The one word that catches my ear most of all is genau. At first I notice it because it is so close to genig, which my mother used and means ‘enough’. But then I realize these are two different words. The literal meaning is ‘exactly’, but it is used as a term of agreement, like right or okay.
There are other words that come back to me from my childhood when mum and dad spoke in Yiddish so my sister and I would not understand. To the best of my knowledge, my mother did not know much Yiddish from her home, but I remember her boasting of having some German from school. So I can count to eight. And I know leiblich. And it turns out that gefülte means stuffed, as in stuffed vegetables (gemüse). There are also foods that are prepared in ways I recognize from my mother’s cooking, like red cabbage, cucumber salad, and potato salad.
Of course, the words I pick up for my survival are related to food, for either shopping or understanding menus. So there is käse for cheese, and sahne for cream, and knoublach for garlic, and brötte for bread. I also recognise some words, such as onion (which I tend to avoid), although I cannot recall them; and of course kartoffel means potatoes which are a staple of the diet and are quite delicious and distinct in flavor and texture from our local variety.
There are other words that come back to me from my childhood when mum and dad spoke in Yiddish so my sister and I would not understand. To the best of my knowledge, my mother did not know much Yiddish from her home, but I remember her boasting of having some German from school. So I can count to eight. And I know leiblich. And it turns out that gefülte means stuffed, as in stuffed vegetables (gemüse). There are also foods that are prepared in ways I recognize from my mother’s cooking, like red cabbage, cucumber salad, and potato salad.
Of course, the words I pick up for my survival are related to food, for either shopping or understanding menus. So there is käse for cheese, and sahne for cream, and knoublach for garlic, and brötte for bread. I also recognise some words, such as onion (which I tend to avoid), although I cannot recall them; and of course kartoffel means potatoes which are a staple of the diet and are quite delicious and distinct in flavor and texture from our local variety.
