As Easy As Eins, Tzvei, Drei: Step 70

Looking back there were three reasons I took German in the ninth grade, although with the advantage of hindsight it’s easy to see none of them held the slightest degree of validity. First, Samuel Morse Junior High did not offer Latin my choice because someone had told me it was a requirement to get into medical school an illusion that persisted despite my mediocre performance in Mr. T’s science class and my lack of blood thirst. Not that I was squeamish at the sight of blood, but some of my friends actually popped pimples to see if they could get them to bleed, while others paid money to attend professional wrestling matches in the hopes one of the contestants might spew his blood all over the mat. One has to wonder if any of them had the opportunity to incorporate this irrational thirst into vocational achievement by working in an emergency or operating room. Second, during my short tenure at John Muir Junior High I had the opportunity to take the seventh grade, not for credit version of a German language class. And third, and probably the reason I took the class at Muir in the first place, German was the closest language to Yiddish. Some with far greater knowledge on the subject have told me Yiddish, the language spoken by Jews in European ghettos, is actually something called “low brow (maybe brau) German.” In this country it became the language of Jewish comedians like Mickey Katz, who played the “Borscht Belt” in the Catskill Mountains. My parents owned records of Mickey, whose son Joel Gray starred in the movie Cabaret and granddaughter Jennifer Gray starred in the movie Dirty Dancing, doing his routines in Yiddish. Most significantly, however, it was the language my parents spoke when they wanted to keep secrets from my siblings and me, and everyone can relate to wanting to know what their parents’ thought was so important they had to keep it from the kids. From the single semester of German I took I recall just three sentences, probably all from the same lesson. For those readers well versed in German please forgive my weak attempt to spell out from memory these words from my past. “Comest tu meit in da bibliotec,” means something like “Let’s meet in the library,” and “Seista da blonda? Da blonda ist meine schwester,” loosely translates, “See the blonde? The blonde is my sister.” Unless my father was going to meet his sister in the library these sentences were of little help to me, since there were no blondes in our family and my mother only had brothers. What I recall best of my experience in that class was that Mr. Freund was indeed a friend and due to the popularity of the language classes there were over forty students in the class. For some reason a number of the students in the class were not in the ninth grade, possibly because they had taken the junior high version of the class as a prerequisite. It was my good fortune to sit in the back of the room and visit whenever I could with one of them. She had perfectly cut bangs, a friendly smile with beautiful teeth, and the sweet name of Candy, but I’ll always remember her as Suzykeit, because that’s what Mr. Freund called her.