Did russian jews during the third immigration speak english?
Saturday, August 28th, 2010 at
7:08 pm
Did russians need to learn english or did they know it already? how did they learn it?
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Tagged with: russians
Filed under: Russian - Written and Spoken
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Most Russian Jews spoke Yiddish, a dialect related to German. Since German and English are closely related languages, it may have been easier to learn English than for someone who spoke Russian or Polish, Slavic languages with fewer similarities.
Some may have spoken some English, and many did not. Those with educations may have known some English but most had to learn it in the US. Like many immigrant families, often children would learn the new language faster and help teach their parents. I don’t know if there were classes to teach English as a Second Language like there are today in some cases, but immigrant children learned English fairly quickly in American schools. After in the US, Jewish parents , who may have been denied education in Russia often put strong emphasis on education to their children, leading to the often stereotypical ideas of Jewish doctors and lawyers and other professionals.
I’m sorry, I did not try to be ‘funny’, I did not know what ‘3rd immigration meant, I should have stated that. I assumed it was the generations that came in the late 19th, early 20th century or around world war I. I’ll be more careful the next time.
That’s not funny, Rubym. The question is about the 3rd immigration (late 60’s – early 80’s, XX). Jews were hardly speaking Yiddish by that time, they spoke mostly Russian, and it was the very good one, because there were plenty of highly educated people having intellectual jobs among them. The only "rudiment" of Yiddish could be a slight melodic accent.
Some of them spoke English very well (especially in since mid ’70’s), some of them did not. It depends how high was a person’s social position and financial situation in the Soviet society. Once realized English was very important for future Jews were doing their best to get their children into so called special schools (with more attention to a foreign language – German, English, French etc.) or to follow a foreign language course.
The problem is the educational system in the USSR in teaching any foreign language wasn’t the best. It was too far from real life, it was full of the rules to learn, there were no opportunities to practice, it was boring to death. That’s why there were complete generations (of Jews, of Russians – of any ethnic groups) for whom studying English was a dead knowledge. Once in America a lot of people got finally a chance to practice that useless cumulated information preserved somewhere in the furthest corners of the brain. And they could better read Hemingway than understand an advertisement in a paper or a pop song on MTV…
So did Jews from the USSR speak English? Much more likely comparing to the 1st and the 2nd waves of the immigration. Where they prepared to step on the American soil and start communicating free? No, they weren’t in their majority. Half-knoweledge was very painful for many of the middle-age people because a lot of Russian Jews could never achieve in the US society the positons they were really worth, their talents got wasted.