The Sunset Gang

YIDDISH When it was first organized, the Sunset Village Yiddish Club met once a week. Members talked in Yiddish, read passages from the Yiddish papers to each other, and discussed, in Yiddish, the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer that they had read during the week—in the original Yiddish, of course. The members enjoyed it so much that they would sometimes stay in the all-purpose room in the Sunset Village Clubhouse, where the meetings were held, for hours after they were over, talking in Yiddish as if that language were the only logical form of communication. Finally they had to increase the meetings of the Yiddish Club to three times a week, although most of the members would have preferred to attend every day. There were a great many reasons for the phenomena, their club president would tell them. His name was Melvin Meyer, but in the tradition of the club, he was called Menasha, his name in Yiddish. He had a masterly command of the Yiddish language. Both his parents had been actors in the heyday of the Yiddish stage, when there were more than twenty Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side of New York alone and they were showing at least three hundred productions a year. “There is, of course, the element of nostalgia,” Menasha would explain to the group pedantically, his rimless glasses imposing in their severity. “It is the language of our childhood, of our parents and grandparents. To most of us it was our original language, the language in which we first expressed our fears, our anxieties, our loves, and the language in which our parents forged our childhood. The link with the past is compelling. And, naturally, there is the beauty of thelanguage itself—its rare expressiveness, its untranslatable qualities, its subtlety and suppleness—which makes it something special simply in expressing it and keeping it alive.” To both Bill (Velvil) Finkelstein and Jennie (Genendel) Goldfarb, Menasha’s words were thrilling, but merely suggestive of the depths of their true feelings. They had joined the club on the same day and, they discovered later, for the same reasons, some of which Menasha had expressed. Their respective spouses had lost the language of their forebears and showed absolutely no interest in the activity as a joint marital venture. Besides, they were much more disposed to playing cards and sitting around the pool yenting with their friends. Because they had joined on the same day, they had, out of the kinship of newness, sat next to each other and were able to start up a conversation on the subject of their first day at the club. “It’s amazing,” Genendel had said when the meeting had adjourned, “I haven’t spoken it since my mother died twenty years ago; yet I caught every word. God, I feel good speaking that language. It brings back the memories of my childhood, my mother, those delicious Friday nights.”