Jewish languages: Juhuri is dying

When we lived in Teheran, I was always interested in how some relatives and friends spoke in what seemed to be an undecipherable language. Although I was fluent in Farsi, I couldn't understand a word that some of these people said.

Along the way, I learned that Persian Jews also spoke dialects. Isfahani is used for comedic impact. There was Kashi (from Kashan), of which I know only one two-word phrase. Regardless of where their families originated - be it Hamadan, Shiraz, areas around the Caspian Sea, or the Aramaic-speaking Jews from Urmia - each group had its own language.

However, most of these were lost after decades of living in the big city of Teheran. My husband's grandmother knew only a few words of the original Isfahani Jewish dialect, and her children and grandchildren recognized even fewer words and their meanings.

When I was involved in the US working with new immigrants from Russia, I had an immediate connection with those from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Many spoke Bukharan or Kavkaz, both with roots in Farsi, so it was easy to communicate - well, much better than in my non-existent Russian.

Years ago, I visited a newly-resettled family from Uzbekistan in Tucson, Arizona. They were religious and invited me for Shabbat. I was surprised to see that all their siddurim and other religious books were printed in Cyrillic.

At an international Jewish genealogy conference in London several years ago, I met a Baku (Azerbaijani Iran) University professor - a Mountain Jew from the city of Kuba, home to several thousand Mountain Jews who speak Tat, also called Juhuri. We were also able to communicate, once I got my ears around the different accent.

Haaretz had a recent article on Juhuri, another Iranian dialect spoken by the Jews of the Eastern Caucasuses and how the people are trying to preserve it.

Juhuri - an Iranian language sometimes called Judeo-Tat - is the language of the eastern Caucasus Mountain Jews, who live mainly in northern Azerbaijan and Dagestan.

Traditions indicate that the Jews of the Caucasus are descendants of the Kingdom of Judea's exiled tribes after the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. The exiles settled in Persia, where they acquired a Farsi dialect and preserved Hebrew words.

Until the 20th century, Juhuri was the common spoken language, while Hebrew was written and for prayer and study. When Juhuri began to be written, the typeface was like Rashi. A prayerbook (1908) and a book about Zionism (1909) were the first two printed in Juhuri using Hebrew script.

Russia annexed the area in the 1850s, and the Russian language became more commonly used. It was also bolstered by business ties with Russians and increased as people moved from small population centers to cities, where more Russians lived.

The communist government, in 1929, tried to supress religion and people stopped using Hebrew to write Juhuri. A decade later, they were writing Juhuri in Cyrillic, which caused problems as the transliteration was difficult.

Although the Jews had preserved Juhuri for centuries, the new developments nearly killed the old language. An expert quoted in the article says the language will be extinct in 40 years.

Until the outbreak of WWII, there were schools in which Juhuri was the language of instruction. This stopped during the war. In 1988, a poet organized a Jewish cultural center in Derbent and convinced the government to renew Juhuri lessons.

"Beginning in the 19th century, the prestige of the Russian language increased steadily, and fluency in it was considered a path to success. The Mountain Jews found themselves in an uncomfortable situation. Although they gave the Russians a friendly welcome, certainly compared to other communities in the Caucasus, the attitude of the Russian government toward them was not significantly different than its attitude toward the other inhabitants of the region. The Russians considered the Jews, like the other Caucasian communities, uneducated, inferior and lacking professions.

"The main reason for this attitude was the Mountain Jews' ignorance of Russian. Even the Ashkenazi Jews in Russia [Jews of European origin] looked down on them. The key to success in the new world in which they found themselves was the ability to speak Russian without a trace of a foreign accent. Knowledge of Juhuri was considered an obstacle that was liable to prevent the people of the Caucasus from speaking perfect Russian. The attitude of the speakers toward their language changed, and they even stopped speaking to their children in Juhuri."

Today, in Israel, there are some 100,000 immigrants - about half still speak Juhuri - who are trying to preserve their culture and language, through theatre, music and poetry.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Hong Kong: 'Asian Jewish Life,' spring issue online

On my recent Hong Kong visit, I met with editor-in-chief Erica Lyons of "Asian Jewish Life: A Journal of Spirit, Society and Culture."

The new AJL spring 2010 issue is now online with stories covering India, Shanghai, Cambodia, foodies, book reviews, film and more.

"Asian Jewish Life is a contemporary journal of Jewish diaspora life throughout Asia. As Jews in Asia we are but a tiny minority unified by tradition, a love for Israel, common contemporary concerns and shared values. While Asian Jewish Life is a common media forum designed to share regional Jewish thoughts, ideas and culture and promote unity, it also celebrates our individuality and our diverse backgrounds and customs."

