In the Quiet of the Railway Station

I am going to Canada tomorrow for the first time ever. I am not wrapping my head around this.

It is far too hot to sleep, so I am going to quickly summarize New York.
Thursday:
-super-awesome road tripping with Nomi, Sonia, and Rokhl. Getting lost on the BQE because it turned into some other road with no warning. Getting directions from a cab driver.
-swanky swanky dinner at Steiner Studios. Apparently they make movies there.
-15 people in an 11-passenger van, lost somewhere in Brooklyn
-tiny tiny hostel
-meeting awesome Yiddishists, and Hasidim, and ex-Hasidim, and an amazing community that almost makes me want to live in New York. But not quite.
Friday:
-bagels, taxicabs, tenements, terrifying Chinese food (and in such quantities!), the Holocaust, terrible tour guides, so so much walking, subway, challah and cake for dinner, wander a few blocks with Jonah and Sonia, beer and crosswords at Jonah's grandma's apartment until 2:30 am
Saturday:
-sleep
-Mermaid Parade (i.e. giant giant crowds and people in costumes) at Coney Island
-really good Mexican food
-wandering another neighborhood
-most mind-blowing concert I have seen in a really really long time. The acts: sweet old man from Romania with accordion, pretty decent ska band, crazy crazy performance artists who were very intimate with the audience, Golem! (sexiest klez band ever and as much as I would love them to do Debi's wedding, they are maybe too sexy for a wedding?), Extra Action Marching Band (yes, a marching band) who likes to perform in and among the audience as much as they like the stage, which means that I had a trombone over my head at some point, and I got shoved out of the way by a male cheerleader, and I might have gotten attacked by a spit valve but I hope not
Sunday:
-marching in the Gay Pride parade with Sonia and her father and their synagogue. Gays and Jews in one place! Woo!
-aching feet (see above)
-hot dog from a stand on the street
-crazy subway detours
-crazy adventures to Queens
-crazy road tripping with Nomi and almost but not quite getting lost
-sweet barbecue at a tiny roadside shack
-home and sleep in my own bed

And then I spent two days going to class and I guess we also warehoused it up for like 2 hours yesterday (it was too hot for more) and now we're going to Canada. I am so exhausted, but I can't stop. Other people are getting sick, so I try to keep my energy up to make up for that. Sonia and I are writing the intern show because we're that over-achieving. It will be amazing and full of inside jokes so you won't understand it. You can come if you want, though. Jonah and Marissa are emceeing and they are lovely people.

I am going to try sleeping. My fan is on very high and all my windows are open but that just means bugs. Send help, but not until this weekend.

Canada!

Curl Up With a Book About Organized Crime

I guess it's about time for an update. Life is proceeding apace. Naomi Seidman is my absolute hero and I cannot believe that I have spent the last week and a half listening to her lecture every single day. Sorry, all future faculty of this program, but you simply will not stack up. I want Naomi to come to Hampshire and be on my committee and keep reminding me how much I love Yiddish and everything about it. Ruth Wisse gave a lecture, too, and I know she's legendary (I mean, she pretty much singlehandedly invented the academic study of Yiddish), and I won't admit it to anyone here, but she made me feel outside the field. She gave a great lecture, but at one point, probably without even meaning it, she made an offhand complaint about how the kids who come to study Yiddish these days don't grow up in the Jewishly rich home that speakers of Yiddish did, and how Yiddish teachers want to start at a higher level, but have to go through the basics of the culture first. And I know she's the sort of person who wishes that mainstream Jewish culture was more than a handful of jokes, and I'm with her there. But something about the way that offhand comment immediately excluded non-Jews from ever "getting" Yiddish made me really disinclined to listen to the rest of her lecture, and deeply colored my feelings about her. Fortunately, I have Naomi Seidman, who's used to teaching mixed-religion classes, and has actually spent a lot of time looking at the intersection of Jewish and Christian culture. I mean, she reads Gimpl the Fool as a story about the Holy Family, and not even a necessarily negative portrayal! She's also teaching all sorts of things about the secret things Jews say about Christians, and it is fascinating. I might even tell you these secrets if you ask nicely. Speaking of which, Night in the Yiddish is a very very different and intensely more honest book. I hope to read it entirely in this form one day, and I wish there were some way of transmitting that back to non-Jewish culture. I'm still not sure how I feel about the kinds of secrets that I'm learning about, although I do understand the minority's need to protect themselves.

I had no intention of being so esoteric here, but I really am in love with Naomi Seidman and it is impossible to really transmit why. Outside of class, warehouse work is grimy and sweaty and some people take to it much better than others, but those of us who have fun with it have lots of fun because, let's face it, pallet jacks are so awesome. Our days are really full, and I am trying to keep some balance (and not spend too much money), and I think I'm managing. Rebecca, Jessica, Paul, Jason, Jeremy, Michael and I spent a lot of time playing Paper Pass (as we have dubbed it) this weekend, and it may become a fixture. I've had some amazing discussions with people about so many things, although really just Jews. I'm trying really hard to get some utterly non-Jewish things in my life for balance, and I'm kind of failing. I need to hang out with Gentiles, I think.

In spite of the longness of the days and the nightly homework, I'm getting a lot of pleasure reading done. Something about being so motivated to do so much Yiddish means I'm also motivated to do non-Yiddish things. Maybe because I have to work so hard to read things in Yiddish, so reading in English is such a relaxing break.

