This fall, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies welcomed a new lecturer in Yiddish language instruction, Elena Luchina. Luchina is a PhD student in Yiddish and Slavic languages at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a Yiddish Pedagogy Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center before coming to Michigan. In addition to Yiddish, she is fluent in Russian, German, French, and Hebrew. She has also received MAs in Linguistics with a specialty in Hebraic and Yiddish linguistics at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, and in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Department of Philology at Moscow State University. 

Luchina explains that her courses focus not only on learning the language itself, but also on the history, culture, and sociology of Yiddish. Her favorite thing about teaching is immersing students in Yiddish and helping them connect to the unique aspects of Yiddish language and culture through music, literature, and games. As a linguist, she pays close attention to the different registers of Yiddish speech: “I want students to be aware of linguistic diversity and how different social situations form the language and the way of thinking in it.”

“I also help students to be creative in Yiddish and to understand all kinds of pure, raw, non-standard language— from old leftist posters and newspapers to interviews with Holocaust survivors, from 19th century birth records to contemporary Hasidic board games, from folk tales to modern queer performances.”

Luchina’s research quantitatively analyzes Yiddish’s relationship to Slavic languages including German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian. “Just like Yiddish, I see myself as a bridge, the missing link between the Slavic department, Germanic department, Judaic studies, Middle Eastern Studies, linguistics, museum studies, digital humanities etc.” Going forward, she is interested in researching the motivations of students who choose to study a second language and how attitudes vary towards different languages.

In the future, she plans to include elements of digital humanities into her language lessons, combining them with community-oriented projects, like digital mapping and genealogical research. In the winter semester, Luchina will lead a freshman seminar course titled Voices of Jewish Ann Arbor. Students will learn how to collect family stories, names, beliefs, attitudes, recipes, and sayings by drawing on resources from the local community and beyond to build a collection that reflects Jewish life and migration between cultures and languages. “I see my task as a Yiddish instructor to connect people to folklore, memoirs, literature and art,” said Luchina. She hopes to give students “a new voice, a Yiddish voice” to speak about their own lives and understand the lives of others.