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

This is the first of 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. 

Fluency is relative: Ben Feldman, Zumer Program alum 2001-2003

I matriculated in the YIVO summer program for the first of three consecutive years in June 2001, nervous as a cat, way older than 90% of my classmates, but thirsty as the devil. There were 72 of us in that blessed year. The workload was overwhelming; I was placed in an intermediate section due to my knowledge of the Yiddish alphabet and a smattering of earlier courses at YIVO and the Arbeter Ring. Sheva Zucker, Eugene Orenstein, and Paul Glasser were just a few of my magnificent, inspiring, patient teachers, laying on the homework with a trowel, bright-eyed and bushy tailed at 9:00 am in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University when the majority of us had been up past midnight, struggling through the texts. It took diligence and loss of many hours of sleep, but I persisted. Fluency is relative, and even after three summers, I wasn't there, neither orally nor in reading and writing. But the investment paid off: now I am. The students with me in the program have in many cases gone on to become leading lights in the Yiddishist world, learning, performing, raising the secular use of the language to a new niveau. I am proud to be among them, to watch the flowers grow.

Benjamin Feldman has lived and worked in New York City for the past forty-five years.  His essays and book reviews about New York City and American history and about Yiddish culture have appeared online and in print in CUNY’s Gotham History Blotter, The New Partisan Review, Columbia County History and Heritage, Ducts literary magazine, and in his blog, The New York Wanderer. Feldman is a 2001, 2002, and 2003 alumnus of the Summer Program, and will give a Yiddish lecture as part of this year’s program.  He will also be hosting an event, A Night at Niblo’s Garden, at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on July 12.