The Yiddish Curse by Zachary Pelta-Heller

     In the fall of fourth grade, I had my first memorable lesson in foreign languages. My teacher was the one and only Hershbo. His name was actually Mr. Hershman, but he was the kind of teacher who insisted you call him by his self-given Rambo-esque nickname; the kind of teacher who would toss you an apple when he called on you, or would wear a camel-colored corduroy sport jacket and white sneakers, jogging down the halls shooting you with his finger pistols as he passed by. Hershbo was the kind of teacher whose lessons stay with you.

     What Hershbo explained about Romance languages was simple and obvious, yet profoundly insightful; you can say the meanest, ugliest thing in French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, Hershbo explained, and it would still sound beautiful. Then, he did a little inventive lingual shtick -- I later learned this was Hershbo's homage to Sid Caesar -- borrowing the characteristically cacophonous French and Spanish letter blends to get his point across to a room full of nine-years-olds. These are the Romance languages.

     By contrast, Hershbo went on, you can talk about bunnies or dewy meadows in German, and it would still sound like Hitler was crushing them under his black leather boot. A little more from the "Show of Shows," and we were howling at our desks, completely convinced (though ignorant, of course, of the lesson's perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes). This was my first lesson in foreign languages, and the whole thing was spoken in two tongues: English and gibberish.

     I desperately tried to recount the excitement to Sam and Grandmom when I got home that afternoon. While stuffing my mouth with fresh rye bread and white fish salad-a spread provided by my grandparents every Friday-I barely managed to get the gist across when my grandmother, a Polish Jew who spent most of her adolescence running from the Nazis, started hollering at my grandfather, another Polish Jew who'd spent much of the war in the Lodz Ghetto.

     This was "The Sam and Grandmom Show," my favorite Eastern European sitcom. The show, which I rarely missed at my grandparents', was still in new episodes, though the plotline was getting a little thin-my grandmother would yell at my grandfather, usually about something mundane like Sam tracking mud onto the pristine, cream-colored carpet. Of course, I usually made up most of the dialogue, since they mainly yelled at each other in Yiddish (it was still better than anything on TV at the time). The only part I understood was when my grandmother turned to me, a glob of whitefish moseying wastefully down my chin, and said: "Chew vis your mouth cloz'd, you chazar you."

     Even at nine, I understood my grandmom's English, which I suppose you could call unpolished, if only to say that (to this day) she hasn't escaped her heavy Polish accent, even after living in this country for over fifty years. What I didn't understand, at least until I attended Brandeis University and was well-versed in Phillip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint), was the real lesson in foreign languages that afternoon: the word "chazar" was one of about twenty words that comprise my entire knowledge of the Yiddish language and culture.

     Here was my grandmother, who grew up with a fluent understanding of Yiddish-one of six languages she somehow learned while on the run from the Nazis, Russians, and anti-Semitic Poles prior to her immigration to the United States in 1950. She struggled to keep her native language alive, to do her part to keep the Jewish culture alive, and yet, one of the only Yiddish words I know is "pig"!

     ut my vivid vocab doesn't stop there. I can call someone crazy, stinky, or smelly. I can call someone a penis, idiot, jerk, or pest. Then there's my crowning Yiddish achievement, the compound insult that I learned when someone cut off Sam while we were on a Sunday drive in Bucks County: literally translated, I can tell someone to kiss my ass from the inside. So graphic and gratuitous, what more could you want from a language? If chazar, meshuggenah, fachochta, feshtunkena, putz, yutz, shmuck, and nudzje (the last four sound like a law firm) aren't enough, I can haul out the big guns: a goy, or non-Jewish person. Even worse, I can call someone a shikse, or non-Jewish girl-to this day, I can't begin to describe the tinge of suffocating anxiety that I get from hearing this word, which I quickly learned and frequently heard in high school when my brother and I brought home dates to our disapproving family.

