Хасиды и идиш Опции

[simulacrum]

Эта статья взята мной из научного журнала "Лингвистика и образование". Смотрите сокращённый русский вариант ниже.

Linguistics and Education
Volume 12, Issue 3
Autumn 2001
Pages 261-283

Literacy, Bilingualism, and Gender in a Hasidic Community

Ayala Fader,

New York University, New York, NY, USA

Available online 5 August 2001.



Abstract
This paper focuses on language socialization activities in a community of Hasidic Jews, showing the ways that local ideologies of texts and knowledge interact with local ideologies of language and gender. Drawing on texts, literacy practices, metalinguistic commentary, and censoring practices at different points along the female life cycle, the paper examines girls' shift from Yiddish-English bilingualism to English dominance upon entering the first grade, despite complaints by teachers and parents. Literacy practices, in particular shifting ideologies of English, are shown to unintentionally render girls' rejection of Yiddish as their vernacular less threatening to communal boundaries because they blur the boundaries of language itself. Ethnographic investigation of how language(s) and literacy are socialized across the life cycle is critical to providing a lens through which to view broader cultural processes, which shape the reproduction of persons, languages, and communities.


Article Outline
Introduction
Literacy, Language Ideologies, and Language Socialization
Background to the Community and the Research
Gendered Curricula, Gendered Persons
Controlling Texts, Controlling Knowledge
Changing Ideologies and Changing Literacies
Reading as Adult Women: The Morality of Reading
Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Appendix A. Transcription Conventions
References


Introduction
One Sabbath afternoon in Brooklyn, a Hasidic rabbi spoke to a crowded synagogue about the need to protect children from inappropriate books. To emphasize the potential danger inherent to texts, he reminded his listeners that a Torah scribed by a gentile or heretic must be burned. He e***ained that even if it is letter-perfect, the hashkofe (outlook) of the scribe enters the actual letters as he forms them. If an observant Jew were to read that Torah, he continued, the words could enter his mind and corrupt him. This anecdote sheds light on local ideologies of literacy and language: even a sacred text written in a holy language has the possibility of corrupting a reader if the intention or outlook of the writer is corrupt.

Jewish religious literacy practices have been a major force in the maintenance of Jewish identity and difference in diaspora. Hasidic Jews today, one denomination along a continuum of Jewish religiosity, are notable for, among other things, a strict and literal interpretation of sacred texts. A focus on texts is one aspect of an increasing religious conservatism more generally among orthodox Jews in North America, including Hasidic Jews (Soleveitchik, 1994). The importance of religious texts, enacted in Hasidic men's study of the Torah, shapes a particular ideology of literacy: The acts of reading and writing are understood as a powerful force for either contaminating or uplifting an individual's soul.

Nonreligious texts and literacy practices are similarly thought to have the potential to corrupt or elevate a person. In a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, especially in children's socialization contexts, secular texts are monitored and controlled by parents, rabbis, and teachers in order to protect against the unwanted influence of those outside of this fundamentalist religious community. Communal attempts to control secular texts and literacy practices are one way that Hasidic Jews maintain and reproduce differences both within (e.g., gender and age) and across (e.g., gentile and Jewish) community boundaries in the multicultural context of New York.

Hasidic literacy practices, however, are complicated by multiple languages (Yiddish, English, and liturgical Hebrew) read and/or spoken in Brooklyn and their associations with gender. Multilingual texts and the ideologies associated with these languages play an important part in the production of gendered identities. It is particularly in socialization contexts¯¯classrooms and homes¯¯that males' and females' differential access to and experiences with texts shape linguistic competencies. Gender differences are marked and reproduced through language choice and exposure to certain realms of knowledge in texts. Further, the social organization of gendered identities is a key site for Hasidic legitimations of their sacred covenant with God.

In this article, I show how Hasidic literacy practices contribute to the production of gendered linguistic competencies in which men and women are believed to have innately different and complementary positions in the moral universe. In particular, I investigate girls' shift from Yiddish¯English bilingualism to English dominance upon entering the first grade, despite e***icit valorization of Yiddish by teachers and parents. I do this in an examination of texts and literacy practices at three different points along the female life cycle: early childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood. First, I analyze textbooks and fiction, metalinguistic commentary, and literacy activities in classrooms and homes in order to show how local ideologies about texts and knowledge interact with local ideologies of language and gender.

Then, through a consideration of censoring practices, I examine how parents and teachers, drawing on a local ideology of literacy, are more vigilant over the content of books than the choice of code. In part, this may be e***ained by a recent innovation in a genre of children's English-language fiction, which creates new associations and possibilities for English to express the morality generally associated with Yiddish texts.

I conclude that English-language literacy practices unintentionally render girls' rejection of Yiddish as their vernacular less problematic because they blur the boundaries and ideologies of language itself. An investigation into the socialization of multilingual literacy practices can form a hub for tracing how linguistic practices get located within the broader workings of the maintenance and production of ethnic and gendered identities.

Literacy, Language Ideologies, and Language Socialization
My analysis of literacy activities and texts in Hasidic homes and schools integrates two related bodies of work using the theoretical frame of language socialization: ethnographic approaches to literacy, especially to children's literacy, and recent research on language ideologies. By integrating these bodies of work, I aim to embed the study of linguistic practices within the framework of broader cultural processes. In particular, my goal is to investigate the practices of identification and differentiation, which produce subjectivities and communities.

Recent ethnographic approaches to literacy have started from a position which locates literacy within institutional circumstances and cultural practices (Collins, 1995). In particular, I draw on Brian Street's elaboration of the "ideological" model of literacy. This model approaches literacy as a set of practices, which is implicated in operations of social power, and thus, integral to the formation of identities and subjectivities (Street and Street). Scholars who approach literacy in this way are committed to understanding literacy practices in socio-historical perspective and contexts (e.g., Collins; Kulick; Reder; Rockhill and Schieffelin). Similarly, my analysis draws heavily on interactions within a girls' Hasidic school and examines how changes in codes and reading practices are important factors in shaping gendered subjectivities.

The work of scholars investigating literacy practices involving children has been particularly insightful. This body of research focuses on the relationships among literacy practices, local ideologies around literacy, and the reproduction of social inequities (e.g., Heath and Schieffelin). These approaches to the socialization of literacy practices support my own position that everyday linguistic interactions shape broader cultural processes.

