Music, lectures, comedy, food, films, and, of course stories. All have been on the program over the 12-year history of the Shalom Yiddish Vinkl (circle), whose mission is to celebrate and preserve Yiddish culture.
But the group’s most recent meeting marked a singular event — a world premiere featuring group members that could potentially affect far more than the Club’s 100-plus members.
“Milwaukee Yiddish Memories: Yesterday, Today and Hopefully Tomorrow” is a 145-minute DVD featuring the Yiddish-related recollections of 29 Shalom Vinkl members.
The project was the brainchild of Nancy Weiss-McQuide, the youngest member of the group and one of its committee members. Committee members include co-founders Alvin (Dink) Holzman and Frieda Levine. The committee, which functions as the group’s executive body, is responsible for coming up with a program for each of the group’s nine meetings per year.
“About a year ago I had the idea that we should just share memories of Yiddish in our lives and schmooze,” Weiss-McQuide said. “So we asked members to please bring and share an anecdote about how Yiddish was used in their lives.”
She recalls the lead-up to that particular fourth Tuesday, the group’s meeting night, as a nerve-racking one.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” she said. “But that day we got stories that were so beautiful and so touching and so funny that it was just one of our best meetings.
“And then, a year later, it dawned on me that we should record these. So we asked some people to bring back their stories, and that’s what prompted this particular project.”
Local videographer David Nedbeck was called in, and at the group’s April meeting, each speaker had five minutes to tell his or her story.
“The stories told by each participant were amazing,” Holzman said in a written statement. “Barbara Kruck spoke of how her Bubby [grandmother] would speak to her in Yiddish while teaching her how to cook and observe the Sabbath. Gerold Hersh spoke about learning to play shoch [chess] with his Zaydie, conversing throughout the games in Yiddish.”
Other members spoke of first hearing Yiddish when they were children, spoken when parents and grandparents didn’t want children within earshot to know what they were saying.
Beverly Ugent recalled that after she was sent to the Workman’s Circle to learn Yiddish — with a different accent than that spoken at home, which was a source of strife for her Bubby — the adults switched their “adults-only” language to Russian.
Growing up in England, Belle Lane’s parents rarely spoke Yiddish, but her grandmother, who lived nearby, did. Years later, when asked during a job interview whether she spoke Yiddish, her reply that she spoke her grandmother’s Yiddish landed her the position.
Both Dink Holzman and Bud Siegel recalled hearing Yiddish at home but learning to read and write the language at Harry Garfinkel’s New Method Hebrew School on 53rd and Center Streets.
“My parents would always take me to the Yiddish theater which came to Milwaukee once a year,” Siegel said, “and I had the opportunity to hear fine performers from the Second Avenue Theater (in New York).”
For Holzman, Yiddish was never an adults-only language.
“My grandfather, when he was a boy in Russia, suffered from what is now known as scarlet fever,” he said, “and the aftereffects left him not being able to speak clearly, and he was deaf. So if you wanted to talk to the Zayda, you had to know some Yiddish…. The only way Zayda could understand you was to read your lips.”
Later in life, Holzman became a minor celebrity at the Chicago nursing home where his wife’s grandmother lived.
“I would write her Yiddish letters and everybody in the home knew what I had written,” he said.
That level of literacy was not passed down.
“My children, my grandchildren have no knowledge of Yiddish at all. They’re not hearing it enough. We’re not speaking it,” he said.
That was Weiss-McQuide’s experience until she was an adult.
“My friend Howard Weinshel (z”l) was a great Yiddishist and he pushed me toward it,” she said.
Membership in the club has allowed her to combine her love of Yiddish language and culture and her love for older adults.
“I’ve always had a love for senior citizens, I like history, I like Jewish history and there’s nothing like hearing it first-hand,” she said.
Now that the club has completed filming, its next task is to decide what to do with the video. Weiss-McQuide said that the group would like to distribute copies to local Jewish community and educational institutions.
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