Need a recommendation for a book in Yiddish? Charlotte Hovland may have you covered. The 25-year-old Washington native is a self-described Yiddishist. Throughout college and into the pandemic, Hovland’s hobby of reading Yiddish novels helped her connect to Judaism and find new communities. She teaches fourth grade at Machar: The Washington Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism.
How did you learn Yiddish?
My family, historically, spoke Yiddish. I think this is typical for American Ashkenazi families. When I got to college I was curious about Yiddish. I knew a few words, but didn’t really have a sense of it as a language. There was a language fair on the first day with a little booth, like, “Learn Yiddish!” And I was like, “Whoa, that’s amazing!” So I took classes through my second year of college and really loved my professor.
We had a club of people who had been learning [Yiddish] and we would get together sometimes for reading together, just talking together. And then after graduating, I kept taking classes with an organization called The Workers Circle. They have online Yiddish classes, which is mostly how I’ve kept up with studying since college.
How frequently do you renew your studies?
Sometimes I’ve been really lucky to have informal communities that I can take part in. I was living in Houston for a while, working at Rice University. I was in their cafeteria and I see this guy reading a book in Yiddish and I’m like, “Whoa!” And I’m like, “Oh, excuse me, do you speak English? I’d love to chat.” And we sit there talking for a while, and he invites me to his Yiddish group. They read short stories together.
A really nice thing was, during the pandemic I moved back to D.C. and I suddenly had all this free time. So a lot of the Yiddish groups that I had contact with really successfully transitioned to virtual meetings. So, in like the early days of the pandemic, I had a bunch of different groups was talking to — like three a week. And it was just people getting together informally either to read together, talk together. That was very nice.
Do you read books that are translated, or do you read books originally written in Yiddish?
It feels like not a great use of my time to read stuff in another language translated into Yiddish. There’s a really cool organization called the Yiddish Book Center. They have a super extensive digital collection of Yiddish books, and they’re all free.
When are these books from?
There’s a golden age between the mid-1800s and the 1930s. My favorite book that I’ve read so far was one of the first ones that was recommended by a professor, called “Esther.” It’s a novella but it’s semi autobiographical. It’s about this woman who emigrates to the U.S. in the ‘20s and lives in Chicago. It’s very open and honest and interesting.
Do you feel like you’re fluent at this point?
I am definitely not fluent, but I usually don’t have a dictionary next to me. I used to read that way and I feel like it was helpful for a while. I usually have a little notebook, if there’s something I don’t understand I’ll write it down and look it up later.
I read a lot as a kid. I used to joke that my first language was written English, not spoken English because I was very quiet and I read a lot. My little experiment on myself now is whether I can do that with Yiddish.
What was your Jewish upbringing like in D.C.?
When I was growing up, there were two ways you could express Jewishness and one of them was religious Judaism, but I wouldn’t consider myself a religious person. The other path that was presented to me was cultural Zionism, which felt distant; I’ve never actually been to Israel. So I felt kind of torn.
Then I went to college, and I was like, this is something people have been living with for a long time. It’s kind of like finding a third axis. There are ways of performing Jewishness that people carry from place to place and aren’t necessarily religious, was exciting and felt like coming home to that idea.
Do you ever bring Yiddish writings to your class?
I brought in some of my books the other day, just to explore in a tactile way. Someone recently translated Harry Potter into Yiddish and I read that for them.
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