Language ideologies have proven a particular fertile place to link up linguistic practice to a wider set of cultural practices. For example, Kathryn Woolard (1998, p. 3) suggests:

... Ideologies of language are not about language alone. Rather, they envision and enact ties of language to identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology. Through such linkages, they underpin not only linguistic form and use but also the very notion of the person and the social group, as well as such fundamental social institutions as religious ritual, child socialization, gender relations, the nation state, schooling and law.

Language ideologies, in particular, often make e***icit the processes of differentiation and identification that create and maintain community boundaries. The work of Irvine and Gal (2000), for example, has shown that linguistic ideologies can be a site where difference is articulated and reproduced in specific semiotic ways.

Ideologies of language articulated in literacy practices are similarly about difference, identity formation, and community. As Street (1993, p. 137) notes, "Literacy, like language, register, and dialect may become a focus for drawing boundaries against outsiders ...." My work shows how ideologies of language, embedded in literacy practices, are an important site where Hasidic difference from other Jews and gentiles is legitimized and reproduced.

The language socialization research paradigm (Ochs and Schieffelin) provides an approach that integrates ideologies of language, literacy practices, and broader social processes of differentiation and identification. The paradigm makes activities between children and caregivers the primary site for delving into broader cultural themes and relationships (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Language socialization focuses on "how children are socialized through the use of language as well as how children are socialized to use language" (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986, p. 184). Talk between adults and children displays language ideologies, notions of personhood, and socio-cultural knowledge, as adults in talking to children often make cultural values and practices e***icit. Furthermore, language socialization does not stop in early childhood, but continues across the life cycle of individuals. Language socialization provides a theoretical and methodological perspective to investigate the cultural logic by which populations make connections among ideas about language, literacy practices, and **uations of persons and communities.

Background to the Community and the Research
The research site, a Brooklyn neighborhood, is dominated by Bobover Hasidim (over 1,000 families) who live alongside smaller Hasidic groups. Hasidic Jews (Hebrew "pious ones") trace their beliefs back to the late eighteenth century in Eastern Europe. While there is scholarly debate as to how to characterize the Hasidic movement historically and e***ain its continuing success, most scholars seem to agree that what marked the movement as unique was a redefinition of the person and his relationship to God.

In a radically democratizing move common to many fundamentalist movements, the Hasidic movement offered an alternative social organization which rejected the rabbinical elite. Instead of stressing ascetic study of Torah, Hasidism offered a social organization based on the relationship between the individual and his spiritual leader, the rebbe (teacher), in which the divine aspect of each person was recognized regardless of social standing. The Hasidic movement, informed by mystical texts, redefined ideals of worship, suggesting that all observant Jews were capable of reaching the divine through joyful singing, dancing, and prayer. Each Hasidic group organized into a dynastic court named after the rebbe's place of origin (Belcove, 1989; El; Ettinger; Hundert and Poll). 1

After the decimation of World War II, survivors immigrated to major urban centers¯¯e.g., Jerusalem, Montreal, Antwerp, London, and Brooklyn¯¯rebuilding the courts and forming a transnational diasporic network constantly invigorated by marriage, kin, and business ties (Belcove; Epstein, 1979; Mayer; Mintz and Mintz). Hasidim in New York have been successful in this most recent phase of their diasporic experience, growing in strength, number, and political clout. They share with other fundamentalist movements a reimagining of community and a longing for a sacred past, while they await a new world order brought about through the final redemption ( Heilman and Marty).

My fieldwork (1995¯1997) follows a tradition of Jewish ethnographers working in Jewish communities where the religious and ethnic identity of the researcher shapes, constrains, and enables the project (e.g., Boyarin; Kugelmass and Myerhoff). For example, in this relatively closed community, my own identity as a female researcher meant that my interaction with males was limited; I primarily had access to women, girls, and very young boys. 2

The research project was guided by the language socialization research paradigm. Data for this article draws on ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork carried out in homes, schools, and other community contexts. Classroom discourse was audiotaped in a girls' Hasidic kindergarten classroom that I call Bnos Yisroel.3 Over 2 years, I followed a class of girls, first in kindergarten and then into first grade. I was also able to attend a boys' Hasidic nursery school and kindergarten classroom for a period of 3 months.4

A unique aspect of education in fundamentalist communities is a continuity across home and school contexts (Rose, 1988). Hasidic parents and teachers generally share the same educational objectives, although variation in familial religious practice is respected by school administrators. Gendered identities, however, are an arena in which parents and teachers have similar goals. Entry into first grade, when boys formally begin to study with all male teachers and focus on religious literacy, is a watershed for the production of gender differences. In the next section, I discuss the organization of knowledge and languages in separate boys' and girls' elementary classrooms in the context of the social organization of gender. Focusing in more detail on girls' curricula, I show how particular associations are formed among codes, speakers, and content.

Gendered Curricula, Gendered Persons
The organization of curricula, and literacy practices in particular, prepare boys and girls to participate in a gender-segregated social organization in which Hasidic males and females have separate domains of responsibility for reproducing their way of life. Hasidic men study the sacred Torah according to the dictates of religious law. Women's domain of responsibility **s raising their children to be erlikhe Yidn (pious Jews) and creating a home environment to support their husbands' and sons' Torah study. This **s the negotiation of public extensions of the domestic sphere in, for example, their dealings with utility companies, medical caregivers, and social service organizations.

Challenging those who would suggest that women's participation in fundamentalist movements would seem to reduce their opportunities, Hasidic women claim that their roles are critical and complementary to the prestige men garner from Torah study; Hasidic women are proud of their cultural competence in their gendered domain of influence, which **s negotiation of the "secular" world, especially marked through fluency in English. They claim that their everyday activities, like mens', bring the messiah closer everyday.

Gendered language choice and literacy practices are one implication of the social organization of gender. Religious study is generally limited to males, who read liturgical Hebrew texts and discuss them in Yiddish. Males, at least until their wives have a few children at which point they go out to work, are dominant Yiddish speakers, although all speak some English. Females, in contrast, have limited access to sacred texts, although they learn to read and write in liturgical Hebrew and Yiddish and are expected to use Yiddish in certain interactions with other Hasidic Jews. In addition, however, Hasidic females must also be fluent English speakers, so that they can participate in and make use of services available in Brooklyn. Ideally, then, Hasidic females should be fluently bilingual in Yiddish and English, while boys and men, at least until they go out to work, are expected to remain dominant speakers of Yiddish, reflecting their immersion in the study of Torah.

