You can now hear people crying in Yiddish in bars all over Berlin

At a Berlin bar on a recent Wednesday evening, several patrons kept glancing anxiously at the group of eight people sitting on low stools with their heads bowed and speaking a vaguely unfamiliar language.

“Weine nicht! Alles wird gut. Welche Sprache sprichst du denn überhaupt? Schweizerdeutsch?” asked one bargoer in a slurred voice, downing a Berliner Luft.

“Yiddish!” sobbed one of the mourners with a heartrending veygeshray.

Since early 2022, the group known as “Shmues un Veyn” has been mourning every two weeks in bars around Berlin. On an average night, anywhere from six to 14 mourners might show up. More formal events, like the chanting of Eykho, draw a larger crowd. 

Founded by Yiddish translator Jake Schneider through the loose cultural collective Yiddish.Berlin, the group offers an opportunity to cry bitter tears in public, and to speak Yiddish casually, outside of formal classes.

Schneider told me, “Some say that doctors prescribe laughter, but I think that’s helpful vi a toytn bankes.” After studying Yiddish online throughout the pandemic he was looking for a group with whom to share his full linguistic and emotional self. He said, “I wanted to find my Yiddish-speaking community and have a good old-fashioned cry.”  Lest anyone should mistake the motives of the group, Schneider was clear: “We are not mourning the death of Yiddish. We are celebrating Yiddish as a living language with a full range of emotional possibilities. It moves us to tears.”

“It’s very simple and natural,” blubbered participant and organizer Katerina Kuznetsova, wiping her eyes with a tikhele. “You don’t need money for this, you don’t need funding. We gather and speak Yiddish; we beat our chests, we rend our garments. Occasionally a participant will hold a few trembling lines of poetry in their palms and let them run, word by word, through their fingers, amidst the sobs of the crowd.”

Translator and poet Jordan Lee Schnee tried to respond to my interview questions but couldn’t get a word out, so well practiced was he at mourning that his lightning speech turned to ashes.