I think people want to watch a movie, and my laundry might be done. This was a terrible update on my life. I apologize.

Sunday 1

I love my life, by the way.

Jonah hosted an amazing Shabbat dinner Friday night (that's a redundant phrase) and I even managed to make some good tzimmes although it paled in comparison to Sonia's amazing kugel. I am making Sonia adopt me, because she is the best Jewish mother ever. There was a ton of great food (Debi makes really good challah, too) and I even made sure that Jonah made deviled eggs so it would be a real potluck (I told him that macaroni and cheese was also necessary but that didn't happen. The kugel had cream cheese in it though, so I guess that's kind of similar). It was great to have most of the internship kids around hanging out and eating, which we don't do often enough, even though we live together. And Debi tried to teach us some crazy Yiddish socialist songs, and then she taught us crazy Yiddish folk dances, which were more successful. There is something pretty amazing about doing mating dances barefoot in the grass at midnight. Especially when it's followed by a bonfire and singing (Kari needs to learn Jew songs because Christian songs aren't going to cut it this summer) and then playing in a creek. Nothing identifies city kids and country kids faster than wading across a(n ankle-deep) creek in the middle of the night and near-darkness. I'm a country kid, by the way. We even had some 1-in-the-morning-ice-cream-straight-from-the-carton (which included the brilliant "get a spoonful of ice cream and then dip it into the jar of hot fudge sauce" method, which I highly recommend for your next communal ice cream function), courtesy of Paul and Jeremy who know how to pick very good ice cream flavors and not boring chocolate/vanilla.

Other highlights of the week:
We have a theme song, and it is in Polish. But it's called "Oy Madagascar" and it is better than you can possibly imagine. Because of this song, Marissa is Jungle Jew.
Nicknames are happening! I love nicknames. Most of them involve Yiddish diminutives.
We took pictures in a tree (with a professional photographer and a bunch of Hebrew religious books that we did not treat with appropriate piety) and I hope they give us copies of a bunch of them cause I bet they're awesome.

Naomi Seidman is coming tomorrow and she is #3 on my list of Yiddishists I adore (after Max/Uriel Weinreich and Jeffrey Shandler) and I am beyond excited. I have no idea how to deal with this, granted, but I'm sure I'll be fine.

Yiddish!

Raptor Roar

I go and put lovely dry-erase boards up for all the (2) mods and then Randall Monroe has to go and do it in his new apartment but 193485934 times better. I wish I were creative.

On a happier note, all of our stuff is labeled in Yiddish. Which Randall Monroe's apartment most sorely lacks, I am sure.

Life Is Beautiful

All this rain, maybe not.

I'm moved in to Prescott 75, in a loft room (pretty much the sweetest deal ever and those of us who have them are maaaad excited) and then internet hookup is in the closet which means that computer + bed (bed being in the loft) is not quite working, but I'm managing. Computer directly underneath skylight in the loft is pretty sweet, though. Mod life is fabulous, people are wonderful.

Speaking of people, I love Internship life. We spent all day today in various lectures and classes (which is a looong day and the only time we are doing so) but it was so incredibly fascinating that I can't begin to complain. There are 3 people (including me) in the intermediate Yiddish class right now, but that might change. In any case, that is a wonderfully intimate class and I know I'm going to learn a ton, even if I'm kind of terrified right now (I cannot form a sentence in Yiddish but I do try). The professor leading the culture class this week is so knowledgeable and a very entertaining speaker, so I'm really glad I'm getting the chance to work with him. I have this opportunity to work with so many leaders of Yiddish academia this summer, and I can't believe my luck- these are the people whose books I read, and now they're here, talking to me! Aaron Lansky did a lecture on a Bashevis story and a Peretz story and I was acutely aware of how incredibly not Jewish I am and we spent a lot of time in general talking about how religion and culture weren't different things for Jews of this time period- religion wasn't thought about at all as separate from daily life- praying and hanging out with your friends and having Shabbat dinner and sleeping were all just things that you did. Of course, I still identify very much with Yiddish culture, but not in a religious sense. And I think a lot of what's important about Yiddishkeit is precisely that it's not Christian, and there's a lot of Christian influence in Judaism today (just because a lot of Christian values have shaped modern Western values) and, although no one said it in so many words today, getting into a Yiddish headspace means getting rid of Christian thinking. Which is easy to do when you point something out to a bunch of Jews as being very Christian-influenced, but not so easy for the Christian in the group. So much of what we're doing has a lot to do with one's own identity. Jewish culture is about identity. Aaron's lecture focused a lot on determining how Jewish Peretz and Bashevis are. And, no matter how much I adore Peretz and Bashevis, I don't know that I can ever judge their Jewishness. Nor will I ever read them like a Jew. We have a wide range of religious observance here (from the not-driving-on-shabbes types to the atheists), but only 2 goyim and I'm the only one who's observant. And that's going to color my treatment of Yiddish literature. And I feel the need to constantly be upfront about it, to start every sentence with "I'm a Christian, and I see this as blah blah blah" or "I'm not Jewish, but I think yadda yadda." And I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't know if it's just my attempt to maintain an identity while being a minority, or to admit that I am woefully ignorant of so many basic Jewish things (although I'm learning and I know more than some) or what, but I feel like it's going to be crucial to my Yiddish career.