As a teenager, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell learned to speak Yiddish while working in a Jewish-owned baby equipment store in New York.
The piece quoted above is an excerpt from the book The Monsey-Kiryat Sefer Express by Zev Roth and is generally accurate in its details: Colin L. Powell wasborn to Jamaican immigrants living in Harlem in 1937; the family later moved to a largely Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, where Powell picked up some proficiency in Yiddish from his neighbors and through working at Sickser's baby equipment store in his teenage years. After graduating from City College of New York, Powell entered the military, eventually rising to the rank of 4-star general, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Operation Desert Storm, and being appointed to the cabinet position of U.S. Secretary of State under President George W. Bush.If there is any nit to be picked here, it's that this piece leaves many readers with an exaggerated impression of Powell's fluency in Yiddish. Most other sources - including Powell himself - speak of him (nowadays, at least) as having a passing knowledge of the language at best. For example, the New York Daily News noted in a 2000 article about Gen. Powell that he had picked up a 'smattering' of Yiddish in his teenage years:Fourteen-year-old Colin Powell slipped off his jacket and went right to work. He kept working at Sickser's through his teens, earning 75 cents an hour and picking up a smattering of Yiddish with which he often surprised people after he became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.2A few months after Powell was named the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1989, a New York Newsday article described him as capable of 'sprinkling' his conversation with Yiddish when addressing Jewish officials:As a boy whose friends and employers at the furniture store were Jewish, Powell picked up a smattering of Yiddish. Vice Adm. John A. Baldwin, an Annapolis graduate who worked closely with Powell a decade ago when they were Pentagon aides, recalls that he was kiddingly nicknamed 'the black Jew.' When it seemed to suit the moment in dealing with Jewish civilian officials at the Pentagon, Baldwin said, Powell sprinkled his language with Yiddish.3In 1995, after an 88-year-old New Jersey man created a fake interview with Gen. Powell as if it were conducted entirely in Yiddish and posted it to a Yiddish-English mailing list, fooling many within the Yiddish-speaking community into believing that Powell was fluent in Yiddish, Powell's spokesperson confirmed that he knew a 'little' of the language:A spokesman for Mr. Powell said he hadn't heard about the spoof but confirmed that Gen. Powell does speak a little Yiddish.4Powell himself was quoted as saying much the same thing during an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in 2001:When Colin Powell took to the stage at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington last month, he made it clear that he believed he was among friends. He had even been rumoured to be fluent in Yiddish. 'Well, yes, I do understand a bissel' (i.e., 'a little'), he said to laughter.5Regardless, even if Powell knows but a few words of Yiddish, it's one more admirable facet of a man who has led a varied and distinguished life in the service of his country.
nan