     The common thread that binds my own personal Yiddish dictionary together is that nearly all of the Yiddish words that I know are curses, or at least, they all have negative connotations. I decided to consult with my younger brother Ben to test the validity of this discovery. After reminiscing about The Sam and Grandmom Show, Ben reminded me that I do know some words that aren't insults. Nosh for example, means to snack between meals, and that's not so bad I suppose, except that it also connotes being weak-willed about food and is said with such emphasis, you would think I had an eating disorder. Ben also brought up punim, which means "face," and is usually (if not always) preceded by shayna. Again, I can't quite bring myself to call this phrase a compliment; I associate shayna punim with my grandparents pinching, squeezing, or contorting my face until it wasn't so shayna anymore. Unfortunately, that was it for the non-offending phrases. The rest of Ben's Yiddish arsenal only added fuel to my own fire. Gems that I'd forgotten like zhlob (an oaf) or shnorrer (a bum). Then there was the phrase that my mischievous brother heard a lot growing up: "a potchkee on the tochis," or a spanking on his bottom.

     A little frustrated with Ben, I began to panic about this language gap and its repercussions on future generations. I pictured my descendants cursing my name (and only in English!) for failing to follow in our family's proud Yiddish-speaking tradition. Or was this a generational crisis? When I turned to some college friends for help, I discovered that a bunch of reformed Jews from Brandeis had as much Yiddish up their sleeves as I had. Maybe the curse of the Yiddish language is that it will be condensed to a handful of Yiddish curses. The real problem was that I'd been quite proud of my stash of Yiddish insults until recently. It wasn't until Sam passed away a few years ago and my grandmother began suffering from hip problems that it dawned on me that my family's Yiddish pride had been pathetically reduced to the foul mouth of a twenty-two year old and is now in danger of extinction, at least in my family.

     I decided to go straight to the source, and confront my grandmother at the worst possible occasion: a family dinner. After my innocent inquiry incensed my mother and my Aunt Eleanor, both of whom understand Yiddish a little and suddenly became the Jewish Defense League over Passover, I managed to pull my grandmom aside and get some answers.

     "Everybody says Yiddish is the language of the Jews who were persecuted and died in the Holocaust, which is true," my grandmom told me, without having to give my question much thought at all. "But let me tell you something," she continued, this time her English was quite clear, "I had a first cousin, a good friend, Selena [after whom my mother was named], who died during the war. And she spoke Polish."

     My grandmother explained that Yiddish was not her family's language. She was from a somewhat affluent family from the industrial town of Volumin on the outskirts of Warsaw. Her parents mainly spoke Polish around the house and insisted that she do the same to assimilate. Once, when she was visiting her grandmother, this way of life even caused Jewish women in the neighborhood to call her a shikse.

     "Well then why," I asked, "do you curse in Yiddish?"

     "I still know Yiddish," my grandmom said, "I used to speak it with Sam because that was the language he grew up speaking, that was his language." My grandfather's family barely eked out an existence in Lodz before the war.

     "But you always remember the curse words that you learn in any language. Those are the words you learn first." Then, my grandmother allayed my fears with the story of her first experience speaking Uzbek, when she told her friends to eat shit without knowing it. She also told me about when she and Sam emigrated from Poland with my mother, when the only English she spoke were the insults Sam brought home from his engineering shop. Desperately wanting to assimilate and feeling so proud to be in America, my grandmom often yelled at my mother, who was three at the time, in her extremely limited English, which was comprised of a few derogatory expressions for parts of the female body.

     My grandmom's wisdom about learning foreign languages was as palpable as Hershbo's back in fourth grade. And yet, my grandmother single-handedly assuaged my Yiddish dilemma the way only grandmothers can. Her concise, humorously anecdotal family history lesson restored my pride in my cache of Yiddish insults. I wasn't about to render Yiddish a dead language in my household, or even cause a language gap with colossal repercussions for future generations. On the contrary, I've mastered the essentials and am on my way to a fluent understanding of a foreign language. Until then, I suppose I'll have to accept my role as a pisher, eagerly waiting to wield a shnook or a shnorrer at the appropriate (or even inappropriate) time.