By the 1920ies and till the end of WW2, all Czernowitzers knew German,
whether they preferred to speak it or not. I have the school certificates of
my father, born in 1907. In 1921 and 1922 he was a pupil in school #14.
The languages he studied in school during both of these two years were:
Romanian, Latin, Hebrew, German as the language of instruction and French.
My mother went to a commercial school and I have her school certificate of
the year 1921-22. She studied Romanian, German and French. Even though the
school certificate is in Romanian, I doubt that this was the language of
instruction.
My parents spoke German to each other, to me and to most of their friends,
but both spoke and read Yiddish fluently and appreciated its rich and varied
means of expression. Above anything else, it was "Mameh Looshen".
I remember an incident which will serve to illustrate my point; it happened
during a walk with my father, in either the summer of 1940 or 1941. At the
Franz Josef Pl., opposite the Cathedral, there was a newspaper kiosk, where
we stopped. A man I did not know came towards us and as he came close, my
father said: "Shoolem Aleichem" to him.
Very excitedly I started tugging at my father's trousers and said:
Ist dass Scholem Aleichem?
Mimi
On 9/7/10 5:55 PM, "Paul Heger" <pheger_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Though we were an orthodox family, I had private lessons in German
> language and reading books, poetry etc
> Paul/Pessach Heger
>
> 2010/9/7 HARDY BREIER <HARDY3_at_bezeqint.net>:
>> In German there is a the "ch" sound so peculiar to German speakers.
>> If you are no German you pronounse it "kh".
>> Listen to a german pronounce " Muenchen".
>> Read it out now . Does it sound the same ?
>> We had it by nature .
>> Because from birth we heard it right.
>> Imposed by caring parents.
>> This did not improve our grammar or spelling which was horrible.
>> We never learned German at school but spoke it with great gusto.
>> Kind of German anyhow.
>> What other choice did we have ? Rumanian was a foreign language ,
>> Yiddish ?
>> Well , our German wasn't far off ,anyway.
>> Whenever we were short of a term ,we reached out for the unlimited
>> linguistic resources at our disposal and came up with something :
>> Ruthenian, Rumanian, Russian or Yiddish -never at a loss.
>>
>> The result was linguistic salad understandable only by local Jews.
>> Czernowitzerisch.
>>
>> Hardy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This moderated discussion group is for information exchange on the subject of
Czernowitz and Sadagora Jewish History and Genealogy. The opinions expressed
in these posts are the opinions of the original poster only and not necessarily
the opinions of the List Owner, the Webmaster or any other members
or entities connected with this mailing list. The Czernowitz-L list has
an associated web site at http://czernowitz.ehpes.com that includes a
searchable archive of all messages posted to this list. Please post in "Plain
Text" if possible (help available at:
<http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/PlainText.html>).
To remove your address from this e-list follow the directions at
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/elist/lyris/leave.html
To receive assistance for this e-list send an e-mail message to:
owner-Czernowitz-L_at_list.cornell.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on 2010-09-08 05:13:06
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 2011-01-01 14:59:47 PST