I have been thinking about my mother during the Nine Days leading to Tisha Be’Av.

Perhaps that is not a coincidence.

Tisha Be’Av belongs to the collective Jewish calendar. It is a period of mourning shared by Jews in Israel and throughout the Diaspora, a moment when we remember destruction, displacement and the long history of rebuilding somewhere else. It is also a reminder that Jewish history rarely remains in one country, one language or one form for very long. Families settle, languages are learned and partly forgotten, and customs are preserved, altered or abandoned. A few generations later, the same family may be living somewhere entirely different. 

My mother died two months ago.

Her death did not suddenly reveal to me who she had been. I understood many of her choices before she died, even when I disagreed with them. But losing her changed my position inside the family story. It made me look at the generations behind me and the ones ahead of me differently.

My mother was the last person in our immediate family still living in France.

After we buried her, the apartment was emptied completely. Its furniture, clothes, papers and the countless objects accumulated over decades were gone. Then we closed the door. 

There was no family home left in France.

My grandparents had rebuilt their lives there after the Shoah. My parents had lived and died there. My sister and I now live in Israel. Our children are growing up here.

The family had moved again.

But this is not only a story about movement from Poland to France and then from France to Israel. It is also a story about transmission: what each generation carried forward, what it could not carry, what it deliberately left behind, and what the next generation chose to search for again.

I was not raised by my mother and father alone. My grandmother was also one of the central parents of my childhood. I grew up between two generations, not simply after them.

My grandmother and my mother did not transmit the same Jewish world to me.

My grandmother’s first language was Yiddish. The Jewish life surrounding her was not something she had discovered as an adult or chosen as an identity project. It was the atmosphere from which she came, shaped by Poland, migration, loss and the effort to rebuild.

Her presence gave me access to a generation that might otherwise have felt more distant. I did not only hear stories about my grandparents. I heard them directly from my grandmother. Her language, memories and way of being Jewish entered my childhood without needing to be formally explained.

My work alias, YiddishFeminist, is my tribute to her.  -> my work alias

The name is not only a reference to a language. It is about what remains after rupture. The words that survive. The habits that outlive the people who practiced them. The objects nobody quite knows what to do with, but cannot throw away. The fragments a later generation receives and turns into something new.

People who know my work may know the name without necessarily knowing how personal it is. It began with my grandmother, but it also became a description of much of my adult life: looking for what survived, identifying what disappeared, and trying to understand what can still be transmitted.

My mother’s relationship to that inheritance was much more painful.

She would scream when she heard her parents speaking Yiddish.

For my grandmother, Yiddish had been a living........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)