Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Marti Krow-Lucal received a thorough Jewish education. Mostly in Yiddish.
Two afternoons a week, she attended a Hollywood kindershul and then, as a young teen, an all-Saturday mitlshul, both of which offered Yiddish lessons and a socialist take on Jewish history. Those schools were among the last of a dying breed: the secular shuln (“schools” in Yiddish) that had once dotted North America.
Though she never attained true fluency, Krow-Lucal retained her love of the Yiddish language and culture. Today, the Harvard-trained linguist
oversees the Secular Yiddish Schools of America Special Collection at Stanford University Library.
She will share her knowledge in a Dec. 12 presentation at the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library in San Francisco. She calls her talk “The Hidden History of American Yiddish Shuln.”
Hidden, because the kindershul, with its emphasis on the workers movement, was the stepchild of American Jewish education, second to religious schools in synagogues and yeshivas.
Hidden, also, because early 20th-century Jewish society outgrew its shtetl origins and became part of the modern American dream.
Says Krow-Lucal, “As Jews became more affluent, and moved away from the workers movement, what do you need Yiddish for? Just put money in the pushke and you’re fine.”
The shuln were largely the creation of the Arbiter Ring (also known as Workman’s Circle), a Jewish socialist group that still exists, largely as a club for Yiddish speakers.
By the 1930s, records show that some 30,000 Jewish children attended shuln in the United States and Canada.
All offered classes in Yiddish language and culture. “There were choruses, athletic clubs, mandolin orchestras, reading circles,” Krow-Lucal says. “These cultural groups continued to contribute money to keep these schools going.”
In her lecture, Krow-Lucal will display some of the archival materials from her Stanford collection, which fills 100 boxes. Those materials include curricula, songbooks, puppets, report cards, diplomas, textbooks, even a Yiddish bingo game.
She notes that some of the Yiddish language curricula suggest that by the 1920s and ’30s, the offspring of Jewish immigrants had begun losing interest in maintaining the Mamaloshen.
“There was a strong prejudice against Yiddish,” she says of those first-generation Jewish Americans. “As far as America goes, we didn’t have any more native speakers, or very few, after 1924, so who was going to teach it?”
Another factor in the decline of the shuln was the founding of modern Israel. Yiddish took a backseat to Hebrew as the language of choice in the Jewish world.
Though Yiddish is still spoken among some Chassidic sects in the United States and Israel, Krow-Lucal doubts a single secular Yiddish school remains open in this country.
She remembers her schools in L.A. as fun places to learn about her Jewish roots, though she insists attending class twice a week is no way to learn a language.
“I learned to read [Yiddish] very slowly, learned to write very slowly and I learned to [use] glossaries, dictionaries and grammar books,” she recalls. “But it was not until I was an adult at a New York institute for a summer that I became a little fluent. I can speak some if I have to.”
She did go on to become fluent in Spanish, having studied it at Harvard and then teaching the language at the college level. She moved to the South Bay in 1981 and taught Spanish at San Jose State University, U.C. Davis and U.C. Berkeley.
Though the heyday of the kindershul is long gone, Krow-Lucal hopes to keep that history alive through her archive, presentations such as her upcoming talk and the broader-based revival of Yiddish and klezmer music.
Speaking of her personal experience in the shuln, she has nothing but fond memories. “Usually you hear people say ‘I hated Hebrew school,’ but there was never a time we felt that way,” Krow-Lucal notes. “It was always engaging.”
Marti Krow-Lucal will speak at 2 p.m. Dec. 12 at the BJE’s Jewish Community Library, 1835 Ellis St., S.F. Free. Information: (415) 567-3327
or www.bjesf.org.