When engaging with minority languages and cultures, how do we make sense of the past, navigate the grief and excitement of their present evolutions, and build a future where these languages and cultures can continue to be integral to our identities and experiences? In this session, we will listen to highlights from the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project collection, exploring people’s relationships to a diasporic, so-called “post vernacular” language—Yiddish—that represents the past for so many, despite being spoken by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.
ABSTRACT: When engaging with minority languages and cultures, how do we make sense of the past, navigate the grief and excitement of their present evolutions, and build a future where these languages and cultures can continue to be integral to our identities and experiences?As oral historians, we are motivated by a temporal imperative to collect the earliest memories of our living elders before it’s too late. Yet there is also value in documenting younger voices to represent the breadth of engagement with language and culture now. In listening deeply to those carrying a minority culture and language, oral history allows us to both record the past and document the continuing evolution of the culture and language use.In this session, we will listen to highlights from the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project collection, exploring people’s relationships to a diasporic, so-called “post vernacular” language—Yiddish—that represents the past for so many, despite being spoken by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. We will hear from people of a myriad of ages and life experiences as they reflect on issues of language, identity, and meaning-making in the past, present, and their visions for the future. We will hear stories that have been passed down generations as well as accounts of how people are reinventing, reinvigorating, and creating new Yiddish culture. Through looking at the specific case of Yiddish language and culture, these stories illuminate the value of an intergenerational, international collection of diaspora cultures.
