What Did You Say?

When my husband and I stood under the chuppah over three decades ago, it never dawned on us that we would be creating a modern-day Tower of Bavel. We entered the marriage with a total of six kids between the ages of five to nine (yes, to make things more leibedig, that number included a pair of identical twins!), and five of the children wore the same size shoe!

My husband's children spoke Yiddish with a smattering of Hebrew and a bissele French; mine, Hebrew with a smattering of English. My husband and I communicated (and still continue to communicate, baruch Hashem) in English. Our blended family was trilingual.

Everything was fine; we managed to make ourselves understood, or misunderstood, as the case may be. And then, with the birth of three more children, the fun really began.

Although I spoke to the older children in Hebrew, I spoke English to the younger ones, and they responded in either English or Hebrew.  My husband spoke to them in Yiddish. Between themselves and with friends, it was a toss-up between English and Hebrew.

When it came to figuring out which language to speak to whom, they kind of got it, but not quite. "Mommy," said my five-year-old proudly, "I g’go to the store, and I g’buy bread," inserting the Yiddish past tense into the English sentence.  Sometimes they replaced English words for Hebrew, altering them to be grammatically (in)correct, as in (I kid you not), "Hicloseti (root word: close) et hadelet. I closed the door."

It took a while until the children realized that I understand Yiddish. When my youngest daughter asked my husband, "Tatty, vos vilst du essen?" and he responded, "A shtikel broit mit kez," she immediately turned to me to explain, "Mommy, Tatty would like a slice of bread with cheese for breakfast."

At one point I decided to stop all the confusion and communicate solely in Yiddish. My daughter quickly put an end to this when she innocently declared, "Ven d'mama vilst machen freilich, ze redt Yiddish un d'gantze shtub lacht — when the mother wants to make everyone happy, she speaks Yiddish, and the entire family laughs."

Then the children got married, and I started working in an all English-speaking environment. On more than one occasion I gave an entire drashah to one of my children's spouses in English. When he finally managed to get a word in, he said, "But shvigger, I really don't understand English.” My oldest son-in-law actually knew a bissele English — exactly one word: chicken. So, one Erev Pesach, when I called out to family eating supper in our chametz corner, "I need help in the kitchen," he promptly appeared at my side and asked, "Where's the chicken?" Now it was my turn to be confused!

And then came the grandchildren.

Some of my grandchildren speak only Yiddish — they barely understand Hebrew, and of course they don't know English. The last time I tried to read a story to them (in Yiddish, of course), they listened politely and then suggested that we play a game instead. I have other grandchildren who speak only Hebrew, and when I ask if they'd like a pulke or a fliegele, they give me a blank stare.

And then there are the London grandchildren. I thought that finally I'd be able to speak my mamalashon to my progeny, but I quickly learned that Brits don't speak English, at least not the type of English that I grew up with. So between deciphering the thick English accent and figuring out the meaning of familiar-sounding words  such as dustbin lorry and third form. most of our conversations consist of, "What did you say?" 

But there is one thing that all children, and children-in-laws and grandchildren know: that when one Mommy, or Shvigger, or Bubby serves hot, straight-out-of-the-oven kokosh cake with a glass of cold, foamy milk, followed by a triple-layer ice cream cone, it's her way of saying, "I love you." And that does not need any translation!