Culture Fest, NYC
Written on Sunday, October 16, 2007
Today I went to Culture Fest 2007 in Battery Park. In the booth of the East Side Tenement Museum there was a woman dressed in costume, acting as an immigrant living in an early twentieth-century housing project. I spoke with her as my present self, and I realized I was communicating with someone who lived and worked alongside my ancestors.
“You probably knew my grandparents,” I said, “They were Italian and Polish.”
“Oh, did they speak Yiddish?”
“Well, my grandfather probably knew Yiddish, but I think he tried not to speak it in public, and he didn’t teach it to my dad.”
It turned out she was from Sephardic ancestry, and spoke Ladino. Our ancestors probably thought each other to be inherently backwards in their cultural differences. After all, Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews both believed themselves to be preserving the true Jewish tradition, although they were practicing different rituals.
