“A lot of people in my family and among my friends when they heard that I study Yiddish and that later made it my livelihood, they are very surprised. Yiddish? How come Yiddish? Why Yiddish? They even laugh sometimes, they are very surprised. And what I answer to them is that there is nothing surprising about the fact that I study or speak Yiddish. The real surprise, the real question that has to be asked is how come my parents, this last generation, didn’t speak Yiddish? Because, if you consider my family, for hundreds of years on all sides they spoke Yiddish.”
Tal Hever-Chybowski is the Director of the Paris Yiddish Center (Maison de la Culture Yiddish) & Medem Library. He is the Founder and Editor of the diasporic-Hebrew journal Mikan Ve’eylakh in Berlin, and Ph.D. candidate at the History Department of Humboldt University, Berlin. He holds a B.A. in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.A. in History from the Humboldt University. He translated into Hebrew Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993), Mikhal Dekel’s The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment (2014), and is currently translating a forthcoming book on diaspora by Daniel Boyarin.
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