>>>>>>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.
>
>My mother was born in Germany, but left German behind when she went to England on the KinderTransport. My father's father spoke only English, AFAIK; his father and paternal grandparents were all born here, his mother was born here to immigrants from Poland, so she may have known Yiddish. My father's mother was born in the Ukraine, but came here as a young child. She spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, I believe, but I never heard my grandparents speak anything other than English. My father studied some German in school (back in the days when you had to for a science PhD) and so my parents used some kind of pidgin German as the "don't let the kids understand" language, but never enough for us to learn any.
>
>Tamar

This is what I love most about this country. Almost all of us came here from somewhere else. In the current political environment some view it as a weakness, but I view it as our strength, absolutely. Every new wave is suspected at first. You certainly know this first hand. You and Marshal and your sons are part of what makes me proud to be an American. Anyone who disagrees with that is going to have to go through me, among many others.

My family was English on one side and French Canadian on the other. Quebec province just north of the border, so there you go, Miguel. And some distant relatives from the eastern provinces.