The Soul of Yiddish

I grew up hearing quite a lot of Yiddish and understanding not much of it at all. And that was a good thing in that my parents used it when they didn't want me to understand. Of course by the time I was around to not understand their Yiddish, it was liberally interspersed with English so that to me, one of their exchanges might sound like: Blah blah four thirty blah blah telephone. Blah blah Corydon Avenue. They had emigrated to Canada in their early years from the Pale of Settlement, the strip of land between Poland and Russia to which the Jews had been relegated and where Yiddish was the commonly spoken language, their first language in fact. My mother arrived knowing Russian which she qui

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