Tag #107520 - Interview #78188 (Halina Leszczynska)

When my father was alive, Yiddish was spoken at home, but now, when Dad is not here, we don't speak it anymore. Dad was there, some friends of his would visit and we had someone to talk to, now we don't. In our family it's only my mother and I [who can speak Yiddish].

But I'm forgetting it as well... I'm now reading Stryjkowski's 'Echo' [29], it's all supposedly taking place in a Jewish family and when there's some dialogue I always ask myself: 'What would this sound like in Yiddish?' And I can't come up with all the words. I even wanted to sign up for a course in Yiddish conversation, so I wouldn't forget it, but I went there once and they could all speak less than I could, so I decided it made no sense to go there. And because I was a methodologist of foreign language teaching I'm kind of sensitive [to teaching methods]. I wouldn't teach these conversations like they do. There always has to be some topic for conversations, vocabulary for the topic, some phrases, idioms...