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y father spoke poor Polish. He spoke, as was typical for Jews before the war, ungrammatically, poorly.
There are four cases in Yiddish, and seven in Polish. He couldn’t always decline the cases properly. And at home we spoke Yiddish. If father had gone somewhere, say, to Kazimierz, and I wanted to write him a letter, I had to write in Yiddish; otherwise I wouldn’t have received a reply.
Those days I spoke Yiddish fluently, but today I don’t. Today I stutter, am at loss for words. When my father died, I was in my thirties. And for so many years I spoke and wrote and read Yiddish. Read I can to this day. If a friend from Israel writes to me in Yiddish to spite me, I can read what he writes.
I prefer to reply him in Polish. Because if I do it in Yiddish, it’s ‘Noah seven errors.’ It’s this Jewish saying: that in the word ‘Noah,’ which has only two letters in Hebrew, you make seven errors.
There are four cases in Yiddish, and seven in Polish. He couldn’t always decline the cases properly. And at home we spoke Yiddish. If father had gone somewhere, say, to Kazimierz, and I wanted to write him a letter, I had to write in Yiddish; otherwise I wouldn’t have received a reply.
Those days I spoke Yiddish fluently, but today I don’t. Today I stutter, am at loss for words. When my father died, I was in my thirties. And for so many years I spoke and wrote and read Yiddish. Read I can to this day. If a friend from Israel writes to me in Yiddish to spite me, I can read what he writes.
I prefer to reply him in Polish. Because if I do it in Yiddish, it’s ‘Noah seven errors.’ It’s this Jewish saying: that in the word ‘Noah,’ which has only two letters in Hebrew, you make seven errors.
Period
Interview
Anna Mass
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