Re: [Cz-L] Our love affair with the German language.

There were people who spoke proper German in Czernowitz.
  Not too many.
   The majority spoke a German that was an offense to the ear
    and a disgrace to the language of Schiller.
     It was a cold - blooded murder of the German language.
      It was only right ,considering what the germans did to us.
Hardy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Taylor" <mirtaylo_at_indiana.edu>
To: "Paul Heger" <pheger_at_gmail.com>; "HARDY BREIER" <HARDY3_at_bezeqint.net>
Cc: <Czernowitz-L_at_cornell.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2010 6:26 AM
Subject: Re: [Cz-L] Our love affair with the German language.

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
-snip-
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Received on 2010-09-08 05:14:41