Editorial, July 16, 2010

Dirty Dancing

LAST year, it was Susan Boyle, this year it’s Jane Korman. A YouTube video produced by the Melbourne artist has gone viral, garnering almost 400,000 hits from around the globe in just a couple of days. And the world’s press has lapped it up with headlines effectively declaring “Shock horror, disco dancing at Auschwitz”.
Quite why there’s been this sudden level of interest is surprising in its own right, given that the film was first posted online back in January. Indeed, as long ago as last November The AJN reported that Korman’s video installation was being displayed in a public exhibition. But it was just this week, quoting our original story from 2009, that one after another various papers picked up on it creating a media frenzy.
Inevitably, as Korman recognised when we spoke to her, some members of the community, particularly survivors, would be offended — disco music and dancing in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei gates would not merely be considered inappropriate given the sanctity and solemnity of the site, they would be sacrilegious, glossing over the horrors of the Holocaust and an affront to the memory of those who died. And yet, while the implementation of the idea she wished to convey may have been misguided, there can be no doubting Korman’s intent and message. A symbol of Jewish vitality in the very locations where the Nazis had sought to extinguish Jewish life. Vibrant expressions of joy visibly rebutting the sorrow, the sadness and the suffering that had been inflicted. In short, while we must mourn the victims, so too we must celebrate survival, just as we do at Pesach, at Purim and at Chanukah. An affirmation, as Korman says, of existence.

The other intent, she claims, is to add a new dimension to our perception of the Holocaust, distinct from the traditional “numbing” images that we’re used to. A fresh approach to engage a public that may have become desensitised. In that regard, the level of interest shown over the past few days, suggests she may have succeeded. An audience has been engaged and an opportunity has been presented to discuss the significance of the Shoah.

But at what cost? Sensitivity, it’s claimed, has been sacrificed on the altar of art. And however worthy Korman’s aims, for some, that’s a price that should never have been paid.

The ganze megillah

AS they struggled to come to terms with ablative absolutes, past participles, the pluperfect subjunctive and the third declension, many is the schoolboy of yesteryear who could be heard muttering the legendary refrain “Latin is a language as dead as dead can be, it killed the mighty Romans and now it’s killing me.”
And yet, while the Caesars and the Circus Maximus may no longer be with us, words spoken by the gladiators and great emperors thousands of years ago still feature in our every day vocabulary. We preserve the status quo and we emphasise the proof of our arguments QED – quod erat demonstrandum.

So too has Yiddish — the language of our shtetl forebears — filtered into common parlance. You don’t have to be Jewish to shmooze, to fress, to shlep or to kvetch. And while Toronto police recently decreed that using the word “shiksa” could constitute a hate crime, nonetheless on American comedies where Yiddish is the lingua franca, Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes gloried in the notion she had “shiksappeal”, while Charlotte in Sex and the City was hailed as a “shiksa goddess”. Throw in some fermischts, a gesundheit, the occasional broiges and some oy gevalts and, for many of us, that’s about it — the language of the alter heim fading into history.

Enough though of the tsores, it’s time to get shmaltzy and spread a bit of naches. For thanks to a surge of interest in recent years, Yiddish is now enjoying something of a renaissance. Academic and cultural groups the world over are building bridges from the past to the present, promoting awareness of the literature, music and poetry that captured the essence of Jewish life in bygone days, while encouraging the modern generation of Jewry to see it as a living, breathing language. Rich in vocabulary and idiom, our haimishe heritage need not just be an expression of who we were, it can also be an expression of who we are.

After all, alongside ritual and tradition, a common language is one of the key elements that binds a nation. Dispersed across the continents, for millions of Jews in the prewar years Yiddish was that bond.

Today, of course, we are blessed. As well as the language of the country we call home, as Jews we have Hebrew. But the glorious guttural tones of Yiddish resonate equally within the Jewish soul and should be embraced accordingly. And why not?

For as the saying goes “eyn loshn iz keynmol nisht genug” — “one language is never enough.”