Here's the table of contents (read each online or download the PDF at the link above):

-- Inbox: Your letters
-- Letter from the Editor
-- India Journal- Life with the Bene Ephraim (Bonita Nathan Sussman and Gerald Sussman)
-- Eating Kosher Dog Meat: Jewish in Guiyang (Susan Blumberg-Kason)
-- Through the Eyes of ZAKA (Jana Daniels)
-- Interview: Ambassador Yaron Mayer
-- Replanting Roots in Shanghai: Architect Haim Dotan’s journey (Erica Lyons)
-- A Palate Grows in Brooklyn: Birth of a foodie (Sandi Butchkiss)
-- Poetry by Rachel DeWoskin
-- The Death Penalty: What Asia can learn from Judaism (Michael H. Fox)
-- Learning to Speak: A cross-cultural love story (Tracy Slater)
-- Book Reviews (Susan Blumberg-Kason)
-- Places I Love
-- Expat Diary: Raising a Jewish Child in Cambodia (Craig Gerard)
-- Film in Focus

Each article provides a diverse look into life in Asia, with a Jewish "hook." Tracing the Tribe will always remember the line "tenderloin of my heart," from Tracy Slater's "Learning to Speak."

Readers and writers with Jewish Asian experiences are invited to submit articles; click here for more information.

If you enjoyed this issue (the winter issue is also online), let Erica know, and tell her you learned about AJL at Tracing the Tribe. Feedback is always welcome.

A great issue, Erica!

Are you a poet? Don't know it?

Want to be a visual poet? Yes, you can!

Not particularly genealogical in nature, but still fun, is ResearchBuzz's great post on a new fun application called FlickrPoet.

Click here and input text, a poem, a paragraph and it will search for the words and illustrate them with Flickr images. The input screen is black, but don't let that worry you, just type in the words you desire and click "show story."

Photos illustrating your words show up below the story box. To do a new text input, refresh the screen to remove the previous illustrations and clear the story box.

If you can't remember any song verses or poems, click here, a compendium of many writers, poets, quotes and much more.

For fun, I tried Shel Silverstein's "Bear In There." Here's the whole poem:

There's a Polar Bear
In our Frigidaire
--He likes it 'cause it's cold in there.
With his seat in the meat
And his face in the fish
And his big hairy paws
In the buttery dish,
He's nibbling the noodles,
He's munching the rice,
He's slurping the soda,
He's licking the ice.
And he lets out a roar
If you open the door.
And it gives me a scare
To know he's in there
--That Polary Bear In our Fridgitydaire.

And here's the display for lines eight-11:

The app is a bit quirky. I wanted to use the first seven lines, but it wouldn't let me use the word"hairy," admonishing me to keep the language clean. The fact that the bear's paws were covered in butter didn't seem to be the problem.

The words in the picture are sometimes hard to read (light letters on generally light backgrounds). You may also get different pictures if you do a new search with the same words, but you can't replace individual pictures.

Have fun!

Place of space: Our ancestors' homes

How do our surroundings, our living spaces impact our families, our thoughts, our history?

Isn't this what our pursuit of genealogy helps to reconstruct? To make sure that our family history remains alive and known and preserved?

In a poem by Leib Borisovich Talalai, a young Yiddish poet whose family was from our shtetl of Vorotinschtina, who later lived in Baranovich and in Minsk, and who was ultimately murdered in the Minsk Ghetto in 1941, he writes about his family house in our shtetl, "If the walls of this house could talk. ..."

What do you know about the spaces in which your ancestors lived? At left are steep steps in the old Jewish quarter of Girona, Spain.

On Yom Kippur, I usually read for a good portion of the day. This year, it was "Sepharad," by Antonio Munoz Molina, one of Spain's most famous writers, who draws on the Sephardic diaspora and touches on the Holocaust and even the purges of Stalin while telling this story I couldn't put down.

The book, praised as "a masterpiece" by "The Lost" author Daniel Mendelsohn, offers some insights into what I'm terming "the place of space" in our lives and in our family history. Mendelsohn wrote in the New York Review of Books:

"Shame and guilt, homelands and exile, ceaseless wanderings and bitter alienations both internal and external, metaphorical and real, are persistent motifs...."

