For Paul Melrood, working to preserve Yiddish is more than a noble duty. “It’s part of me,” he said in a telephone interview this week.
That’s no surprise to anyone who knows Melrood. Though he came to Milwaukee from Pilyva, a small village near Kiev, Ukraine, at age one, Yiddish was his first language. The son of esteemed Yiddish teachers Sonia and Mordechai Melrood, Paul grew up in a home devoted to the mama loshen. “We treasured everything that was Yiddish.”
That devotion has led Melrood to get involved with Yiddish preservation efforts, and in early June, he was elected president of the International Association of Yiddish Clubs at its ninth conference, held in Minneapolis.
The conference, themed “They Came to the Goldene Medine: The Immigrant Experience,” drew 11 Milwaukeeans and more than 200 others from the 102 member groups worldwide.
This is a good time to admit that Melrood is my cousin. My earliest memories of Jewish holidays include him, his parents and lots of Yiddish. “Dayenu” has not sounded the same since my Uncle Mottel stopped leading our seders.
Paul joined the 16-year old IAYC in 1996, when he and his wife, Marlene, attended the organization’s third conference, held in Miami, Fla. He found there “a number of people who had the same idea I had about preserving this 1,000 year old language.”
He’s been deeply involved since. He has been a member of the board and most recently served as vice president. And he is known, he said, for his excellent command of the language. “When they run across a word and they don’t know how to say it, they ask me.”
Melrood evokes a world long gone, one in which deeply engaged, devoted and passionate Jews dreamed of Socialism and Zionism — without ever entering a synagogue.
They sang Hebrew songs and danced Israeli dances in the 1930s, before the establishment of the state. They sang “Hatikvah” (Israel’s national anthem, which means “The Hope”) and knew deeply about those hopes.
“They did it because they believed it, not because it was the fashionable thing to do,” Melrood said.
Melrood grew up part of that culture. He celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah by reading from the Yiddish writer Shalom Aleichem. “We didn’t have an Orthodox bar mitzvah. I did not say the brochos in shul,” he said.
In 1946, when he was 26, he joined Perhift, the oldest non-professional Yiddish theater group in the United States. He performed at Theater X in 2000, as part of the company’s “To Lift Ourselves Up,” part of the International Arts Festival in Milwaukee.
He still performs. “I’ve been reading Yiddish poetry at the [community-wide Yom HaShoah event] for the last 40-50 years.” And he attends the local Yiddish Club gatherings, held the last Tuesday of each month at Congregation Shalom.
In July, he will teach a lecture about Yiddish theater as part of the Greenfield Summer Institute of the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Melrood’s passion for Yiddish is partially about honoring the past. “It should be preserved and taught and given its due respect because of the fact that it’s that old and there’s so much of the Jewish people connected with the Yiddish language. And in respect to those who were killed because of the connection between their being Jewish and speaking Yiddish,” he said.
But there’s more. “Yiddish is as old as English,” he said. “It’s a 1,000 year old language that my people grew with, read, enjoyed drama and theater. All of that has been developed over these years. We’ve developed a rich cultural heritage, a literature/language that maybe years ago was crude and not sophisticated but is now refined.”
And when it comes down to it, preserving Yiddish is also about being proud of what is ours, of who we were and we who continue to be. “You should be proud of being a Jew and that heritage is part of it,” he said.
So, the million-dollar question: Is Yiddish a dying language?
“Yiddish has been dying since I was born and it’s still alive and well,” Melrood said. “If you read the Yiddish Forward, there’s an awful lot going on around the world in Yiddish.”
“I think we’re seeing that [with Milwaukeeans too]” he said. “Our kids are [leaving town] but they’re out in New York and they’re learning Yiddish.”
If, between attending events at the 92nd Street Y and reading Yiddish literature, they happened to pick up a copy of the June 17 Yiddish Forward, they would have seen our own Milwaukee Yiddishist, with his silver goatee and white conference nametag, taking his place as a big macher.
For more information about Milwaukee’s Yiddish Club, which includes more than 100 members, contact Congregation Shalom, 414-352-9288.
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