Curses and Code Switching: Dreaming in Yiddish with Sheldon Londner

Sheldon Londner, a secular Yiddishist raised in Los Angeles, shares the powerful legacy of his Polish survivor parents and his lifelong bond with the Yiddish language. Sheldon recounts his parents’ miraculous survival of the Holocaust, their journey to America, and how they passed down Yiddish as his first language. He discusses the unique linguistic gift of growing up bilingual, the cultural concept of the “Yiddish gas” (Yiddish street), and the challenges of maintaining fluency without an active speaking community. Today, Sheldon actively preserves this heritage by organizing a weekly Yiddish reading circle.

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Shulem (Sheldon) Londner is a retired medical professional in Los Angeles. He’s the son of Polish Holocaust survivors who suffered the loss of over 100 family members. He grew up in a religious multilingual family with Polish, English, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian, and Hebrew, but Yiddish was the daily vernacular. Although not formally educated in Yiddish, both his parents found delight in Yiddish wordplay, a trait he inherited and cherishes to this day. As the leader of a weekly Yiddish Reading Group, his focus is on developing a more sophisticated vocabulary and exploring the Yiddish idiom form.