Gender differences, however, are not very significant before the age of 3. Until then children are considered ungendered "babies." Babies are addressed primarily in a simplified baby register of Yiddish, although they are exposed to both Yiddish and English. Members of the community suggested that speaking Yiddish to young children (boys and girls) was an active step parents took to maintain their Hasidic way of life, ** as their grandparents had done in Europe. For example, in an interview, I questioned a Hasidic mother and teacher as to why "a Yiddish kind darf redn Yiddish" (a Jewish child needs to speak Yiddish), something that another community member had suggested. She responded, translating the Yiddish as she spoke:

I think maybe the point is if a Yiddish kind gayt es nisht redn, if a Jewish child isn't going to speak it, then nobody will know it. It's with everything you know? It's up to the Yiddishe kinder, the Jewish children, to maintain everything. If de Yiddish kind vet nisht redn Yiddish, if the Jewish child won't speak Yiddish, there won't be anybody out there talking Yiddish.

It is the parents' duty to talk to children in Yiddish, to make sure that children master Yiddish like the rest of religious practice, which they will in turn pass on to their own children. According to community members, learning a babytalk register of Yiddish is one way that children learn to think, act, sound, and be Hasidic Jews.

Between the ages of 3¯5 years old, boys and girls enter gender-separated schools. From that point onward, their educational and linguistic experiences are all differentiated by gender. Through access to particular texts, boys' and girls' linguistic competencies begin to follow separate paths. Gendered educational experiences create particular associations with particular languages and forms of literacy. Yiddish, English, and liturgical Hebrew are differentially valued for boys and girls as is evidenced by an examination of the school curricula.

Boys entering the first grade spend the entire day acquiring literacy in liturgical Hebrew and Yiddish and studying religious texts, all in Yiddish. They do not receive instruction in English literacy and secular subjects (math and social studies) until the second or sometimes even third grade. When non-Jewish subjects begin, they come at the end of a long day of study and boys are often exhausted and restless. English literacy and secular learning are minimized and often trivialized. As one 11-year-old boy said of English teacher's, "S'iz nisht kan . S'iz a " (It's not a teacher. It's a babysitter.).

Beginning in second or third grade, according to the reports of their mothers, boys learn that maintaining Yiddish at home is one of their responsibilities. Young boys even ask their mothers to speak less English and more Yiddish. For example, a mother reported that her son came home from school and said, ", ikh beyt dikh, red nor Yiddish in de haym" (Mommy, I beg you, only speak Yiddish at home). She agreed she should try.

In contrast, the organization of girls' curricula attempts to create fluency in both Yiddish and English, religious and secular subjects. Girls are taught in Yiddish in the morning when they study religious learning or "Jewish" studies. English is the vernacular in the afternoon for studying "English" or "secular" subjects. Girls have two different teachers for the morning and the afternoon, a Hasidic teacher to teach religious subjects and an orthodox but not necessarily Hasidic teacher for the secular subjects. Jewish and secular subjects for girls are differentiated according to classroom language, teacher, and time of day.

In the morning, girls learn liturgical Hebrew and Yiddish literacy, as well as receive religious instruction in the Jewish holiday calendar, mides (character building) and the parshe (weekly biblical portion). This pattern leads to the association of particular languages, speakers, and contexts. Yiddish literacy is generally taught in the context of simultaneously transmitting a moral lesson. In a first-grade Yiddish reader put out by the school (Greenzweig, 1990), the preface e***icitly makes its agenda clear:

... Mit de hartsige balernde maselekh, vos zenen ongefilt mit yiras shamayim in mides toyvos, tsiyon mir de interes fin de kinder. Az de kinder veln derfiln dem zisn tam, veln zay alayn shoyn hobn groyse khayshek tsi laynen in Yiddish. Zay veln zan darshtig nokh mer tsi derkvikn zayere hertselekh in veln mit der tsat gayn vater in hekher. Zay veln, b'esras hashem, okh zikh nemen tsi laynen mases veygn avoseyni ve'imoseyni hakdoshem in dernentern zikh tsum gartn fin sifrey mussar af Yiddish.

(...With these heartfelt instructive little stories which are filled with good values and awe of God we draw the interest of the children. As children sense the sweet taste of Yiddish reading, they themselves will have a great desire to read in Yiddish. They will thirst to refresh their little hearts even more and will, with time, go higher and further. They will, with God's help, take to reading about our holy forefathers and foremothers and bring themselves closer to the garden of ethical writings in Yiddish.)

In the text, each chapter focuses on teaching a specific vowel through rhyming stories, while simultaneously imparting a moral lesson. These readings are often used as a springboard for discussion by teachers. For example, one chapter focuses on the Yiddish vowel /ay/, rhyming haym, fayn, klayd (home, nice, and dress). The story links Yiddish to a simpler, less materialistic time in pre-war Eastern Europe through the narrative of a little girl's grandmother. The grandmother tells a story about the haym (i.e., Eastern Europe) when she was a little girl. In honor of the Sabbath, she had "one and only one" dress and was very happy with it. Even when the dress got worn out and had to be turned inside out and resewn, first once and then again, she was satisfied with her lot.

In class, a first-grade teacher read the story aloud and then asked the girls if they would be satisfied with ** one Sabbath dress. The girls clamored that they would. Their teacher responded skeptically as, in fact, a great deal of money and attention is spent on girls' Sabbath clothing. She suggested that people in the past were less materialistic and vain:

I wish! Ikh hof az inz volt geveyn tsifriden. Ober in de alte tsaten, de mentshn zenen geveyn zayer tsifriden.

(I wish! I hope that you would be satisfied. But in the olden days, the people were very satisfied.)

Girls are taught to make associations among Yiddish, the old days in Eastern Europe, their grandmothers, and lack of materialism or vanity. Speaking Yiddish is one way that teachers and mothers try to maintain and reproduce the ways of their ancestors. As one mother responded to my question about why Yiddish is important:

Why I think Yiddish is important? Well, that's how we, the Jewish people, keep themselves separate from the rest of the world but keep together as a nation. We're doing what our parents did. We're not changing what our parents and grandparents did.

