Watch: Kissin speaks Yiddish, plays Debussy

Helene Kamioner says:

He grew up with it. His grandparents spoke Yiddish according to one his Youtube’s. He perfected his spoken and written knowledge more recently. Frankly as a native Yiddish speaker as my first languate actually, I find Kissin’s Yiddish not so clear to my ears….although it very correct.

Shalom Rackovsky says:

Yiddish has many regional dialects, some so idiosyncratic [with respect to pronunciation, vocabulary and idioms] that they are comprehensible only with difficulty to speakers from other places. For example, my father spoke a highly literary version of Jerusalem Yiddish, and my mother spoke Ukrainian Yiddish. For both of them, it was their mother tongue. They almost never spoke Yiddish to one another, unless they didn’t want me to understand [which forced me to learn Yiddish…]. My in-laws were a similar case- my mother-in-law spoke Jerusalem Yiddish, and my father-in-law spoke the Yiddish of the Carpathian Mountains, and they never spoke Yiddish to one another, although they both spoke Yiddish freely to their siblings. The characteristic Yiddish of Jerusalem is closely related to that of Lithuania. EK seems to be speaking a relatively standard literary dialect with a significant Russian accent, and comprehension isn’t aided by the poor quality of the sound recording.

Helene Kamioner says:

good question. Yiddish, like any language has a lot of dialects depending on where you come from. Big difference between Galizianer and Litvak Yiddish. Before the Holocaust, Warsaw boasted more than 23 Yiddish language newspapers…and every little Stetl, particularly in Poland, had their own Yiddish “gazette.” It’s such a beautiful and expressive language, with many great authors, playrights, actors, etc. Isaac Bashevis Singer gave his speech in Yiddish when he won the Nobel or Pulitzer prize. I always forget which is which. When anyone would ask where my particular Yiddish comes from, as my father told me, Lodz, Poland. The language uses the Hebrew alphabet…not so easy to read and write, but worth the effort to my heart and ears.