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This Issue 01/29/2004

Also in this issue

• Guides
• Still representing Montreal
• I Don't Practice Santeria
• Scott Haller: Pancakes to Celebrate
• Hawaiian Wipeout

Eight people sit around the dining room table inside 1738 Academy Lane. Atop the blue floral tablecloth are a bottle of Dr. Brown's black cherry soda, apple juice, tea and an assortment of other kosher for Passover foods. The Cohens are visiting today, having made the hour-and-a-quarter drive from East Windsor, New Jersey. They talk excitedly, energetically. But not in English.
They speak Yiddish, a language associated with the Old Country, with yentas, shlemiels and shlemazls. It is not often associated with young families, much less young American families. But inside 1738, Yiddish is more than a mere association - it is a way of life.

As long as there are kids who speak a language, then it isn't dying," says the home's owner, Alexander Botwinik.

Botwinik's children, Tovi, 8, and Dina Malka, 6, are being raised with Yiddish as their first language. It wasn't until they attended school that they gradually began to master English.

"They were recreating the immigrant experience," Naomi Cohen, Botwinik's wife, explains.

The youngsters would return from class, repeating new English words they had learned, at which point the parents would patiently repeat the word in Yiddish. The problem, they lament, is that at this stage parents often give up, succumbing to the urge to let their children speak in the new language. They're not determined, they don't coax the children back to the original tongue.

"Nobody I know of insists," Steve Cohen says simply, obviously disappointed at his statement's implications.

The conversation at the dining room table would be exclusively Yiddish. They use English for the guests' benefit, but once in a while slip back into the mameloshn -- mother tongue. Steve sips his glass of tea and then wipes the sweat from his forehead with a cloth napkin before launching into an explanation of his lifestyle. He's a small guy, with his hair cropped short and threads of gray starting to seep through the brown. He wears colored jeans that sit high on his waist. His gray Rice shirt is tucked in, and the sleeves are rolled up because they're too long.

Steve decided to raise his two young children, Daniel and Hannah, speaking Yiddish as an experiment more than anything else. About 10 years ago, he read an article in a Yiddish magazine about raising children in Yiddish. The article claimed the task was possible, and Steve found himself intrigued.

"I can try it," he says. "Maybe I can last a couple years."

Steve wasn't fluent in Yiddish at the time. He still isn't completely fluent in Yiddish now. When he doesn't know a word, he turns to the dictionary. In fact, Steve is creating his own dictionary of sorts. Having earned a doctorate in chemistry, Steve now devotes some of his spare time to putting together a Yiddish chemistry dictionary.