Uriel Weinreich Summer Program Testimonial: Gelya Frank ‘21

“Re-Membering” Yiddish

by GELYA FRANK, Summer Program ‘21

My 22-year-old nephew Jacob Frank and I took the 2021 summer program together, placing in level Beys, after taking weekly courses offered online by the Workers Circle. Nothing can prepare you, however, for the YIVO Zumerprogram, plunging into Yiddish language and culture, day and night, for six exhausting but exhilarating weeks.

For Jake, it was an immersion of discovery. For me, restitution and regrowth.

Something had been missing—truncated—in my Jewish world in the Bronx during the 1950s. Evidence of Yiddishkeit pervaded my neighborhood off the Grand Concourse at 181st Street, but the political, artistic and other cosmopolitan achievements of the interwar years were being erased by the project of Americanization. For my American-born parents, this project was bounded with getting ahead, however modestly, and without rejecting one’s Jewish identity, avoiding being (and being seen as) “too” Jewish. There seemed to be a practice of ignoring and forgetting the destruction of the Jews in Europe, so that it was something of an embarrassment when Paul, the owner of a dry-cleaning business, came to the counter in short sleeves that showed the blue numbers on his forearm. No one actually talked to me about the Holocaust. I learned the details one day after school, watching raw black-and-white war footage on Channel 11.

For me, the YIVO Zumerprogram has been a counter-project of “re-membering” as my mentor, anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff put it in Number Our Days, her book and Oscar-winning film about aging Jews in Venice, California. “Re-membering,” Barbara explained, is a form of memory work that allows you to reconstitute the wholeness of something ruptured that is precious and belongs to you. Yiddish was my rightful language, I felt. Without it, I was unable to say more than a few words with my one living grandfather. I had no idea where we came from. I was shocked, when I made a heritage trip in 2018, to find out that our shtetl was in Belarus. Europe, ‘the Old Country,’ had been a blank. Who and what were we?

In my career as an anthropologist, I consulted on land and water rights with a Native California tribe and wrote a book about its cultural and tribal sovereignty. This and other projects dealing with oppression and marginalization, collective action and the reconstruction of society, have all been inflected by my Jewish experiences and longings. A hartsikn dank to YIVO, my teachers Perl Teitelbaum, Yuri Vendeyapin, Mikhl Yashinsky, Shane Baker and Marc Caplan. A sheynem dank to my friends, the marvelous students of level Beys, and to the many others of various ages and many countries. Your love of Yiddish culture and your own cultural generativity reconnect me so much more directly to the living tradition and its future.

Gelya Frank is a cultural anthropologist and writer on Jewish themes. She is the co-founder and moderator of Yiddish Schmoozers in Translation (www.yidlit.com), an online discussion of Yiddish literature in English translation.

Learn more about the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture.