“Well,” he added with a smile, “it means breaking windows, but it means feeding other people for free.”
Pink peacock, however, is not only a revolutionary concept, it is also a pioneering initiative in the Scottish Jewish landscape, its first physical area for Yiddish in decades. The owners come with Yiddish to the cafeteria and need the place to eat to be “an area of Yiddish learning”, equipped with Yiddish dictionaries and many conferences, “so that other people can practice their yiddish”.
They are also leading the implementation of a “summer program in Yiddish” – main points to consider – for students and Yiddishists.
Coffee already has a strong presence on social media and is bilingual with an icon depicting a brightly colored hand-drawn bird. Holleb and Isaac tweet in Yiddish (something rare among classical Yiddish institutions, which condemn as “conservative” in their language technique) and interact and report on how some online Jasidic accounts adapt language to the social media age.
טעמע די וואָך: תּשובֿה (אומקערן, פֿאַרענטפֿערן זיך, און / אָדער חרטה האָבן)
ערבֿ־אונטיק 9:20 בס «
???? weekly virtual havdalá ????
This week’s theme: chouva (return, apology and/or regret)
Saturday 9: 20pm BSThttps: //t.co/BtTcJGTJz8 pic.twitter.com/Zg3fnxtkRq
– peacock ראָזעווע פּאַווע (@dirozevepave) 26 August 2020
For a century, Scotland’s central belt housed an exclusive Yiddish hybrid and Britain’s only indigenous Jewish “dialect”: Scottish-Yiddish, which was formed when the language was merged and combined with Scottish, called Scottish Gaelic, the dialect spoken through millions of people. across the lowlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Holleb and Isaac also give a nod to this Yiddish past.
“I think being in Scotland and making Yiddish, we’ll do Scotland-Yiddish,” Holleb said. ”For us, the Yiddish we practice is not just preservation: we need to use and speak Yiddish, and if used in Scotland, we will say Scottish words’.’
For example, they adopt a variant of “Glasgow” that differs from the Yiddish spelling typical of the city, which prefer a variant derived from The Scotch. From there, the hope is that pink peacock is also an area for language speakers such as Scottish Gaelic, Roma and other Jewish minority languages such as Ladino and Judeo-Arabic.
“We are building a minority linguistic community,” Isaac said. “We are focusing here on Yiddish as our primary language, however, we are making efforts and look forward to welcoming all kinds of other languages.”
Yiddish is spoken through 30,000 other people in Britain, almost all of the developing Hasidic community. In Scotland, which does not have a giant Hasidic community, Yiddish has been dead for years. Today, the closest Yiddish language centre to Glasgow is the Ieshivá, the city of Gateshead, 150 miles south of England.
“There’s a need for yiddish, ” said Holleb. “There is virtually no Yiddish activity in the UK, and most of them are educational and suffocating, or simply inaccessible.”
Holleb and Isaac are not alone: from New York to London Sydney, a small number of young left-wing Jews claim that Yiddish is an act of political expression.
“The language is being rediscovered through young Jews,” Holleb said. “For me, it’s an exercise in carelessness: as Jews, we don’t have much to gain from assimilation and we threaten to waste our culture, and I don’t need to do that.”
“It has become transparent that being actively Jewish, whatever it means to people, is an act of anti-fascist resistance in itself. It’s hard to say ‘mit zeynen do’: we’re here and we speak Yiddish. “
Holleb and Isaac said they were not interested in Hebrew because it was too similar to the construction assignment to the country of Israel, a country from which they disagree with policy. They also claim that Yiddish is more secular and multicultural because it incorporates elements of other languages into the countries where Jews have settled.
“Yiddish is considered an antithesis of Hebrew and Zionism,” Holleb said, “especially for anti-Zionist Jews or Jews who criticize the Israeli state. Yiddish is a way to link to a Jewish language that is fashionable in Hebrew. There is no Yiddish nation. It’s a diapathic language.”
זײַן אויף (בעיקר אויף) קווירע ייִדישע ציבערס פֿון שטאָטן
עס וועט גערעקאָרדירט ווערן, כּדי אויב איר פֿאַרגעלט די דירעקטער שטראָם, וועט איר קענען עס קוקן שפּעטער ???? https://t.co/7CJqFTl3ud pic.twitter.com/2aEpOxaXWU
– peacock ראָזעווע פּאַווע (@dirozevepave) 25 August 2020
Holleb and Isaac have been active in left-wing Jewish collectives in Scotland and, atheists, have been concerned in Irn-Ju, a congregation that houses synagogue facilities in the homes of their members, many of whom are from the LGBTQ community.
By offering their online page and bilingual online resources, upload both, they hope to help “native Yiddish speakers”, basically jasidim, “who are queer and probably will not have the resources to help them perceive or manage this”.
“In our Yiddish, we made an effort for the hassidim to read them, but they speak another dialect,” Holleb said. “Our Yiddish is more educational because that’s how we learned.”
Both had a “mixed” relationship with the Jewish network established in Glasgow. When they and Irn-Ju leaders campaigned to save a disused local synagogue from demolition, the network said the organization would reopen old conflicts that had been resolved years earlier. The network had sold construction to finance other things and Irn-Ju had no plan or investment to manage a physical synagogue.
However, Holleb and Isaac hope to attract at least some of the city’s 9,000 Jews and stress that the concept of pink peacock is not “a major factor.” They simply say that they “reach a Jewish network that other computers are not.”
“Even if you despise all our politics,” Isaac said, “you can take credit for the food we provide.”