“A Goy Who Speaks Goyish, a Real Goy from Goyland!”: An Analysis of the Interplay between Languages and Identities in Yiddish Migration Stories

During the Great Migration from Eastern Europe Jewish migrants were required to adapt to new economic, political, and social environments. Among the many adjustments were changes to their social network, specifically relationships with their significant others, non-Jews. Many migrants wrote about their personal experiences in Yiddish, whether for publication or for posterity. Previous scholarship has considered linguistic adaptation among Yiddish speaking migrants to North America and the role it played in adjusting to their new environments. This paper will add to current work through an ethnographic discussion of the connection between language use and Jewish migrants’ relationships with non-Jewish neighbours. Through close readings of several Yiddish personal narratives written by Eastern European Jewish migrants to Canada, I will consider the ways that multilingual play, common among Yiddish, was adapted to new linguistic landscapes. The discussion will be based on published autobiographies, such as Di Geshikhte fun Mayn Leben (1951) by Esther Shechter, as well as unpublished personal narratives. I will show how familiarity and lack of familiarity are represented by migrant narrators through the languages they refer to and make use of within their Yiddish language performances. Through this discussion I will demonstrate how personal narratives offer essential insights into the methods by which migrants construct new identities and interact with others in their new homes.