>>>>We first fry (schmalzen. no idea how to translate, turn around in the hot lard?) it a bit in pork or goose lard.
>>>
>>>Fascinating. "Schmalz" is the Yiddish word for chicken fat. (Of course, lard, which, in English, generally refers only to pork fat, is a non-starter for Jewish cooking.)
>>>
>>>Tamar
>>
>>One of my best friends when I lived in Chicago was a Jewish neighbor who converted to Christianity. He said Hebrew is the language of scholars and Yiddish is the language of the street. We had many enjoyable lunches together, sans pork. Living so far apart now we have lost touch other than occasional emails.
>
>Not as true any more, but historically, Hebrew was the holy language and Jews spoke something else for daily living: Aramaic back in New Testament times, Yiddish in more recent times in East Europe, Ladino (a Spanish-Hebrew mix) among some Sephardic Jews. My mom, who was born in Germany, said they spoke German at home, never Yiddish.
>
>Today, Hebrew is the daily language for Israelis, but it's a modernized Hebrew, thanks a guy named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda). Yiddish is slowly dying, though not as badly as it might have; that's thanks to a guy named Aaron Lansky, who somewhat by accident, founded the National Yiddish Book Center. (His book, Outwitting History, is a pretty good read.)
>
>Tamar

My enate grandparents came here from Rumania (I know, but they still called it "Rumania") and they spoke Yiddish. My mother learned from them and spoke it too. But my parents never spoke their ancestral languages to us, so we ended up monolingual. Kind of made sense since neither could speak the other's ancestral language. Would have been nice though to have become trilingual the easy way.