In metalinguistic commentary, many mothers and teachers told me that Yiddish is a more aydl (refined) language. A teacher told me that in Yiddish certain terms or ideas from "today's world" cannot even be articulated. Despite the fact that these women use English as their vernacular, their metalinguistic commentary portrays Yiddish as a more moral, edifying, and more authentically Jewish language.

In contrast, literacy activities in the "English" afternoons were not e***icitly didactic, although central Hasidic concerns of fitting-in, self-control, and limited individualized expression were stressed. Unlike the communally produced Yiddish texts, English reading texts were public school readers, which provided innocuous stories. For example, girls read a chapter in their English reader about a puppy who ran up and down a hill and the children who chased after him.

In comparison to their own e***icitly articulated ideologies of Yiddish, teachers and mothers suggested that girls think English is "fancy, sophisticated, ladylike, and shtoty (high class)." While first-grade girls made very little metalinguistic commentary regarding their attitudes toward English, they did repeatedly ask me which language I liked more, claiming to "only like to talk in English." First-grade girls also frequently commented on the fashionable clothing of the afternoon English teachers who were, as I noted, often not Hasidic. Although orthodox Jews, these women in general had more flexibility in the requirements for modest dress and were able to dress in greater accord with current mainstream fashion. This **d, for example, longer hairstyles of wigs, sheerer, unseamed stockings, shorter skirts and no hats on their wigs. Girls' association between English and their fashionable English teachers was one more factor influencing their frequent requests that their mothers only speak to them in English.

One mother and teacher theorized that when girls hear their mothers and teachers speaking English among themselves and hear their brothers and fathers speaking Yiddish, they begin to associate femaleness with speaking English. Girls' mothers' use of English can be traced to the fact that Hasidic schools for girls have only existed for approximately 20 years. Before that, Hasidic girls went to public schools or non-Hasidic Jewish day schools, which taught in Hebrew and English, not in Yiddish. However, with the establishment of Hasidic schools for girls, there has been a heightened effort to encourage Yiddish use among girls, although for the previous generation, using Yiddish as a vernacular is an effort in terms of fluency.

Further, teasing routines that focus on gender and language competency show that language choice practices are, indeed, a site for reaffirming separate gendered realms of authority. Hasidic men and boys comment on girls' use of language, complaining and teasing that it sounds as one father said, "too American." Being "American" implies a break with more European ways of doing things and a break with the more authentically "Hasidic." In contrast, Hasidic women often negatively assess men's English and lack of secular knowledge. Wives, for example, frequently claim that their husbands can "barely" speak English. When Mrs. Katz invited my husband and me for a Sabbath, she confessed she and her husband were worried because her husband did not have "a good English." I went alone for Sabbath and discovered that her husband was a fluent English speaker, though his English was influenced by Yiddish phonology and like all Hasidim, greatly influenced by Yiddish and Hebrew lexicon.

Thus, through literacy practices, the structure of schooling, and the home context, girls come to associate Yiddish with a range of specific contexts: babies, moral didactism, religious learning, and males. Girls' own observations and associations with English and fashionable clothing provide further incentive for the gradual shift to the use of English with their peers and adult women.

Girls' shift to English occurs despite demands by teachers and administrators that among themselves, girls should be speaking in Yiddish. A teacher told me, for example, that girls should speak English in their English afternoon classes but by themselves, during recess, they should really be speaking Yiddish. Very few do, however, and teachers are constantly reminding girls to speak Yiddish. Language choice is one of the few sites where continuity across home and school contexts is not as strictly enforced as other realms. School administrators, while e***icitly supporting the use of Yiddish among the girls, draw the line at demanding that parents speak to their children exclusively in Yiddish. This is due, in part at least, to the fact that administrators are aware that many women are not that fluent in Yiddish other than a babytalk or respect register. When, for example, a teacher wanted to send home a chart where mothers had to keep an account of how often girls spoke in Yiddish, the principal vetoed the idea. Some homes are English-speaking, she e***ained, and we cannot force parents to speak in Yiddish, although we encourage it.

In contrast, the school administration does enforce and require that parents abide by the standards the school sets for access to certain books, especially by forbidding attendance at the public library. In the next section, I discus how and why the school administration monitors students' reading activities. Girls' increasing use of English as their vernacular can be more fully understood once it is contextualized in local ideologies of reading and access to knowledge.

Controlling Texts, Controlling Knowledge
Texts available to elementary school-aged children and the literacy practices involving them reinforce ideologies associated with Yiddish and English, while drawing on a culturally specific notion of texts as potentially corrupting or morally uplifting. Ideologies of Yiddish and English are made e***icit in two local categories of narratives for children which support a particular elaboration of how Hasidim see their world. Parents, teachers, and children frequently categorize stories as ekhte mases (genuine stories), which are e***icitly Jewish, or goyishe mases (gentile stories). Ekhte mases are generally in Yiddish and recount the lives of sages or other aspects of shared sacred history.5 Goyishe mases are in English and are purely for entertainment. They ** fairy tales and mainstream North American children's fiction.

The Bnos Yisroel school library is physically separated into goyishe and ekhte mases by language. There is a Yiddish section of the library and an English section. The Yiddish books in the library are almost exclusively didactic and e***icitly moralistic. These are usually read aloud to children, often summarized and translated, because they are written in an inaccessible Yiddish; they are published in Israel where a variety of Yiddish influenced by Hebrew lexicon is used. Mothers told me that their children found these books "boring or unexciting." Although I did see some children eagerly asking to be read these ekhte, (genuine) stories, I rarely saw a child read a Yiddish book alone. These books were usually part of a group activity. Yiddish is the vehicle for texts which are morally didactic, non-individualistic, and "genuine."

