Every language has its expressions that don’t quite translate into English. Saudade, weltschmerz, and other lacunae bedevil translators since there’s no easy one-to-one translation for them. So you can imagine the problem posed by Yiddish.
Yiddish is the Marx Brothers to Hebrew’s Maimonedes, Lenny Bruce to its Ben Gurion, klezmer to its kaddash. It doesn’t pretend, or aspire, to be scholarly. Its cadences and meaning carry a different set of cultural baggage than Hebrew.*
Assimilation goes both ways; the speakers and their language, both of which came here in steerage ages ago, didn’t only assimilate into America; as so often happens, America assimilated some of the habits and language of the new arrivals, too. And what an assimilation.
Think on this for a second. How dull would your conversations, and mental landscape, be without the occasional kvetch about shlepping through snow and holiday traffic for hours? Who hasn’t shmoozed with their boss or the schmuck (a putz, really) who sits in the cubicle next to yours? And who hasn’t plotzed when some alter kocker who can’t see over the steering wheel cuts you off in traffic?
Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish (1968, revised posthumously in 2001) is a wide-ranging, sometimes hysterical, sometimes thought-provoking tour of the Yiddish language. Someone’s done Yiddish for Dummies, and there’s the more recent Born to Kvetch, but Rosten’s original was the book that first charted “Yinglish,” and looked at all the ways that Yiddish has infiltrated and influenced English. It retains all the pungency and humor of the language itself, while the later edition appends all sorts of scholarly marginalia, some of it useful and some of it just schmaltz.
But about the writing. Language influences how we think, because generally we think in sentences (or maybe even paragraphs, if we’re feeling especially pensive). Having words from other languages lingering somewhere in your memory banks can send your thinking, your speaking, and (it goes without saying) your writing off in some new and interesting directions.
Shalom.
*Mind you, the opinions expressed here are from a goy. Say it together, now: “What does he know from nothing?”