Opinion | Two Languages Walk Into a Bar

I encountered another variation on this theme during my annual stay at a Jewish summer bungalow colony. Why me? Long story, but it started during the pandemic and became a habit, and I am one of many non-Jews there. It’s called Rosmarins Cottages, and it is one of the last Reform Jewish colonies of a kind of which there were once dozens in the Catskills — immortalized in the film “Dirty Dancing” and, more recently, on the wondrous television series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”

At Rosmarins, I get an earful of what happens to English when it is spoken alongside yet another language, Yiddish. Of course, most people don’t walk around the place thinking of themselves as speaking Yiddishisms. But if you listen closely, you can hear how Yiddish infiltrated the English of earlier American Jews, such that it now seasons the speech of people a generation or more removed from actually speaking Yiddish.

For example, at Rosmarins, one says that one will be eating “by” someone’s bungalow later, not “at” it, e.g., “We’re going to be by Lenore’s. Are you coming?” This “by” is taken from the way Yiddish uses its word “bey”: “I am at grandpa and grandma’s house” is “Ikh bin bey zeyde aun bobe’s hoyz.” Just as Miami English is used by people who mostly speak English, at Rosmarins all but a sliver of the people using “by” this way do not speak Yiddish. Even the non-Jewish bungaleers (yes, that’s the term) come to use it. I and another gentile resident were using it just the other day without a second thought.

A while ago another resident and I were trying to find the light switch when leaving a big barn of a building. The resident, a lifelong English speaker who does not speak Yiddish but had relatives who did, found the switch and said, “Oh, I found where to close that light.” That was modeled on Yiddish, in which one could put it the same way and say, “makh tsi de likht.”

Or, to go back in time a little, there was — of course — a 1950s Broadway musical about a Jewish bungalow colony. It was called “Wish You Were Here” and was a minor hit. The colony’s social director introduced himself with a song, set to a klezmer-like tune, in one stanza of which he sang about how his parents and older relatives hated that he had decided to become a social director. He imitates them:

Oh, woe, woe, woe!

A social director! A social director!

Don’t tell us our boy is a social director!

Let him be a loafer, let him be a bum.