPS), one of Montreal's longest-established Jewish day schools. JPPS is also one of the few remaining secular Jewish schools in the world which teaches Yiddish as a required subject.
Once the mother-tongue of over 10 million Jews worldwide, Yiddish is now spoken as a primary language only by the small minority of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Often confused with Hebrew, a semitic language related to Arabic and Aramaic, Yiddish is in fact a Germanic language stemming from the same root as modern German and Dutch. Written in the Hebrew alphabet and borrowing heavily from Hebrew and other languages, Yiddish was the lingua franca of European Jews for over a thousand years.
At its height, Yiddish was a global language, spoken throughout eastern and western Europe and across North America. There were literally hundreds of Yiddish-language daily newspapers like New York's Forvertz (Forward) and Montreal's Keneder Adler (Canadian Eagle). There was Yiddish theatre, Yiddish film and Yiddish universities. The short-lived 1919 Ukrainian republic even accepted Yiddish as an official language and used it on its currency. For a long time Yiddish, like French in Quebec, was the central focus of Jewish nationalism. Then came the Nazis. Though failing in their twisted aim of wiping out the whole Jewish people, they destroyed over a third of the world's Yiddish-speakers as well as the language's Polish-Jewish heartland. It was a blow from which Yiddish never really recovered.
Ironically, the State of Israel's adoption of Hebrew as its official language also hastened the decline of Yiddish. Many early Zionists looked down on Yiddish as the language of exile, as somehow unworthy, and they discouraged its use.
Shifre Krishtalka accepts none of this. As the title of her book suggests, her passion for Yiddish remains as strong today as it was in 1930 when she began teaching in Tishivitz, Poland. Her tale almost sounds like one of Sholem Aleichem's fables. Growing up in the fiercely anti-semitic and quasi-fascist Poland of the interwar years, she bitterly resented the open racism of her teachers in public school and the way they prevented Jewish students from even speaking Yiddish on school property. She became a comitted Zionist at an early age and joined the Left Labour Zionist Movement with her future husband. She attended a famous Jewish teacher's college for five years (five years. I was certified as a high school teacher in nine months) and yet was denied her teacher's certificate in her last month of study when the Polish government mysteriously withdrew her college's accreditation. She returned to her home town and was eventually able, through the Left Labour Zionists, to open Tishivitz's first Yiddish afternoon school. She became immenseley popular with her students and their parents, but she soon ran afoul of the government, who suspected her of being a communist, and ultra-Orthodox extremists who wanted to set up their own Yiddish school. The threat of arrest and months of unrelenting pressure directed at her and her family eventually forced the closure of her school. In 1933, she and her husband emigrated to Canada, and by 1935 she was teaching for Montreal's Peretz School. She taught at Peretz and the amalgamated JPPS for over 40 years, and then went on to head pedagogic development and teacher training in Yiddish.
It has been a long road to Yiddish: A Living Language. Despite promises of assistance from the Federal multiculturalism ministry, it took Mrs. Krishtalka and her son Aaron, a history professor at Dawson College and McGill University, over three years just to find an institution willing to publish the book. Two more volumes are ready for publication, but no one knows if the funds will be available to bring them to completion.
I hope they are published. I find myself poring over Volume I, flipping pages, sounding out sentences that almost-but-not-quite make sense to me. I can read a little Yiddish. I can understand spoken Yiddish slightly better. I still say "Oy!" rather than "Ow!" when I stub my toe. But to my children Yiddish will probably be a foreign language, and to their children it will be a historical curiosity like Latin and ancient Greek. Unless Shifre Krishtalka has her way. Unless she can keep it alive by the sheer force of her will and her love alone.