Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture: Alumni Voices

This is the second post in a series about alumni of YIVO’s intensive summer program in Yiddish, offered by YIVO and Bard College. The program, which was established in 1968, is in its 47th year. This year’s session runs from June 23 – August 1, 2014.

How I Invented My Own Yiddish Verb: Randi Hacker, Zumer Program alum, 1980

In the summer of 1980, I studied at the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program at Columbia. The student population was marvelously international (England, Ireland, Germany and France were all represented) if not entirely Jewish: The kids from Ireland were there as part of their German major at Queens College and they were quite good at the language. In fact, one of them received the award for top student in the intermediate class (the intermediate class that was, by the way, taught by Mordkhe Schaechter himself).

Dovid Katz taught the Advanced Class with an energy and humor and authentic yidishkeyt that was splendid. Dovid called everyone “mayn kind” but it was particularly enchanting when he used the term in speaking to, Kalman, our 86-year-old, full-bearded, native-speaker classmate. Dovid encouraged creativity and I remember that, when we studied perifrastisher verbn, I invented my own (meponim zayn – to face things, as in lomir es meponim zayn – Let’s face it), which Dovid, to my great delight, still uses.

In those days, on any given day on campus, you could catch a glimpse of (and maybe even have a conversation with) Mikhl Herzog and Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman as well as the Schaechter offspring. We had a regularly scheduled singing class and those songs are still with me. In fact, I recently taught the song “S’iz geven a mol (a kleyn yidele)” to group of pre-schoolers here in Kansas and received an email from one mother telling me that her 4-year-old son stomped around the house saying “Oy, oy, oy!” for about a week afterwards.