Jan 30, 2025
INTRODUCTION
Since 2022, the Yiddish Sof-Vokh UK has offered Yiddish speakers the chance to spend a weekend entirely immersed in mame-loshn. The entire weekend is participant-led, with talks, workshops and performances organised and delivered by attendees. Regular contributors include teachers, specialists, and enthusiasts of all kinds, but this is not a summer program: no dictionaries are provided, nor is there any language instruction. Instead, participants come away learning from each other and from the rich variety of experiences and identities that makes up the Yiddish-speaking world.
As summer approaches and we get closer to the fourth Yiddish Sof-Vokh UK, we prepare to return to a hotel in the beautiful Lickey Hills in England’s West Midlands. A significant amount of preparation and reflection by the volunteers of the Yiddish Café Trust goes on behind the scenes in order to welcome new participants and maintain a Yiddish-only svive. Two of the event’s organizers, historian M. Syd Rosen and Yiddish teacher and puppet-maker Osian Evans Sharma, sat down to discuss the immersive Yiddish weekend.
Motl Rosen: You went to the first Yiddish Sof-Vokh, right? How did that come about?
Osian Evans Sharma: I didn’t help with organizing the first year I attended. In fact, I had no idea what to expect. I started learning Yiddish during my MA in Jewish Studies, but that was during the worst of the pandemic and it was all online. I went to my first summer program the following summer in Tel Aviv, but there wasn’t much socializing involved due to ongoing restrictions. I was aware of the Yiddish Open Mic, which the Yiddish Café Trust puts together every month as a kind of hybrid show-and-tell. They were then in the process of launching the Sof-Vokh, and my teacher Sima Beeri was involved; so I had lots of encouragement to join. Motl, you weren’t speaking Yiddish on campus either, though.
MR: It’s funny, because although I’ve been in and out of academia for the past decade, I never encountered Yiddish in a university environment. But anyone trying to pick up the language in London will eventually come across Vivi Lachs, Steve Ogin, and the circle around the Yiddish Café Trust. They’ve been fighting for Yiddish-language spaces for longer than I’ve been alive. Before I really knew it, I was being welcomed and encouraged and motivated to keep on learning bit by bit. That said, I wasn’t really sold on immersing myself in anything.
OS: Well, the Sof-Vokh certainly is an immersive environment, but there definitely aren’t any language classes. There were more academic presentations in the first year, but even then there was no language instruction as such. Heather Valencia’s presentation on Sutzkever’s poetry made a strong impression on me then. But the whole weekend was about living in Yiddish, regardless of the topic. We ate together, danced together, and took country walks together. The program has changed a bit over the years; there are still academic talks, but we have more child-friendly sessions, workshops in theater, sports, creative writing—every year is different because sessions are led by attendees. That’s what keeps the program interesting. Why didn’t you like the idea of immersion?
MR: To be honest, I was pretty skeptical about the whole Sof-Vokh premise. I was terrible at languages at school and didn’t exactly want to go to Latin camp when I was a teenager, so I really didn’t want to go to Latin camp as an adult.
OS: You weren’t enticed by the prospect of wearing a toga for 48 hours?
MR: Yeah, a Yiddishist Animal House sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But no, my biggest fear was encountering a sort of cosplay that might be very compelling and fun if you’re a certain kind of person that loves Ancient Rome or Esperanto but that would resonate very differently in this context.
OS: Sure, but we’re not dealing with a dead language, or a constructed one. It’s alive and organic! The first time I went, I was surprised by how quickly the first evening went from lighting Shabbos candles to singing [the Bundist anthem] Di shvue, fists waving in the air. Of course we “perform” rituals, but that doesn’t make them inauthentic.
Sof-Vokh 2024 participants make paper cuttings known as shvueslekh or royzelekh, a traditional Galician activity on Shvues.
MR: It was quite compelling to arrive at the Sof-Vokh and gradually realize that “performative reclaiming,” or whatever you want to call it, isn’t always straightforwardly cringe. It can be really beautiful to try different things out for size, to be earnest and playful and open-minded. People are there for different reasons. That diversity of belief and interest and practice is really special but obviously very hard to navigate.
OS: Nu, now’s as good a time as any to address that diversity in this conversation. Basically, last year we asked people to avoid talking publicly about politics. Just on a basic level, many attendees don’t have the Yiddish-language fluency to navigate such sensitive topics. And by “politics” we mean the situation in the Middle East, which has become a lot harder to talk about—and not talk about—in the last year.
MR: It seems obvious to point out, but these tensions have always been there—we all know people who have learned Yiddish to feel connected to a culture they think the mainstream of Jewish life has alienated. For a lot of veltlekhe speakers, Yiddish has sometimes been this sort of haven from the topic of Israel-Palestine, too. That said, some of the most pro-Palestine people I know are the keenest to find ways to learn from their elders, but finding a mutual language for those conversations can be tricky.
