Yiddish

Mazel tov. Congratulations. Yiddish 101 in Room 105 lives.Only three students had shown up Monday for the first session of Miriam Isaacs' new credit course, Elementary Yiddish 101, at Baltimore Hebrew University.Vey is mir, said the university's president, Robert O. Freedman. Woe is me. If enrollment doesn't pick up quickly, he said he would cancel the course on the 1,000-year-old language that he and Isaacs say is dying but they want to help save.Suddenly things happened. More than a dozen prospective students called to inquire about attending.

The other day I cooed here in Wordville over the publication of the final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English , and yesterday Mary Beth Marklein quoted those sentiments in an article published in USA Today . I stand by those statements. DARE is a project underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the oldest project of the endowment, representing half a century of work. The next time you hear someone railing against government expenditure, keep in mind that your tax dollars could, and do, go for worse things than preserving the marks of our distinctive national voice.

It survived Hitler, Stalin, the decision to make Hebrew the official language of the State of Israel and the adoption of English by immigrants to the United States. Now Yiddish, for 1,000 years the everyday language of European Jews, is facing another threat: budget cuts. At the University of Maryland, which has stood alongside Harvard and Columbia as one of the nation's few schools to consistently offer instruction in the Germanic tongue, the recent announcement that the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies would be dropping it in the fall shocked area enthusiasts.

William S. Miller, a retired mechanical engineer who was also a model railroad and dollhouse enthusiast, died Wednesday in his sleep at Emeritus at Pikesville, an assisted-living facility. He was 101. William Samuel Miller, whose parents emigrated from Lithuania, was the son of a tailor and a homemaker. As a youth, he worked in his father's shop while attending Polytechnic Institute, from which he graduated in 1927. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1930 in mechanical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University.

Your Monday front page story on UM dropping the study of Yiddish brings to mind that Yiddish is alive and well in Pikesville. Yiddish is being taught and spoken every Friday morning at the Pikesville Senior Center, 1301 Reisterstown Road, from 10:15 to 11:30 a.m., where you can enjoy poetry, skits, stories and jokes in Yiddish in an informal setting at no cost. Helen Bronstein, Towson The writer is the programming manager of the Baltimore County Division of Senior Centers & Community Services.

"Wandering Stars," a musical based on a Sholem Aleichem novel, will be presented by the Jewish Theatre of Esther Rachel Kaminska from Warsaw, Poland, at the Dalsheimer Auditorium at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation Monday and Tuesday.Performed in Yiddish with simultaneous English earphone translation available, "Wandering Stars" features a cast of 35. The plot interweaves a love story with an account of a traveling Jewish theater troupe.The Jewish Theatre was formed after World War II by actors from the Lodz ghetto.

Mazel tov. Congratulations. Yiddish 101 in Room 105 lives.Only three students had shown up Monday for the first session of Miriam Isaacs' new credit course, Elementary Yiddish 101, at Baltimore Hebrew University.Vey is mir, said the university's president, Robert O. Freedman. Woe is me. If enrollment doesn't pick up quickly, he said he would cancel the course on the 1,000-year-old language that he and Isaacs say is dying but they want to help save.Suddenly things happened. More than a dozen prospective students called to inquire about attending.

CHERNOVTSY, Ukraine -- "I'm the last of the Mohicans of the great Yiddish tradition in Czernowitz," Josef Burg said.The shine in his eyes under a shock of white hair and the vigor of his gestures seemed to contradict the calendar, which says that this year Mr. Burg, the author of many books and tales, will celebrate his 80th birthday.Mr. Burg, who speaks all the local languages, past and present -- Yiddish, German, Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian -- calls this city by its Austrian name. Only an undertone of melancholy that resonated through hours of conversation in his home and on walks through the slushy, icy streets of Chernovtsy reflected his sense that all that he recalls so vividly is gone forever.

Molly Picon, a beloved American actress who died in 1992 at age 94, liked to tell a story about breaking into show business at the age of 5 in Philadelphia.After singing and dancing for streetcar passengers, she passed the hat and collected $2. Later the same day, she got $8 for her first vaudeville performance.Molly's mother was happy; after all, Philadelphia had three theaters. Molly's grandmother disagreed. Book her into streetcars, she said, there are more of those.Picon, an actress who made her early fame in Yiddish theater, first in New York and later on stages in Baltimore and elsewhere, will be honored Sunday at a gathering marking the 100th anniversary of her birth.

Gertrude Nitzberg, a teacher who collected Yiddish folk songs and stories of old Baltimore, died Sunday of complications from cancer and diabetes at Charlestown Care Center. She was 81 and had lived in Mount Washington for many years. Fluent in Yiddish, she interviewed elderly Baltimoreans to collect their memories of life here in the early 1900s. She also gathered 500 Jewish songs on tape for the old Jewish Historical Society, now the Jewish Museum of Maryland. "She was a pioneer who showed the society the kind of community-based activities it should take," said Bernard Fishman, former Jewish Museum director, who now heads the Lehigh County Historical Society in Allentown, Pa. "She was an impressive and inspirational woman with a vision of what the essential tasks of a community museum should be."