A recent innovation in Yiddish texts for children, however, are the Mides Velt and Chayder Velt series (The World of Character Traits, The World of School series) (Schmeltzer and Schmeltzer). These colorful texts depict contemporary life in a suburban Hasidic community (New Square, New York) and ** a companion tape (in the Hasidic variety of spoken Yiddish) with musical selections to teach children the importance of proper, ethical behavior. In Mides Velt, Part A, for example, children learn through the e***oits of two brothers how to behave at home from when they wake up in the morning to when they go to bed. The texts emphasize obedience to parents, kindness to other children and siblings, and respect for Jewish laws. These books, in contrast to the English-language Jewish books for orthodox Jews, I discuss below, are specifically Hasidic. Males have long sidecurls and are dressed in Hasidic garb. Females are always drawn from behind, so as not to have to show their faces; it is considered immodest for Hasidic females' faces to be presented publicly.

Further, unlike the Yiddish texts published in Israel about sages, these local texts are in American Hasidic Yiddish. This means that while the texts are written using Yiddish orthography, there are many borrowings and loan words from English, rendered with Yiddish phonology. For example, the first story begins with vart shoyn de Mame in kikt aros fin fenster tsu zeyn dem . (Mama is already waiting and looking out of the window to see the ). The types of texts are an attempt to make Yiddish texts more appealing to young children, while still creating the association between Yiddish and moral didactism. These books and tapes were indeed popular with younger children (up until ages 7 or 8 years old).

In contrast to the content of acceptable Yiddish-language books, teachers' and parents' concern over negative influences from the non-Jewish world results in a greater wariness of non-Jewish, English texts. Caregivers, for example, fear that goyishe mases (gentile stories) will introduce representations of inappropriate females, which might ** romantic relationships and/or express certain kinds of knowledge.

Children's access to English books, then, must be controlled. Hasidic adults control access by defining, labeling, separating out, and censoring books according to content and language. For example, the English-language books in the library and classrooms were often decades old, what Hasidim describe as a more "decent" time, even for gentiles. Inappropriate passages or pictures were blacked out with a marker or excised completely in many of the same ways that Peshkin (1986) describes censorship practices in a Baptist Fundamentalist school. Girls frequently take these home for a few days. They read them alone, to siblings, or were read to by their mothers before bed.

Both boys and girls (aged 3¯11 years approximately) are allowed to read gentile children's literature as long as it is deemed "clean" or "kosher," i.e., without any potentially contaminating representations of anything other than a nuclear family or any romantic relationships. Labeling certain texts as "clean" or "kosher" creates a parallel between reading and the Jewish dietary laws (kashrus). Both the Jewish dietary laws and the censoring of books are attempts to control what is put into the body and mind. For example, elementary-aged girls in an assembly were reminded that the act of ingesting unkosher food can make a person become coarse, vulgar, and polluted. Similarly, what one ingests intellectually through reading has the potential to corrupt and contaminate. Sustenance for body and mind must be monitored due to its potential for pollution.

Children's books that were acceptable **d, for example, Amelia¯Bedelia and Curious George, stories about a maid who takes instructions literally and a monkey who gets into scrapes because of his curiosity, respectively. These books were familiar to and popular with a wide range of children. However, English-language fairy tales, laden with notions of true love, evil witches, and fantasy are not only discouraged, they are considered irrelevant and dangerous.

When, for example, a first-grader (from an orthodox but non-Hasidic family) brought in a copy of Cinderella (an edition based on the animated Disney film) for her English teacher to read to the class, the teacher first went out to show the principal and check if it was acceptable. She came back and told the girls we did not have time to read it that day, though there were still 20 minutes of class time remaining. I asked her later if the book was not allowed because Cinderella was dressed immodestly in a low-cut ballgown; to dress modestly, Hasidic girls cover their collarbones. She e***ained that girls are going to see immodest clothing all over the city; they have to get used to it. However, Cinderella dances with the prince and kisses him in front of everybody. These girls, she said, will never experience that. It will not be their lives. Why should they be exposed to it? Goyishe mases, which present challenges to Hasidic ways of life, in particular relationships between males and females, are not allowed to penetrate community boundaries.

Like teachers, parents similarly monitored their children's readings activities. When children, despite the school administration, were allowed to visit the public library, an older sibling always had to accompany younger ones in order to check that chosen books were appropriate. When a family did not patronize the library, parents would often receive catalogues of books in the mail, which they could check for content before placing an order. One mother accidentally ordered a book which she later discovered featured a child whose parents were divorced. To the disappointment of her 8-year-old daughter, she returned the book unread. Although it had looked so "exciting" to her daughter, she said that there was no reason for her to be exposed to divorce at such a young age. Children are being protected from the gentile world while learning of the potentially contaminating and dangerous effects such books might have.

Living in an urban context where books and magazines were within easy reach, Hasidic girls did sometimes attempt to read unacceptable books. However, parents and teachers quickly discovered breaches and publicly shamed transgressors. For example, it was the policy of the Bnos Yisroel administration to forbid attendance at the public library because of the possibility of unsupervised reading. Some mothers allowed their daughters to go, however, because they themselves had grown up in more permissive times. When the administration heard that some high-school girls had been going to the library, they ordered spot checks of book-bags and when they found a library card, it was publicly ripped up.

In another incident, a teacher told me that some years ago, girls were secretly circulating books from the Sweet Valley Twins series created by Francine Pascal (Pascal, 1989). These books follow the lives of non-Jewish high-school girls, which ** dating. Somehow the administration discovered that girls were passing these books back and forth. They checked every girl's bag, confiscated books, and warning notes were sent home to parents. Through surveillance practices, attempts to experiment or e***ore alternative ways of life through literacy activities are publicly shut down.

The teens I spoke with seemed irritated more by the complete ban on the library than the censoring of materials, more upset by the lack of trust in them to choose their own reading materials than questioning that some books must indeed be censored. Girls accept restrictions on certain books or content as one more set of practices, that mark them as different from those outside of their community.

In the next section, I show how gendered reading practices unintentionally support girls' use of English as a vernacular. Innovation in English texts for children and young adults is resignifying the ideology of English as a gentile language, creating the possibility for English to be a Jewish language too. This shift in language ideology makes girls' use of English as a vernacular less an issue of resistance to teachers and school administrators. Teachers, administrators, and parents are more concerned with the content of children's books, than which code they are in. This is because girls' use of English as a vernacular, especially in reading practices, reinforces and legitimates elaborations of essentialized gender difference.

