It is estimated that there are only around 3 million speakers of Yiddish left in this world, and I'm guessing that most of them are stand-up comedians. Compare this with the number on the eve of World War II -- roughly 12 million Yiddish speakers, not so many comedians, maybe, but a big number, nonetheless, because there were far fewer human beings overall back then.
We all know what happened during WW2, but in addition to the Halocaust, assimilation and the one-language credo of the Zionist movement has sent the number of speakers plummeting during my lifetime.
Humor is in short supply as well, I'm sorry to report. Everyone's too worried about the economy. The few surviving old humorists who played the Borsht Belt in my youth (not that I ever made it to the Catskills, mind you, I was stuck wandering the cornfields of Michigan like a disoriented character in a story by Sholem Rabinovitsh (better known as Sholem Aleichem), who is also known as the Jewish Mark Twain, and whose work you, my dear reader, have long known well. Perhaps not the original טבֿיה דער מילכיקער but certainly as the romanticized Fiddler on the Roof.
Now, where was I?
Oh yes, my annual Yiddish Report, one of those features you can only access here, at Hotweir World Headquarters (HWH).
Listen, on the subject of wanderers, stars or not, did you hear the one about the guy who kept meeting women on Montrose Avenue in L.A., I think it was, or maybe in Brooklyn, whatever, and this guy kept getting rashes afterward? After the third such episode his doctor told him to start trying the women on La Cienega.
So we're thinking of going back to our roots here at HWH, which will require us to reveal our own origins as part of the little-known wandering DeVeres. Among other things, there are those who postulate that the queerly massive vocabularies many of us DeVeres possess from childhood are evidence of literary genius or at least literary genes.
I'm not touching that one any faster than I'd touch one of those rashy women on Montrose Avenue. A meshugener I am not.
I'm lost again. Oy, the state of Yiddish. Can you name the only three countries where Yiddish is an official minority language recognized by the state?
Quickly!
Time's up.
There's Moldova, of course, where 26% of the population speaks Yiddish. That was the easy one. The other two are The Netherlands and Sweden, where nobody speaks it but they are extremely sensitive to the issue of "Youish Guilt."
What else can I tell you, my darlings? Okay, here's one: In the U.S. where are most Yiddish speakers? Quick, quick, quick.
Time's Up.
New York, Florida, California, and Pennsylvania. There's a handful of others, mostly in the Midwest (we have 20 more speakers in Michigan, than you do, Ohio -- take that!), and Arizona plus a few tiny northeastern states, mainly suburbs of New York.
In the end, this population is miniscule -- maybe 178,000 American Jews. And mostly over 65.
So the next time you ask yourself, why isn't anything funny anymore, you might consider this: גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזֹור אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא, i.e, if nobody is hawking our prayer books, who's going to have a good day after synagogue? (A very, very rough translation.) I'm not sure what that even means, but you get the point.
Don't ask me for anything more: I'm only a disoriented non-star, which frankly, in my book, is a better translation of what טבֿיה דער מילכיקער (Tevye the Milkman) represnets, but then again, who's asking what I think?
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