Re: [Cz-L] Languages

Miriam (Mimi) Taylor <mirtaylo_at_indiana.edu>

I beg to differ.

The generation of my father, born in 1907, studied 6 or more languages.
I have multiple school certificates attesting to the fact. How well they
knew them, depended on how much use they made of them and in what esteem
they held the language. Romanian they despised, German literature,
the speeches of Cicero, some of the speeches of Caesar and parts of the
Peloponnesian wars, they knew by heart. They read Shalom Aleichem and
Mendale in Yiddish.

Growing up in a Jewish Czernowitzer family, by the age of 4, I knew
who Shalom Aleichem was. At age 5 I heard another child my age recite
"Der Erlkonig" When I came to Israel in 1949, I did not know Hebrew well
enough to enjoy reading in it. So I read the books my parents had at home;
The plays of Schiller, Shakespeare's plays in German in gothic script,
the books of Zweig, Werfel and Wassermann.
Schiller's poems were often recited at the dinner table and some lines,
like: "Wehe wenn sie losgelassen" (from "Die Glocke" and used derogatively
about women) entered the daily language.

Keep in mind, that I was born in 1937 and never had a single German lesson.

During the 2006 Czernowitz Reunion, in Chernivtsi, those of the generation
born in the late twenties and early thirties were able to speak fluent
Ukrainian.
On the bus taking many of the participants of the Czernowitz Reunion
 from Lviv to Chernivtsi and later back, all of us old Czernowitzers,
were constantly speaking in the most delightful mixture of German,
Yiddish, Hebrew and English, with a Romanian, Russian or Ruthenian word
thrown in, when we found that they better conveyed what we wanted to say.

Vielleicht waren wir nicht wunderbar, aber so schlimm waren wir auch nicht!

Mimi


> We keep getting a lot of posts on Czernowitzer proficiency on
> languages, so let us put things right :
>
> German - as this was no longer the official language, it was not
> taught in schools and the German we used was what we heard at
> home and what we read. The language we used in conversation
> would not be understood by ethnic Germans.
> Not to speak of grammar and literature we lacked completely.
> I am not speaking of the old timers who studied in Austrian schools.
>
> Romanian we spoke like a foreign language. Very faulty.
> "Matale stai la bastonul al doilea ?"( Sie wohnen am zweiten Stock).
> We only found out how little we knew ,whem we came to Rumania.
> Not to speak of the accent - special Czernowitzer.
>
> Yiddish - we were trained to avoid this language and not use it.
> All the Yiddish we got was from our grandparents, who knew
> nothing else . This was not very much.
>
> Russian, Ruthenian, Ukrainean we didn't know at all.
> We got some in the short time we went to Soviet schools.
> Not worth mentioning.
> So what language did we master ?
>
> The non-jewish population of Czernowitz faced the same problems.
> To describe Czernowitzer as language wizards is a little far-
> fetched.
>
> Czernowitzers still show their talents in many other fields,
> though.
>
> Hardy

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Received on 2008-01-07 20:41:06