A Lesson in Yiddish for Armenians: What Armenians Can Learn From Jews
Every morning I read The New York Times, almost as a pleasurable ritual. The litany of bad news – Covid; starvation in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Yemen; war in the South Caucasus and Ukraine; the rise of the reactionary Right – often darkens my mood, but as an optimistic man of the Left, I look for the redemption one can find in those humans working hard to make the world a better place. Such people, I am sure, are far more numerous than the troublemakers, charlatans, criminals, and politicians who do great harm to the rest of us.
A story in the paper this morning caught my eye. A number of women scholars, teachers and translators of Yiddish, have discovered unknown novels, memoirs, and poems of Jewish women writers whose stories had long been lost in the dusty pages of newspapers where they had been serialized. Voices of talented, perceptive, creative women have now been unsilenced, translated, and published in English. A language, the Yiddish of East European Jews, that had been condemned to death by the Nazi genocide has been resurrected. A younger generation of Americans is studying the Yiddish language and culture in any of the two dozen Yiddish studies programs in the United States. Abandoned words, forgotten stories, have now become available for a wider audience in the living language, English, spoken by 1.5 billion people globally.
I recognized the photograph of one of the translators, Anita Norich, who had taught at the University of Michigan, someone with whom I had always enjoyed talking because of her sharp – dare I say it – Jewish humor. Now retired, Anita searched for lost literature by Jewish women and discovered and translated the 1941 novel A Jewish Refuge in New York about a woman who fled Nazi-occupied Poland only to be treated badly by her American relatives. I thought of the extraordinary documentary film, Image Before My Eyes, that I had seen decades before about Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. The film hardly mentioned the genocidal mass killing that was about to befall the unsuspecting Polish Jews but concentrated instead on their rich social, artistic, and political life in interwar Poland. A whole civilization of 3.5 million people, with political parties and sports clubs, synagogues and theaters, conflicts and reconciliations, was shown in all its variety. This society was eliminated, never to recover again on the land on which it had existed for hundreds of years. Indeed, that lost history is currently being actively distorted and denied in today’s nationalist Poland. Yet, at the moment, in translations and universities that life is being rediscovered far from where it once existed.
Armenians like Jews are a historic people with a complex and fraught history who have suffered the indignities and cruelties of empires that attempted to destroy them. Armenians were dispersed from their original homeland, and like Jews lived for centuries in diaspora communities struggling to maintain their language and culture. Armenians suffered a genocide like the Jews. The Armenians who once numbered 2.5 million in the Ottoman Empire were cut down or deported in 1915; many assimilated into the Muslim population or emigrated to other countries, until the number of Armenians left today in the Republic of Turkey has dwindled to about 60,000, largely living in Istanbul. Some Armenians who survived outside their ancestral homelands, like the Jews, founded a new state on lands that they once had shared with Muslim neighbors -- neighbors whom they would eventually drive from that land. Like Jews in their constructed homeland, the small, besieged state of the Armenians would find itself in a hostile neighborhood, perpetually in conflict with others nearby. And both peoples would be divided between their own ethnonational states and their diaspora scattered around the world.
What happened to the language of the Ottoman Armenians -- Western Armenian -- which had a flourishing literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? It is still taught in the remaining Armenian schools in Turkey and the diaspora. A few writers still write in what appears to be an endangered language, though many more Armenians write in English, French, Turkish or Russian. Agos publishes a section in Western Armenian, and the newspapers Marmara and Zhamanak are issued daily in Western Armenia. Aras Press prints books in a language that many once thought dead. In 2006, Aras published a volume in Turkish titled Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Comhuriyet’e Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar. Scholars like Lerna Ekmekçioğlu and Melissa Bilal are recovering and collecting the writings of Armenian women writers who wrote in Western Armenian and will publish an interpretative anthology of Armenian feminist work. With the support of Raffi Panossian and the Gulbenkian Foundation, teachers are being prepared in an effort to “arrest or possibly reverse this process of not-so-gradual loss of a language that was a vibrant source of Armenian culture only half a century ago.”
Zabel yesayanA lost literature marginalized in a patriarchal culture is being revived, and a new generation is reading writers of the past like Zabel Yesayan, and Zabel Asadur. A small community of Armenians, and the rest of the world, is now in touch with some parts of Armenian literary culture that had been forgotten. Armenian studies programs in universities in America also are teaching the language that once flourished in the Anatolia villages and towns where Armenian farmers and merchants worked, made their living, and tried to build a future for their children despite the discrimination of the Ottoman state and predations of Muslim countrymen.
I have struggled much of my adult life to learn to speak and read Armenian, both Eastern and Western, even studying for a time, Grabar, the classical Armenian language of antiquity and the Middle Ages. There are few occasions in the little city, Ann Arbor, where I live and teach to speak Armenian, but I have used it in my historical work. There is an irrationality in taking the time and making the effort to learn a language that you will find few others with whom to speak, and yet there is a pleasure in tasking your mind with declensions and conjugations in the language of your ancestors. They say learning a foreign language keeps the brain young and prevents dementia. I hope that is true, but I think I study foreign languages (currently Turkish, by the way) because they put me in touch with the past. With Armenian and Turkish I can reach back to that time and place where my grandparents lived – Yozgat and Diyarbakır – and from which they fled in fear of massacres.
Much of my own work and of a younger generation of historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars has been about recovering what Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Turks lost over a century ago and which is still threatened. Nations cannot survive without knowledge of their history, culture, and language. I have been hearing those plaintive words ever since my grandmother told me that until the building of the Tower of Babel confounded the tongues the original language of human beings was Armenian. She was sure that the language spoken in heaven is Armenian, and I fear I will fail the language exam to enter paradise.
In the United States, no matter what your origins, it is essential to learn English. But that does not require losing the language of your birth, your parents, or your ancestral homeland. In a Turkish nationalizing state students of all religions and ethnicities learn to speak and read Turkish, the state language, in order to flourish. Armenians, Assyrians, and Kurds hold on to the fragile hope that they can also preserve and develop their own national languages so that their people can thrive and prosper. Long before the Ottoman Empire or the Republic of Turkey existed, the land of Anatolia was inhabited by civilizations whose ruins can still be found scattered on the landscape. Try as any government might to erase the past, history haunts the present. Shared languages make states possible, but one’s own language makes cultural communities possible. Language and knowledge of the past are the tools that ordinary people have that allow them to live together in one country, on the land that they have inhabited together long before the nations and states of our own time existed.