Writes Munoz Molina:

"What is the minimal portion of country, what does of roots or hearth, that a human being requires?" Jean Amery asked himself, remembering his flight from Austria in 1938, perhaps the night of March 15, on the express train that left Vienna at 11:15 for Prague, his troubled, clandestine journey across European borders toward the provisional refuge of Antwerp, where he knew the endless insecurity of exiled Jews, the native's hostility toward foreigners, humiliation from the police and officials who examine papers and certify or deny permits and make you come back the next day and the next and who look at the refugee as someone suspected of a crime. The worst is to be stripped of the nationality you thought was yours inalienably. You need at least a home in which you can feel safe, Amery says, a room that you can't be dragged from in the middle of the night, that you don't have to run from as fast as you can when you hear police whistles and footsteps on the stairs.

Later on he asks the reader:

What do you do if you know that from one day to the next you can be driven from your home, that all it takes is a signature and a lacquer seal at the bottom of a decree for the work of your entire life to be demolished, for you to lose everything, house and goods, for you to find yourself out on the street exposed to shame, forced to part with everything you considered yours and to board a ship that will take you to a country where you will also be pointed at and rejected, or not even that far, to a disaster at sea, the frightening sea you have never seen?

He describes an old Jewish house with a low door, on a narrow street in a neighborhood of 15th century houses. On the two ends of the large stone lintel are two Stars of David, inscribed in a circle. The author adds:

The two Stars of David testify to the existence of a large community, like the fossilized impression of an exquisite leaf that fell in the immensity of a forest erased by a cataclysm thousands of years ago. They couldn't believe that they would actually be driven out, that within a few months they would have to abandon the land they had been born in and where their ancestors had lived. The house has a door with rusted studs and an iron knocker, and small Gothic moldings in the angles of the lintel. Maybe the people who have gone carried with the key that fit this large keyhole, maybe they handed it down from father to son through generations of exile, just as the language and sonorous Spanish names were perpetuated, and the poems and children's songs that the Jews of Salonica and Rhodes would carry with them on the long hellish journey to Auschwitz. It was a house like this that the family of Baruch Spinoza or Primo Levi would leave behind forever.

Quite by coincidence, a Google alert this morning led me to the Genealogy Blog's post which also commented on "the place of space" in our family histories.

This leads me to a thought: what part do places hold in our family histories? It would seem places (like houses) take on a character of their own, a spirit, if you will. They facilitate gathering and celebrating and memories. When they are taken away, it seems there is a disruption in our gatherings until we can find another substitute. In our transient society where we uproot every two years, are we constantly severing these vital ties with the past and memory.

Is there a difference between taking away a house, or taking away the family that lived there? What happens to the generations and centuries of memories? How long do they remain to be passed on to younger generations?

When do those memories disappear?

When does the disconnect occur between history and youth?

Museum of Family History - new in January

Steve Lasky, creator/curator of the Museum of Family History.com, is visiting in South Florida and attended two JGS meetings in the area. He just informed me that he has updated his website search tool to a custom Google search engine. Steve's site grows so fast that a good search engine was essential. Check it out here

He's always busy and those who know him believe he never sleeps. Here's a quick look at what he's added just this month:

- World Jewish Communities: Multimedia honors the history of our Jewish families where they once lived. The first two WJC exhibits are for Czernowitz (Ukraine) and Ozarow (Poland) with Zambrow (Poland) and Mukacheve (Ukraine) on the way.

- Voices of Czernowitz: Read about several Czernowitzers: tenor Josef Schmidt and poets Itzik Manger and Rose Auslander. You can hear some Schmidt arias; you can hear Manger recite two of his poems in Yiddish and hear an Auslander poems and read her words (written in German.) The Yiddish poems are presented in Yiddish (with Hebrew letters), transliterated Yiddish, as well as in English.

- Hear two recordings of Yiddish songs sung c1913 by Liza Fischer, who acted in the Yiddish theatre of Warsaw. Click on the link at the bottom of the page.

- A searchable database is online for alumni or searchers of alumni of Thomas Jefferson High School, in East New York, Brooklyn. This was a predominantly Jewish school, and the database will become part of a future "Jews of Brooklyn" exhibit - Steve also plans to add Jews of the Bronx, Manhattan, etc. Currently, there are eight Jefferson yearbooks (1927-1936) to browse through or search. For those who attended Samuel J. Tilden High School, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, Steve Morse has a similar database.

As Tracing the Tribe previously noted, I found my Uncle Bob in the Tilden database. Readers who graduated either school should contact Morse or Lasky, who are both looking to add to their respective databases. I almost feel inspired to create one for the High School of Music & Art, my own school! There are several Jewishgenners who attended M&A. Hooray for the magenta and powder blue - well, it WAS an "arty" school!

-Living in America, The Jewish Experience: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania includes "The Jewish Quarter of Philadelphia," and two related short exhibitions.

- Something is always new at this virtual Museum. For breaking news, visit the Recent Updates page.

Take a cyberwalk around the museum. I know you'll find it informative.