OS: “A silent Yiddishist” feels like a contradiction in terms. Most of us have listened to the Klezmatics album, Shvaygn = Toyt [Silence = Death]. The title is a translation of a famous ACT UP slogan and it fits so well because it sounds like an old Yiddish slogan, but it also speaks to the idea of Yiddish as a language that refuses to be silenced. As organizers, we’re still looking for the best way to approach this: not to stifle differences, but also to emphasize things we have in common.
MR: I wasn’t entirely sold on last year’s policy, but I understood the reasoning behind it, and because I was there as an attendee and not an organizer, I was keen to see how it played out. Last year’s approach seemed to work more or less, but one of the problems seemed to be that people read it as a shutting down of one side or another from speaking, and that’s never a good feeling. This year we’ve tried to make it clear that there is no “ban,” if only because it’s good to communicate to attendees what it is we’re hoping for. We want to host this temporary space, we want it to be safe for everyone, but telling people what they can and can’t do also risks inflaming tensions. I don’t really see it as a change of policy so much as a change of emphasis. Obviously, how it plays out in the event is hard to predict, but we’re trying to encourage attendees to find ways to get along rather than threatening them with what will happen if they don’t.
OS: The unique community that the Yiddish language brings together may seem fragile, but we’re all aware of how precious it is too. I know you think it sounds schmaltzy, but the principle of sholem-bayes is a reminder that we don’t have to think alike to eat together (at least for a weekend). We want to meet each other in good faith, and feel like a part of a community. It’s about striking a balance between being protective and our efforts coming across as punitive.
MR: Which is relevant when it comes to linguistic ability, too. People are always asking, “I’m a beginner, should I come?” and it seems like the answer is, “Well, it depends what you mean by beginner.”
OS: There has always been some ambiguity on the subject of having beginners at the weekend. The whole thing is, after all, in Yiddish, and as the UK’s only immersive Yiddish event of its kind, it would be a shame to have to slip into English at any point. It happens, but we’d rather it didn’t! Personally, I think it’s great when Yiddish learners show up who aren’t fully confident in their language, as long as they are respectful of the goals of remaining entirely in Yiddish.
MR: Part of what’s great is that we get attendees from all over the world, some of whom aren’t as confident speaking English anyway, even if they grew up in the UK.
OS: Mame-loshn becomes the lingua franca!
MR: It’s hard, because you also want attendance to scale up as interest in the language grows, but without compromising on the reason for our getting together in the first place.
OS: When I first joined, I was definitely far from fluent. I remember struggling to speak and worrying a lot that my silent smiles would be misinterpreted as rudeness. The truth is, not only did no one mind, but it took many hours of hearing Yiddish before I felt ready to squeeze out some sentences spontaneously. Not feeling confident when speaking the language is always frustrating, but immersive spaces like the Sof-Vokh are also really important environments for improving your Yiddish — a bit different than what you find in the classroom.
MR: I think if in doubt, people should contact us and we can arrange for someone to check in with you on your level and the expectations and see whether it’s a good idea.
OS: We introduced a new thing a couple of years ago, the “Gvald-grupe.” The idea was to reassure people who felt their Yiddish would be tested by the weekend. Without using any English, the group helped remind learners that they were not alone in finding a Yiddish-only environment challenging and to meet each other. It takes a lot of confidence to start speaking in a language you’re still learning, but it’s only through contexts like these, among friends and peers, that you’ll build that confidence.
MR: Yes—that and frolicking with the bunny rabbits in the woods around Hillscourt.
OS: Look, people have different views on how to balance these concerns. When we were discussing this piece, at one stage it felt like it would be good to open the conversation up more widely and bring in representatives of all the viewpoints: beginners, native speakers, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Hasidim, non-Jewish Yiddish-speakers…
MR: Not that all of these are mutually exclusive groupings, though. The stakes seem so high that everyone wants to tread very carefully not to say the wrong thing and not to prompt someone else into saying the wrong thing, either. But it feels to me like even acknowledging these dynamics is moving things slightly in the right direction.
OS: Nu, the Sof-Vokh isn’t a debating society; it’s a chance to socialize. If we’re doing our job right, people will leave knowing they have both a past and a present in Yiddishland.
MR: And a future!
OS: Halevay!
Those interested in learning more about the Sof-Vokh experience can listen to Professor Nadia Valman and Dr. Vivi Lachs’ new Cockney Yiddish Podcast, which is being launched on February 17. Episode 5 was recorded in part at the 2024 Sof-Vokh.
Tickets for the 2025 Sof-Vokh will be available from the week of February 10 at yiddishcafe.com. The organisers hope once again to be able to provide bursaries in order to subsidize attendance. Those interested in donating can do so here; previous donors have given in the name of a loved one or a cause. The Yiddish Café Trust are also organizing a fundraiser on February 23 in London, with performances from Michael Rosen, David Schneider, and other leading British Yiddishists. Tickets can be bought here.
Ducks outside Wortley Hall, Sof Vokh 2023.