Changing Ideologies and Changing Literacies
For first-grade girls, English was often metalinguistically described by teachers as a goyishe shprakh (a gentile language). Lecturing her class (in Yiddish) on the importance of speaking a Jewish language, a teacher asked the girls why they would want to "copy" gentiles by speaking their language. "Do they love us so much, do we love them," she asked, "that we should want to copy their language?" However, outside of first-grade classrooms, the ideology of English as a gentile language is more ambiguous. As one teacher noted to me, there are many non-Hasidic observant Jews, khushever (important) community members, who speak only English at home. Language choice is neither a sufficiently potent nor accurate marker of Jewish orthodoxy and/or difference from gentiles.

Literacy practices further render associations between English and gentiles more tenuous. In the English section of the school library and popular in bookstores and homes were what community members call Yiddishe (Jewish) books for elementary-aged school children. Written in English, these books have orthodox Jewish children as protagonists and teach children the importance of, for example, helping their parents in preparing for the Sabbath.6

One feature of these books, which mark them as e***icitly Jewish and observant, is that they are written in a variety of English community members call haymish (familiar). In print this is indexed by unmarked use of Yiddish and Hebrew code mixing, which is a representation of community speech patterns. For example, religious lexical expressions like Shabbes (Sabbath) and kiddish (the blessing over wine) are unmarked, untranslated, and orthographically representative of Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew lexicon. Jewish English books, then, are not only transforming literacy possibilities for children, they are actually supporting and creating a developing variety of English which is specific to orthodox Jews in North America. This has been termed Jewish English by some scholars who describe it as English with a large number of borrowings and calques, as well as prosodic and phonological elements from Yiddish and Hebrew (e.g., Benor and Steinmetz).

These books use brightly colored illustrations and glossy pages to redefine possibilities for English-language books for children. Jewish books in English sanctify the language, breaking apart simple dichotomies of holy and profane languages. Jewish English books create the possibility for redefining ideologies of English according to content, rather than code. When the content is "Jewish" and the language marked through lexicon and orthography as Jewish, the code itself may become less significant or less easily identifiable.

Community members who are concerned with maintaining a clear separation between Yiddish and English find these books problematic. For example, a mother who was especially committed to having a Yiddish-speaking home worried about the impact of these Jewish English books on the perpetuation of Yiddish. I asked her if these books did not complicate the association of English with the language of gentiles. She responded, "It's a big problem. It blurs the lines." Jewish English texts for children do "blur the lines" between the actual codes of English and Yiddish, as well as their possibilities for expression.

This phenomenon of the increasing ambiguity of ideologies of English, I suggest, makes girls' gradual shift to English as their vernacular less problematic. When English can accommodate Jewish ideas, practices, and beliefs, its use is less threatening to the impenetrability of community borders. As children mature into young adulthood, texts and activities further support internal gender and age differences, which are important to the social organization of this community.

In keeping with the use of Yiddish as a register for very young children, as I noted, there are new genres of Yiddish children's literature. These books represent an effort to maintain associations among Yiddish, morality, and edification, even as they try to appeal to children through representations of their own world. In contrast, I have not found young adult fiction genres in Yiddish. Reading practices have become increasingly gendered by this age (12 years and older), and boys are not expected to spend time reading for "fun." One editor of a Jewish series for young adult girls suggested to me that boys "** don't have time to waste on that kind of reading (fiction). They are busy studying Torah." The limited offerings for boys in a popular neighborhood bookstore supported this.7

There are, in contrast, many fictional texts in English for girls. These texts draw on mainstream North American young adult fiction genres to promote e***icitly observant Jewish ideals, including moral didactism and gender difference. A bookseller from one of the most popular stores in the neighborhood reported that the market for Jewish fiction aimed at girls has expanded rapidly within the last 5 years. Previously, he noted, reading material for children and young adults was translated from Hebrew and was mainly non-fiction. Orthodox young adult fiction aimed at girls is a relatively recent trend. Jewish fiction for girls is written either by individual women or a group of women, often based in Israel, and supervised by rabbis who ensure that the books are "kosher."

Some of the recent fiction for Orthodox Jewish girls is e***icitly modeled on secular books for girls. For example, when in a phone interview I asked about the motivation for the Jewish series, The Bais Yaacov Times by Leah Klein (1993), an editor at Targum Press told me "We had to give them something to read besides Babysitter's Club" (a series aimed at mainstream American girls created by Ann Martin) (Martin, 1988). Other books are e***icitly Jewish and moralistic. For example, The Brookville Chesed Club (Good Deeds Club) by Tamar Elian (1992) is a series about a group of Jewish girls who organize a club to do good deeds. These English texts, like the Jewish English books for younger children, are appropriate vessels for moral didactism even when they are in a gentile genre and language.

In the next section, I discuss how many adult Hasidic women participate in the belief that reading should be a source of moral edification. This is despite the fact that most adult women's reading activities are in English.

Reading as Adult Women: The Morality of Reading
By the time girls grow up, they are almost exclusively reading in English. Even those women who were fluent readers and speakers of Yiddish as children report a loss of fluency as they matured. As adults, they claim to find reading in Yiddish "too difficult." Women's reading activities continue to be monitored by the authority figures in their lives, usually their husbands. One mother who is an especially voracious reader (only of non-fiction) told me that her husband was unusual in that he let her read whatever she wanted. He trusted her, she e***ained to me, because he knew that her faith was unshakeable. Her husband did request that she not bring gentile reading material, e.g., magazines or newspapers, into the house, in case their children found them.

Despite women's dominantly English reading activities, there is a general ideology that the purpose of reading is for moral improvement and reading for entertainment is a waste of time, although some women do read for this purpose. During a recess period, for example, teachers in Bnos Yisroel were talking about the latest historical novel which some of them had read over the Passover break. Some of the teachers had been so enthralled by the novel, which traces a Jewish man's adventures and trials from pre-War Europe to present-day Israel, that they had been riveted to their sofas for long stretches of time (the novel was very long). The teacher I regularly observed did not seem to approve. "I don't read novels," she said, "They're a waste of time." She e***ained that novels were only for "entertainment." She was not improving herself or learning anything by reading fiction. She claimed that she would rather read a "Yiddish," i.e., Jewish (in English) non-fiction book, which would teach her something or inspire her. Other women I met expressed similar views.

