Helen Feinn traveled to Milwaukee all the way from Walnut Creek, Calif., to attend the International Association of Yiddish Clubs’ seventh world conference. “That’s how much I love Yiddish,” she said.
In fact, Feinn’s love of that wonderful, German-distilled language of the eastern European immigrants — among them, her parents — went with her all her adult life, by her account.
When as a young wife she and her husband moved from Chicago to La Porte, Ind., she said she managed to find “one other Yiddish-speaking person” in that town; and they met at least once a week to converse in Yiddish “so we wouldn’t forget.”
She has been a member for 14 years of the Yiddish club of the Jewish Center of Contra Costa County. And she had a great time at the conference, which took place primarily at the Park East Hotel April 12-15. “It’s wonderful to see all these people who love Yiddish,” Feinn said.
This kind of passion for the language brought to the event about 200 people, most from the Midwest, but many from all over North America. In conversations over their breakfast Sunday morning, several of them said how much they enjoyed the conference with its wide range of programs and presentations.
Accountant Rochelle Zucker, for example, was one of three who came from the small Yiddish club in Winnipeg, Canada. Zucker said Yiddish was her first language, as her father had come from Europe.
At the conference she particularly enjoyed the Saturday night concert featuring clarinetist Kurt Bjorling, the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble and singer Sima Miller. They did not do “the schmaltzy kind” of Yiddish music, she said.
A group of four from the Detroit-area seemed to be as close as family, and joked around like one. It turned out three of them were family — Lee and Raymond Henkin of Bloomfield Hills; and her brother Meyer King of Farmington Hills. The fourth was Jerry Gerger of West Bloomfield.
They, too, had immigrant parents whose native language was Yiddish, and so acquired a love of the language. And they all said they thoroughly enjoyed the conference. Lee Henkin particularly praised Paul Melrood, chair of the conference’s organizing committee, who “did a fantastic job.”
King lauded the conference’s speakers for the plenary sessions and the various workshops. “The speakers were eloquent and interesting,” he said. “And everybody was so friendly. It was a delightful experience.”
Gerger said he felt that the conference participants were “schleps among giants” when it came to the presenters. “These [presenters] are people you read about in magazines and newspapers.”
While most of those attending were middle age to elderly, there was a sprinkling of younger people present, including Amanda Seigel, 25. Originally from Madison, she now lives in Minneapolis and belongs to a Yiddish club there from which, she said, 13 people came to the conference.
An office worker and singer who described herself as a student of Yiddish who “occasionally” teaches it, Seigel said she particularly enjoyed the readings of Yiddish poetry that took place at the conference.
She said she finds Yiddish to be “a very rich, very idiomatic language. I think that through the language you get aspects of the culture of eastern Europe that without the language you miss.” She lamented that Yiddish gets “watered down” in U.S. popular culture and “seen as humorous” while, as this conference showed, it is “really an entire culture.”
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