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52 Ancestors Week 20 – Another Language
May. 15th, 2018 11:45 amThe theme for week 20 (May 14-20) is Another Language.
I sometimes joke that my family spoke no language known to the rest of mankind in general. It’s more that the people around me spoke a number of languages, often within the same sentence. I am not joking when I say that I was nearly 40 by the time I realized that capisce is not a Yiddish word. My father was fluent in English, Yiddish (essentially his native language), Hebrew, German, Russian, and Italian and had a smattering of other languages. My mother was born in the U.S. but spoke Yiddish and Spanish before she spoke English. My maternal grandfather’s fluency in Spanish was useful for his jewelry business when a lot of Puerto Ricans began to move to the Bronx, though they made fun of his Cuban accent.
Other languages also come up a lot in searching for records. I have a number of vital records from Poland for ancestors on my mother’s side of the family – and they are in Russian. On my father’s side, the vital records from Lithuania are in both Russian and Hebrew. I can read names, but I need help with some of the other details. And then I have post cards in Yiddish and photographs with inscriptions in languages ranging from Yiddish and Hebrew to German and Italian. I am grateful to people on some facebook groups who have translated things for me.
My favorite language related story involves my paternal grandfather’s marriage to his fourth wife. I heard Dad talking with him on the phone – in Yiddish (with bits of Italian thrown in, as was typical for them). Suddenly, his vocabulary must have run out because he said, in English, "Pa, you don’t have to marry her. In America they call it shacking up." I swear this is absolutely true. Emes.
I sometimes joke that my family spoke no language known to the rest of mankind in general. It’s more that the people around me spoke a number of languages, often within the same sentence. I am not joking when I say that I was nearly 40 by the time I realized that capisce is not a Yiddish word. My father was fluent in English, Yiddish (essentially his native language), Hebrew, German, Russian, and Italian and had a smattering of other languages. My mother was born in the U.S. but spoke Yiddish and Spanish before she spoke English. My maternal grandfather’s fluency in Spanish was useful for his jewelry business when a lot of Puerto Ricans began to move to the Bronx, though they made fun of his Cuban accent.
Other languages also come up a lot in searching for records. I have a number of vital records from Poland for ancestors on my mother’s side of the family – and they are in Russian. On my father’s side, the vital records from Lithuania are in both Russian and Hebrew. I can read names, but I need help with some of the other details. And then I have post cards in Yiddish and photographs with inscriptions in languages ranging from Yiddish and Hebrew to German and Italian. I am grateful to people on some facebook groups who have translated things for me.
My favorite language related story involves my paternal grandfather’s marriage to his fourth wife. I heard Dad talking with him on the phone – in Yiddish (with bits of Italian thrown in, as was typical for them). Suddenly, his vocabulary must have run out because he said, in English, "Pa, you don’t have to marry her. In America they call it shacking up." I swear this is absolutely true. Emes.