Your Monday front page story on UM dropping the study of Yiddish brings to mind that Yiddish is alive and well in Pikesville. Yiddish is being taught and spoken every Friday morning at the Pikesville Senior Center, 1301 Reisterstown Road, from 10:15 to 11:30 a.m., where you can enjoy poetry, skits, stories and jokes in Yiddish in an informal setting at no cost. Helen Bronstein, Towson The writer is the programming manager of the Baltimore County Division of Senior Centers & Community Services.

It survived Hitler, Stalin, the decision to make Hebrew the official language of the State of Israel and the adoption of English by immigrants to the United States. Now Yiddish, for 1,000 years the everyday language of European Jews, is facing another threat: budget cuts. At the University of Maryland, which has stood alongside Harvard and Columbia as one of the nation's few schools to consistently offer instruction in the Germanic tongue, the recent announcement that the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies would be dropping it in the fall shocked area enthusiasts.

It survived Hitler, Stalin, the decision to make Hebrew the official language of the State of Israel and the adoption of English by immigrants to the United States. Now Yiddish, for 1,000 years the everyday language of European Jews, is facing another threat: budget cuts. At the University of Maryland, which has stood alongside Harvard and Columbia as one of the nation's few schools to consistently offer instruction in the Germanic tongue, the recent announcement that the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies would be dropping it in the fall shocked area enthusiasts.

Billy Crystal practically sprints onto the National Theatre stage to begin his autobiographical one-man play, "700 Sundays," passing through the front door of a set designed to look like the house where he grew up on Long Island. He plunges into rapid-fire reminiscences of his early years with the eagerness of a puppy, barely pausing for breath, and certainly never stopping to wonder whether anyone might not be interested. As it turns out, he has a most engaging tale to tell, and a long one. At nearly three hours, Crystal's 2005 Tony Award-winning vehicle is perhaps too much of a good thing, but it's hard to resist the combination of humor and nostalgia packed into the show.

Many middle-aged American Jews have identical memories of Yiddish - the language their parents spoke when they didn't want the children to understand. That's what Gila Haor remembers from her childhood in upstate New York. But at 33, she's trying to change things in her Pikesville household by speaking Yiddish as often as possible to her three daughters, ages 3 to 8. "It would make my grandparents - they are gone - so proud to know that I am speaking Yiddish," she says. Enthusiasts like Haor are few and far between.

Albert Kilberg, a retired clothing manufacturing executive, died of a heart attack Monday at his home in Harper House in Cross Keys. He was 92. Mr. Kilberg, the son of Russian immigrant parents, was born in Baltimore and raised on Ann Street. One of seven siblings, he helped support his family by delivering Yiddish newspapers. He was a 1933 graduate of City College. During World War II, he served as a captain in the Army Supply Corps in the European theater of operations. Mr. Kilberg played a pivotal role in procuring and delivering supplies needed for the historic Yalta Conference that was held early in 1945.

Many middle-aged American Jews have identical memories of Yiddish - the language their parents spoke when they didn't want the children to understand. That's what Gila Haor remembers from her childhood in upstate New York. But at 33, she's trying to change things in her Pikesville household by speaking Yiddish as often as possible to her three daughters, ages 3 to 8. "It would make my grandparents - they are gone - so proud to know that I am speaking Yiddish," she says. Enthusiasts like Haor are few and far between.

NEW YORK - Itche Goldberg has a lot of memories. He remembers delivering ice by horse and wagon in the days before refrigeration. He recalls the days when the Soviet Union seemed - to some people anyway - like a wonderful new social experiment. When he mentions "The War," he's not referring to the first gulf war, or Vietnam, or even World War II; he's talking about the Great War, now known as World War I. When that conflagration ended in 1918, Goldberg was 14, which means he's now in his 101st year.

To mark the 100th anniversary this year of Isaac Bashevis Singer's birth, the Library of America recently published all his English short stories in three volumes. Isn't it incongruous for a Yiddish writer to be admitted to the American canon, alongside Poe, Twain and Emerson? The nationality of an author's work is defined by a combination of his life, his writings and his audience. Singer was a Yiddish writer in Poland who had already published a novel and translated All Quiet on the Western Front and The Magic Mountain to Yiddish when he came to the United States, in 1935.

The stage lights at Colonial Players, the Annapolis Summer Garden and other community theater venues will seem to shine a bit less brightly this season because of the death of Stan Morrow, one of the area's finest actors, who died of cancer at Anne Arundel Medical Center Sept. 3. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928, Morrow moved in 1954 to Maryland, where he worked for the American Automobile Association as group travel director and operated a travel business after retiring. His greatest passion was the stage.