A Taste for Yiddish

Every Saturday afternoon when he was 7, Aaron Paley ate lunch with his older siblings and begged to hear what they’d learned at Yiddish Kindershul that morning. “We’d always have corned beef on rye, Dr. Brown’s cream soda and a pickle,” said Van Nuys native Paley, now 45 and founder of Yiddishkayt Los Angeles. The first Yiddish words they taught him: broyt mit puter (bread and butter).

This month, Paley will help teach Angelenos about the mamaloshen by mingling two of his long-standing passions: Yiddish and food. His group’s third biennial festival, Food for the Soul: A Celebration of Yiddish, the largest Yiddishfest in the nation, will serve up Ashkenazi culture with a gastronomical twist. The dozen events scheduled — at museums, nightclubs and theaters — will include concerts and a discussion about delis with restaurant critic extraordinaire Jonathan Gold (see sidebar).

Musicians from The Klezmatics will present Esn! Songs From the Kitchen, in which they cook and schmooze about everything from the holiness of ritual foods to the oddities of a sisterhood cookbook. Pushcart vendors will hawk bagels-on-a-stick and “nickel-shtikls” (5-cent pickles) at a Lower East Side Festival at the Skirball Cultural Center. Even the four song concerts — including a Yiddish cabaret set to jazz — reveal the mamaloshen’s obsession with the stomach.

“The two ultimate songs identified with Yiddish are ‘Raisins and Almonds’ and ‘Romania, Romania’ — which is all about what you can eat in Romania, Romania,” Paley said. “We’re a culture that loves food, partly because we’ve lived through centuries of not having enough.”

“Food is the thing that lasts in ethnic communities after they’ve completely assimilated,” said Susan Lerner, co-chair of Yiddishkayt’s board of directors. “Even when you’ve lost everything, you still have the food connection; it’s the earliest memory. It represents home and hearth and family. It’s pretty much immutable.”

Hence the giant corned beef sandwich on the festival’s brochure. “We’re using food as a vehicle to draw Jews back into the Yiddish ‘kitchen,’ but what we’re serving up is actually nouvelle cuisine,” said Paley, co-founder of Community Arts Resources, Los Angeles’ preeminent festival organizer. “We’re offering new works by contemporary artists who use Yiddishkayt as a starting point … presenting Yiddish as a dynamic culture that is relevant today.”

The concept has been simmering since Yiddishkayt Los Angeles began in 1995, part of a general resurgent interest in the culture that all but died after the Holocaust. The Yiddish revival, Paley said, is fueled by nostalgia and the desire to reclaim heritage forsaken in past generations’ haste to assimilate. The phenomenon now includes an $8 million National Yiddish Book Center Complex in Amherst, Mass., and, in Los Angeles, at least three professional klezmer bands and dozens of Yiddish classes and clubs as well as the festival.

Yiddishkayt Los Angeles, which has a $200,000 budget and drew 5,000 visitors in 2000, has built a national reputation. “It’s been particularly successful at bridging the Yiddish- and English-speaking worlds, which is the trend of Yiddish cultural organizations trying to bring in younger, American-born Jews,” said Itzik Gottesman, associate editor of The Yiddish Forward newspaper. “Groups like Yiddishkayt are making the culture interesting, hip and fun.”

Paley and colleagues came up with the idea for Food for the Soul after hearing about Esn! an event they viewed as hip and fun. It’s created by members of the Klezmatics, perhaps the most popular and critically acclaimed group on the contemporary klezmer scene.

“We’re all food-obsessed,” said trumpeter Frank London of himself and Esn! co-creators Lorin Sklamberg and Adrienne Cooper. “My grandfather owned a deli in Brooklyn Heights, Lorin’s grandparents were Jewish chicken farmers in California and Adrienne’s grandparents were kosher butchers in Chicago. So one day we said to each other, ‘We all love food, we love Yiddish culture and songs’ so — as the ‘Little Rascals’ used to say — let’s put it all together and put on a show.”

At the University of Judaism Oct. 9-10, the musicians will cook Jewish classics over an electric stove and recount their culinary histories. London, 44, will describe growing up in a Reform Long Island household where meals “were a bizarre melange of Jewish fare and American 1950s cooking — like chicken a la king with kugel.”

He said he’ll cook cholent onstage precisely because he did not grow up with the quintessentially Orthodox Sabbath meal. Sklamberg will bake a challah and Cooper will fry matzah brie while debating whether the dish should be served sweet or savory. In between, the musicians will sing ditties such as the socialist anthem “Bread and Roses” and Mickey Katz’s “Seder Dance,” a parody of Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance.” “The song lists every thing you eat at the seder,” London said. “The last course is baking soda, which you need because you have indigestion from eating so much food.”

Not everyone believes such palatable fare furthers Yiddish. Sociologist Joshua Fishman told The Forward he dismisses festivals like Paley’s as “entertainment.” He contended the “real Yiddish revival” is occurring in the world of the Orthodox, who comprise most of the world’s estimated 750,000 fluent Yiddish speakers. Yet, he conceded that while, “People [arrive] nonspeakers, and they leave nonspeakers … maybe some of them will go on to take a class.”

That is Paley’s goal. “We know it’s not enough to do just a festival,” he said, citing his organization’s one-day Yiddish ulpan.

Yiddishkayt Los Angeles also recently hired a 22-year-old program manager, Tali Pressman, to run the organization and plan events appealing to young adults. One of the events, the Los Angeles debut of famed jazz-klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer, will take place Oct. 11 and 12 at The Knitting Factory, a nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard.

It’s a way to introduce assimilated Angelenos to the joys of Yiddish. “The culture nourishes the Jewish people, literally and figuratively,” Paley said.

For more information about the festival, call (323)692-8151 or visit www.yiddishkaytla.org .