These early attitudes, the post-World War II push toward assimilation and American Jewry's increased involvement and identification with Israel, have made their mark on the present generation. When I would tell people that I was teaching Yiddish, most-especially Jews-were amused. Over and over again, I heard: "How cute!" I would counter that Yiddish is a language like any other. Generations of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe spoke it and wrote it, just like any other people in any other language. But here in America what had been mame-loshn to millions of Ashkenazi Jews, what had been a medium through which Jewish history, culture, politics, ethics were transmitted, had become a joke, a joke usually made by Jews, a joke now so Americanized it has become the property of the gentile mainstream.

America is, after all, the only Jewish community outside of Israel that is surviving. British Jewry is stagnant, dying. Then there are the French, of course, but in the Diaspora only in America is there open Jewish dialogue, vitality. Its Jewish community is thriving and will, I feel, survive. Sometimes, perhaps, it moves in the wrong direction. But it is self-confident and alive. Many people retain their Jewish identity despite marrying non-Jews. I myself have seen it. [Smiling] Perhaps you don't agree, but the mixed marriages they have there are not all that bad. We Israelis tend to patronize American Jewry. Why not instead be happy about it? American Jews accept their Jewishness. I feel, in fact, that we in Israel could learn a little something from this the better to enjoy our being Jewish.

A life in two languages is a life experienced twice.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

It [America] is Jewish in spirit, soul, practice, language and morals.

Any reader who feels superior to such quaint English might remember that when the overwhelming majority of humankind was illiterate, it was hard to find a Jewish lad over six who could not read and write (Hebrew). Most adult male Jews could handle at least three languages: they used Hebrew in the synagogues and houses of study (see Besmedresh), Yiddish in the home, and — to Gentiles — the language of the land in which they lived. My father, a workingman denied the equivalent of a high school education in Poland, handled Yiddish, English, Hebrew, and Polish. Jews were linguists of necessity.

There was a thousand-year-old tradition in Poland that I feel far closer to than the religious traditions based on Torah and Talmud and halakha. Now much of that tradition is religious. But it represents my history, my Polish Jewish ancestors. Poland is the center of my Jewish cultural roots, and the destruction of that center in Eastern Europe has created the deprivation of my life. My mission is to try to figure out how to continue here. So in that sense I don't accept the Zionist premises of Diaspora and homeland-that dichotomy. I feel Jews can be Jews anywhere. They might have to work on it in different ways depending on the contexts, hostilities, support, and so on. But they have to figure it out. So, yes-neither Israel nor the Bible is the core of my Jewish Identity. (GP: Can you say what it is? Is it memory?) IK: For me it is language and culture. What the Jewish Labor Bund called national cultural autonomy…Language by itself really doesn't mean anything to me. It's because a language is the medium of a whole culture, of a literature, of a politics (socialism) that language-Yiddish-takes on meaning. Now the question for me is what happens to that combination of language and culture here in the United States. I'm someone who is currently active in translating. I don't want that Yiddish heritage lost to the Jews here who can't read Yiddish. So simultaneously when I translate I'm also proselytizing for people to study Yiddish so that they can read the original. What I don't know is whether we can in fact have a secular culture-meaning one not based on religious practice and ritual or on religious texts-here in the United States as they did in Europe. They had the Yiddish language to define it, we do not. Of course, I'm hoping we can and will.

Jewish experience in the US, isolated from the experience of Jews around the world, seems fairly rosy. But Jews are an international people, and the nature of Jewish identity, oppression, fear and danger derive from and connect to experiences outside this country...Wars between the US and other countries have always been fought in other countries; most people in the US live in an extraordinarily protected context. Not only is our country vast and populous and proud of an isolationist spirit (often masking an imperialist reality); but, in addition, the strictly limited immigration during the middle portion of this century has restricted most Americans' knowledge about war, persecution, torture, the experience of refugees. Most Americans seem to believe ourselves peculiarly unaffected by what goes on in the rest of the world.

Jewishness is not a single thing, it is multiple and full of inconsistencies.