A more acceptable alternative to individualized reading is the taped inspirational lectures (available in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English), which circulate from a lending library or are available for purchase.8 Women (and men) would often listen to these taped lectures given by well-known rabbis and respected women while they were doing chores, in-transit, or to relax. The lectures most often drew on a discourse of self-help in tandem with Jewish ideals and values. For example, The Center for Chinnuch and Chizuk Habais (The Center for Education and Building Up the Home), claimed that the lectures which they offered focused on:

Self-hope, personality development, Chinnuch (moral education) and encouragement of Torah values in a warm Yiddish (i.e. Jewish) environment. Most lectures will touch you and give you the knowledge to find true happiness with your role in life (1996).

The lectures **d topics such as "Bringing Out the Best of Ourselves," "Finding the Path to a Joyful Life," "Be Optimistic About What You Can Accomplish," and "The Best Way of Giving." This alternative to reading controlled not only the content, but also the medium of communication.

Adult women's literacy activities, then, support the notion that the content of texts is more important than which language texts are in. Hasidic women's literacy activities are based on a particular ideology of knowledge and communication. While Yiddish is considered an inherently more "refined" and moral language, with new possibilities for expressing Jewish ideas in English, controlling knowledge and building boundaries against what is considered potentially contaminating require the most immediate communal attention. This has the unintended consequence of making girls' switch to English as their vernacular unthreatening either to internal gender differences or to community borders.

Conclusions
A focus on the socializing activities of multilingual literacy practices shows where these practices interface with and influence broader processes of cultural reproduction and change. The Hasidic case study shows how a diasporic fundamentalist community engages literacy practices to manage and control difference both within community boundaries and across them. Hasidic teachers and parents emphasize the morality of reading activities by monitoring content, language choice, and mode of transmission. Literacy practices reinforce gender differences at the same time that they strengthen communal borders, which separate Hasidim from other Jews and gentiles.

An investigation of multilingual literacy practices also provides insight into processes of language shift. Drawing on Silverstein's (1985) work, Kulick's (1998) research in Gapun, Papua New Guinea shows how language shift can occur when a linguistic form or a whole language gets associated with and becomes indexical of a particular group of people. The Hasidic case study is an example of one segment of a community shifting languages. However, as Kulick (1992) has shown elsewhere, language shift does not necessarily imply cultural change. Among Hasidim, changing ideologies of English allows girls' shift to English to be perceived as a force of social reproduction rather than resistance to authority figures and change.

This change in ideology is evidenced in the new Jewish English books available, which use English to convey Jewish narratives with a moral message. The appropriation of a non-Jewish form to convey a specifically Jewish message has a tradition among Hasidim, as Ellen Koskoff's (1995) work shows. Koskoff discusses the ways that Lubavitcher Hasidim in Brooklyn often use secular tunes from musical comedies or TV commercials in their performances of sacred nigunim (religious melodies). The practice of taking a secular form and infusing it with religious meaning can be traced to the Zohar (a mystical text), which says that at the time of creation, holy vessels were broken, scattering the sparks of Godliness. These sparks lodged often in the most mundane locations and only a person of good intention and holiness can redeem them. Koskoff (1995 p. 100) notes that through appropriation, Hasidim negotiate the gentile world around them. She writes, "The borrowing and transformation of the (gentile) tune effectively neutralized both the power of the mundane earthly music and of its user ...(i.e., the gentile)." Jewish fiction for girls similarly takes a "mundane" form and infuses it with Jewish "truth," effectively neutralizing any taint from the hashkofe (outlook) of gentile North America.

Local ideologies of literacy further support this shift in language ideology and language itself for Hasidic girls and women. Hasidic ideologies of literacy emphasize the importance of the outlook of authors and content rather than the language of the text. Thus, despite the claims of teachers, school administrators, and mothers, that speaking Yiddish is important to the reproduction of Hasidic ways of life, girls' rejection of Yiddish in some contexts becomes a force of conservatism, shoring up community borders through elaborations of difference.

Investigations of local notions of literacy, communication, and language ideologies are critical to placing practices around texts in their socio-cultural context. This approach to literacy provides a lens through which to view broader cultural processes, which shape the reproduction of persons, languages, and communities.


Acknowledgements
The research on which this article was based was funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Lucius Littauer Foundation, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. I am very grateful for their support. For their comments, suggestions, and guidance, I would like to thank Stanton Wortham, Bambi Schieffelin, Barbara Miller, and **istine Walley. Finally I would like to thank the Hasidic women and children who shared their lives with me.


References
Belcove, J. (1989). A quest for wholeness: The hasidim of Brooklyn. PhD Dissertation. Cornell University.

Belcove-Shalin, J., Editor, , 1995. New world Hasidim: Ethnographic studies of Hasidic Jews in North America, SUNY Press, Albany.

Benor, S., 1998. Yavnish: A linguistic study of the orthodox Jewish community at Columbia University. The Lion's Letters: Columbia University Student Journal of Jewish Scholarship 1 2, pp. 8¯50.

Boyarin, J., 1993. The ethnography of reading, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Collins, J.T., 1995. Literacies. Annual review of anthropology, Annual Review, Palo Alto.

Collins, J.T., 1998. Our ideologies and theirs. In: Schieffelin, B.B., Woolard, K. and Kroskrity, P., Editors, 1998. Language ideologies: Practice and theory, Oxford University Press, New York.

Elian, T., 1992. In: Brookville C.C.: Getting started, Mesorah Publications, Brooklyn.

El-Or, T., 1994. Educated and ignorant: Ultraorthodox Jewish women and their world, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder.

Epstein, S. (1979). The celebration of a contemporary purim in the Bobover Hasidic community. PhD Dissertation. University of Texas.

Ettinger, S., 1991. The Hasidic movement¯¯Reality and ideals. In: Hundert, G., Editor, , 1991. Essential papers on Hasidism: Origins to present, New York University Press, New York, pp. 226¯243.

Greenzweig, D., 1990. We can read and understand (A), Bnos Zion of Bobov, Brooklyn.

Harshav, B., 1990. The meaning of Yiddish, Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Heath, S.B., 1982. Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Heilman, S. and Friedman, M., 1991. Religious fundamentalism and religious Jews: The case of the Haredim. In: Marty, M. and Appleby, R., Editors, 1991. Fundamentalism observed, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 197¯264.

