...when I have formed the sounds, said the words out loud, those
who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only,
suddenly felt it had been revived. As my tongue, mouth, lips,
throat, lungs physically pushed Yiddish into the world—as I, a
Jew, spoke a Jewish language to other Jews—Yiddish was very much
alive. Not unlike a lebn geblibene, a survivor, of an
overwhelming catastrophe, it seemed to be saying 'khbin nisht
vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober 'khbin
nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live. Irena
Klepfisz (b. 1941), U.S. Jewish lesbian author; born in Poland.
"Secular Jewish Identity," 1986. Dreams of an Insomniac, part 4
(1990). Klepfisz, a Jew born in Poland in 1941, escaped the 1943
Warsaw Uprising after her father was killed in its second day.
After some years in Sweden, she and her mother emigrated to New
York City–the only members of either side of the family to
survive the Holocaust. She became an expert in, and teacher of,
Yiddish.