Ellen Cassedy

A soft rain was falling as a white-haired woman slowly made her way to the microphone in the courtyard of Vilnius University. “Tayere talmidim!” she began. “Dear students!”

The old woman was a member of the tiny, aging Jewish community in the capital of Lithuania. Her name was Blume. “How fortunate I am,” she said in a quavering voice, “that I have lived long enough to see people coming to Vilnius to study Yiddish.”

Seventy-five of us huddled together on wooden benches under the heavy Baltic sky. We had come from all over the globe to spend a month at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Some were college students looking for credits; others, middle-aged like me, had arrived in the former Jerusalem of the North in search of something else.

Years earlier, when my mother died, I’d developed a yearning for the language of my ancestors—the Jewish ones, that is (my gentile father’s family hails from Germany and Great Britain). When my mother was alive, I could count on her to keep hold of the past. Now that she was dead, not only had I lost her, but all those who had gone before seemed to be slipping out of reach, too.

Maybe Yiddish, which has been called “the linguistic homeland of a people without a home,” could offer me the comforting sense of continuity that had been ruptured by my mother’s death. In helping to keep that cultural homeland alive, perhaps I could find a way home myself.

As the rain continued to fall and the damp courtyard darkened, I shivered. It was a hard place, this land of my forebears—a country where Jews and their culture had been systematically exterminated—a curious place to come looking for a sense of belonging.

Amid the pastel façades and crisp spires of 21st-century Vilnius, traces of the old Jewish world were few and far between. But the last Yiddish speakers of Vilnius led us on long walks that began on cobblestoned Zydu gatve (Jewish Street). Back when Blume and Fania and Rokhl were young, schools and theaters used to crowd the narrow lanes and the streets resounded with Yiddish,as learned rabbis brushed up against fish peddlers.

Then came the Nazi invasion and the ghetto. Some 70,000 Jews were jammed into the old Jewish quarter on this very spot where we were standing. More than 90 percent of Lithuania’s 240,000 Jews died during World War II.

Some of our elderly guides had fled to safety before the massacre began; others, like Rokhl, had escaped from the ghetto and joined the Red Army in the forests. Now, sometimes weeping, sometimes radiant, they talked and talked—about the world that used to be, about the people who were no more, about their own miraculous survival.

The flat where I lived with my roommate was located within the former ghetto. In the evenings, we used an old-fashioned key to open the creaking wooden door into our courtyard and then climbed the stairs to our rooms. Bent over our books at the kitchen table, we did massive amounts of homework, whispering under our breath as we riffled through our dictionaries.

In the mornings, I began to awaken with Yiddish words on my tongue, which I would savor with a slice of dense black bread topped with butter and cheese from Rokiskis—the town where my great-grandmother had operated her dairy—and little knobby cucumbers. One week the market offered tiny apricots and the next, small purple plums.

Here in the Old World, there was no abundance. Only our weekly Friday night celebration at the Jewish community center was lavish. The long tables spread with snowy cloths were loaded platters of fruit and nuts, cheese and challah that tasted just right. Late into the night, we sang endless nigunim, wordless melodies full of joy and sorrow.

Day after day, in a classroom crammed with rows of battered wooden desks, our teachers guided us into the most intimate linguistic nooks and crannies. One morning we pondered the mysteries of verb aspects: the differences among “I kiss,” “I am kissing” and “I keep on kissing.” Another time we ran our tongues over long strings of adjectives formed from nouns: oaken door, woolen glove, golden ring, clay pot. At the end of every session, we sat back and listened as the instructor read from his favorite texts in a sonorous and elegiac voice. It was a mekhaye—a great pleasure.

On the last day of class, we finished a story written after the Holocaust in which the narrator finds himself pulling a wagon piled high with dead bodies. So it is for all of us, I thought, as we go forward lugging our past behind us. It was our hardest story yet, but I didn’t mind. I had come to feel that in Yiddishland, this place of love and of pain, it was the effort itself that mattered. Simply trying—to listen, to understand, to speak—brought a deep satisfaction and the sense of connection I had been seeking.

At the graduation ceremony, the sun shone in a blue sky, and there were flowers and herring and vodka. “Zayt gezunt,” we said—goodbye, be well. We gave a kiss, we kissed, we kept on kissing, and crying. It was hard to leave.

“Home, In So Many Words”
Hadassah Magazine, January 2007, Vol. 88, No. 5