Hundert, G., Editor, , 1991. Essential papers on Hasidism: Origins to present, New York University Press, New York.

Irvine, S. and Gal, S., 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Kroskrity, P., Editor, , 2000. Regimes of languages: Ideologies, polities, and identities, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, pp. 35¯83.

Klein, L., 1993. The B.Y. times series, Targum Press, Southfield.

Koskoff, E., 1995. The language of the heart: Music in Lubavitcher life. In: Belcove-Shalin, J., Editor, , 1995. New world Hasidim: Ethnographic studies of Hasidic Jews in America, SUNY Press, New York, pp. 87¯106.

Kugelmass, J., 1988. Between two worlds: Ethnographic essays on American Jewry, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Kulick, D., 1992. Language shift and cultural reproduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Kulick, D., 1998. Anger, gender, language shift, and the politics of revelation in a Papua New Guinean village. In: Schieffelin, B.B., Woolard, K. and Kroskrity, P., Editors, 1998. Language ideologies: Practice and theory, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 87¯102.

Kulick, D. and Stroud, C., 1990. **istianity, cargo, and ideas of self: Patterns of literacy in a Papua New Guinean village. Man 25, pp. 286¯303.

Martin, A., 1988. The babysitters club, Scholastic, New York.

Marty, M. and Appleby, R., Editors, 1991. Fundamentalism observed, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Mayer, E., 1979. From suburb to shtetl: The Jews of Borough Park, Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

Mintz, J., 1968. The legends of the Hasidim: An introduction to Hasidic culture and oral tradition in the new world, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Mintz, J., 1992. Hasidic people: A place in the new world, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Myerhoff, B., 1979. Number our days, E.P. Dutton, New York.

Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B.B., 1984. Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In: Shweder, R. and Levine, R., Editors, 1984. Culture theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 276¯320.

Pascal, F., 1989. Sweet valley twins, Bantam, New York.

Peltz, R., 1998. From immigrant to ethnic culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia, Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Peshkin, A., 1986. God's choice: The total world of a fundamentalist **istian school, University Press, Chicago.

Poll, S., 1962. The Hasidic community of Williamsburg: A study in the sociology of religion, Shocken Books, New York.

Reder, S. and Wikelund, K.R., 1993. Literacy development and ethnicity: An Alaskan example. In: Street, B., Editor, , 1993. Cross-cultural approaches to literacy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 176¯197.

Rockhill, K., 1993. Gender, language and the politics of literacy. In: Street, B., Editor, , 1993. Cross-cultural approaches to literacy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 156¯175.

Rose, S., 1988. Keeping them out of the hands of Satan: Evangelical schooling in America, Routledge Press, New York.

Schieffelin, B.B., 2000. Introducing Kaluli literacy: A **onicle of influences. In: Kroskrity, P., Editor, , 2000. Regimes of languages: Ideologies, polities, and identities, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, pp. 293¯327.

Schieffelin, B.B. and Gilmore, P., Editors, 1986. The acquisition of literacy: Ethnographic perspectives, Ablex, Norwood.

Schieffelin, B.B. and Ochs, E., 1986. Language socialization. In: Siegel, B., Editor, , 1986. Annual review of anthropology, Annual Reviews, Palo Alto.

Schmeltzer, Z., 1995. Der Mides Velt, Targum Press, Israel.

Schmeltzer, Z., 1995. Der Khayder Velt, Targum Press, Israel.

Silverstein, M., 1985. Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology. In: Mertz, E. and Parmentier, R., Editors, 1985. In semiotic meditation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, Academic Press, New York.

Soleveitchik, H., 1994. Rupture and reconstruction: The transformation of contemporary orthodoxy. Tradition 28 4, pp. 64¯130.

Steinmetz, S., 1986. Yiddish and English: A century of Yiddish in America, University of Alabama Press, Alabama.

Street, B., 1984. Literacy in theory and practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Street, B., Editor, , 1993. Cross-cultural approaches to literacy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Weinreich, F., 1990. Modern English-Yiddish dictionary, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Woolard, K., 1998. Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8 1, pp. 3¯29.

Zakon, M.S., 1990. Gemarakup: Super sleuth, Mesorah Publications, Brooklyn.


Appendix A. Transcription Conventions

I. To represent the mixture of linguistic codes in the everyday speech of Hasidim, I have devised a system to facilitate reading transcribed portions of speech.
a. Yiddish is in italics. Within Yiddish discourse, routinized switches and borrowings from English, that maintain English phonology (which is the majority) are both italicized and underlined.
b. English translations of Yiddish lexical items are in parentheses. For example, Hasidic men have long, curly payes (sidecurls).
c. Hebrew is in italics and noted as Hebrew in parentheses. Hebrew used by North American Hasidim is Ashkenazic Hebrew and is represented as such orthographically.
II. Yiddish is transcribed from its Hebrew orthography using a modified version of the YIVO system (see Weinreich, 1990). This was done to best represent the dialect of Yiddish spoken by the Hasidim with whom I worked. Throughout the article, I attempt to maintain the dialect of Yiddish and the variety of Ashkenazic Hebrew, which is generally spoken. However, speakers' phonological repertoires ** a range of pronunciation. Thus, for example, a speaker might use the word frum (religious) in some situations and frim, in others. These are represented as accurately as possible in the quoted portions of text.
The system, which is based on Harshav (1990) and Peltz (1998), is as follows:




An exception to the transcription conventions are words in Yiddish or Hebrew which have a standard, recognizable spelling in English. I have retained the English spelling in order to facilitate reading. For example, I write Yiddish rather than Yidish and Hasidic rather than Khsidic.
III. Transcription conventions to represent spoken language **:
a. Empty parentheses, ( ), represent an unclear utterance.
b. An equal sign, =, signals interrupted, overlapping speech.
c. Co

[Hillel]

Да, вижу линию над Фэй.
Но печатная традиция есть разная. Видели Хумаш "Бейс Йеѓуда"?
Там вообще другая орфография. Так что традиций возможно несколько.
Стандарта у Идиш в отличии от Лошн Койдеш единого не было.
Есть скорее в технической терминологии "рекомендации к реализации".

Наезжать я ни на что не хочу, хас вешолойм. Главное чтобы приятно было читать.