In the house where I grew up in Santiago de Chile I heard a Babel of whispers, songs, prayers, and languages. Spanish was my language, my mother tongue spoken in the fiestas, in the schools, and in the poetry books I loved and read out loud as poetry should be read. My maternal grandparents spoke German and Yiddish. My paternal grandparents spoke Russian and often sang to the music of a balalaika bought in a flea market at the outskirts of the city. At school I learned Hebrew and songs in Ladino. At first I seemed to be confused with too many languages, but as the years progressed all of these languages were and continue to be a part of my inheritance as a Jew, as a poet, and as a woman. It was truly enchanting to hear and feel the depth of these many languages that embedded the narratives of the Jewish people throughout our history-an ancient people carrying their prayers and their legacy across the earth.

Today when an immigrant comes to America he finds a Jewish world already established here. It is full of strange sights but it is nevertheless Jewish. The earlier arrival, the "ungreen" Russian, Pole, Galician or Rumanian, is still a Jew, the same as the greenhorn. Quickly, the newcomer grows accustomed to his "ungreen" friends and thus to America. Today's Jewish immigrant has become familiar with American Jewish words and habits from the letters and newspapers from America that he received at home. But we found few Jews and only a small Jewish world on our arrival. The strangeness we felt was much deeper, the loneliness much sharper. America was, in a literal sense, a new world, a strange world, a disagreeable world, but also a challenging world that strengthened me with a strong, healthy odor like that of a freshly plowed field. America intrigued me, puzzled me. It seemed to me that America lives more in one day than Russia does in ten. The cat I had spied on the Philadelphia pier was living proof that America was part of the same world that included Vilna, Petersburg, Lemberg and Berlin. But in the first months, as I came to know America, I had the opposite impression. It was a new, different kind of a world. It was a pleasant world that tantalized me. All around me was astounding wealth, activity and enterprise. I had not yet heard the expression "the land of unlimited possibilities." But I felt all around me the sense of opportunity. Slowly, I began to perceive a change in myself. Every minute, it seemed, I savored some new experience. I examined all, I listened to everything, I observed everywhere. I was repelled and attracted, possessed and homesick and excited by expectations. My success as a speaker, the stimulating taste of applause, the stunning feeling that thousands knew me, intoxicated me. But they did not overcome my homesickness. I was torn between the pleasure of new achievement and the longing for home. Sometimes, in my restlessness, I didn't recognize my old self. (p 244)

Judaism to me is a culture - first and foremost, the Hebrew language, which I think is the crux of the heritage, a long line of books, creations, certain sensibilities which I identify as Jewish sensibilities, although they are not exclusively Jewish, humor and skepticism, certain anarchism, certain lack of confidence in any regime or government whatsoever, certain utopian ambitions about world reforming. All of these, I identify - this and more, I identify as Jewish heritage, Jewish sensibilities. And all of those are alive and kicking - sometimes kicking too hard - outside the realm of synagogue.

Outside of Israel and Russia, we have our own realities, and Yiddish is "The Language That Won't Go Away." I often talk about this longing for Yiddish despite Israel, despite all the Holocaust memorials, despite all the Jewish activities that are part of American Jewish life. There's a lot of feeling about Yiddish both among an older generation and a younger generation that never even got to hear it. As I myself get older, I encounter young students whose parents don't remember Yiddish or never knew it, but perhaps whose grandparents spoke Yiddish. Yiddish for most is increasingly a vague memory. And yet this younger generation has this yearning. It's an interesting phenomenon. What is it that's missing in Jewish American life that makes Jews think that Yiddish could fill a void? Clearly, something is missing. We don't know whether for them Yiddish is the answer or not; something is happening among that generation. What I would like people to think about is why at a time when there's a frenzy about the Holocaust, about memorialization, about interviewing survivors, and so on, there is a rich revival of klezmer music. Is it a desire to focus on the joy that was there before the war?

This is the confusion. Being Jewish. Being a lesbian. Being an American. It all converges. It is like feelings about one's parents. Love and embarrassment. The painful realization that they are not perfect.