When it was first organized, the Sunset Village Yiddish Club met once a week. Members talked in Yiddish, read passages from the Yiddish papers to each other, and discussed, in Yiddish, the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer that they had read during the week -- in the original Yiddish, of course. The members enjoyed it so much that they would sometimes stay in the all-purpose room in the Sunset Village Clubhouse, where the meetings were held, for hours after they were over, talking in Yiddish as if that language were the only logical form of communication. Finally they had to increase the meetings of the Yiddish Club to three times a week, although most of the members would have preferred to attend every day.

There were a great many reasons for the phenomena, their club president would tell them. His name was Melvin Meyer, but in the tradition of the club, he was called Menasha, his name in Yiddish. He had a masterly command of the Yiddish language. Both his parents had been actors in the heyday of the Yiddish stage, when there were more than twenty Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side of New York alone and they were showing at least three hundred productions a year.

"There is, of course, the element of nostalgia," Menasha would explain to the group pedantically, his rimless glasses imposing in their severity. "It is the language of our childhood, of our parents and grandparents. To most of us it was our original language, the language in which we first expressed our fears, our anxieties, our loves, and the language in which our parents forged our childhood. The link with the past is compelling. And, naturally, there is the beauty of the language itself -- its rare expressiveness, its untranslatable qualities, its subtlety and suppleness -- which makes it something special simply in expressing it and keeping it alive."

To both Bill (Velvil) Finkelstein and Jennie (Genendel) Goldfarb, Menasha's words were thrilling, but merely suggestive of the depths of their true feelings. They had joined the club on the same day and, they discovered later, for the same reasons, some of which Menasha had expressed. Their respective spouses had lost the language of their forebears and showed absolutely no interest in the activity as a joint marital venture. Besides, they were much more disposed to playing cards and sitting around the pool yenting with their friends.

Because they had joined on the same day, they had, out of the kinship of newness, sat next to each other and were able to start up a conversation on the subject of their first day at the club.

"It's amazing," Genendel had said when the meeting had adjourned, "I haven't spoken it since my mother died twenty years ago; yet I caught every word. God, I feel good speaking that language. It brings back the memories of my childhood, my mother, those delicious Friday nights."

"Oh those wonderful Friday nights," Velvil had responded, his mind jogged by the dormant images now sprung to life, the candles, the rich rhythm of Yiddish speech, the smells of fricassee and honey cake. He looked at Genendel as someone familiar, someone perhaps that he had known in his youth or at least someone recognizable to his spirit. She was smallish, thinner than his wife Mimi, who had allowed herself to run to fat. Lines were embedded in Genendel's tanned face, but when the light hit her at a special angle, the wrinkles disappeared and with them the years. She looked then like a young girl. When he told her this after they had become intimate in their conversation, she pursed her lips in mock disbelief and punched him lightly on the arm. But he could see she was pleased.

"Thank God you're telling me that in Yiddish," she said. "If my David would hear it, he'd think you're flirting."

"I am."

She put a hand over her mouth and giggled like a girl. It had not seemed possible to her that anything could occur beyond their lighthearted banter, their kibitzing in Yiddish. She dismissed such thoughts as idle and forbidden speculation. And yet they would sit for a long time after the meetings were over, discussing their lives, their children, their fortunes. At first their exchanges had been purely factual, filled with the details of their biographies.

"I worked for the Veterans Administration as a lawyer, and hated every minute of it," Velvil had said, "but I was frightened to death." He was surprised to have told her that. He had never referred to being frightened except to himself, characterizing his long term as a civil servant merely as "an easy buck with no hassle." What he really meant, he knew, was that he had been too scared to leave the government. "But I had two kids and it was safe. So we lived in Flatbush and the kids grew up and we waited out my pension. Not very exciting. My parents had greater dreams for me, but they had scrambled so hard for money that they made me paranoid about it."

"Are you sorry you stayed with the government so long?"

Why is she probing my regrets, he wondered, yet understanding the special poignancy that Yiddish could inject into such inquiries.

"Of course I regret it. But I went through the motions for my family."

She, too, could understand that kind of sacrifice. She had also longed for other things.

"I wanted to travel," she said, lifting her eyes to his. He had all his hair, she noted, and a part of it was still black. It was his most striking feature. A handsome man, she concluded to herself, feeling a faint stirring, a mysterious memory of yearning.

"Once we did go on a packaged B'nai B'rith tour of Israel. I loved it, not necessarily because of my Jewishness but because it was exotic. It all looked like a movie set. David, after the first day, didn't tour. He hates touring. And I love it. That's why we never went anywhere else."

"I love to travel," Velvil said suddenly, knowing it was true, although he, too, had never traveled.

"Where have you been?"

"Not very many places," he said. But it was important for him to be scrupulously truthful with her, like strangers meeting on a train who say things to each other that they wouldn't dare say to anyone they really knew. "In fact, no place. My wife would never leave the children."

Sitting in the back corner of the room after the meetings adjourned, losing all sense of time, they picked through their lives with care and detail as if embroidering a tapestry.

"I have a son and a daughter," Genendel told him. By then their Yiddish had returned to them in full force, their vocabulary amplified, dredged up from some secret place in their subconscious. They could be both fluent and subtle, the little nuances delicate but sure. "They were good kids. All that's left now is merely the loving of them."

"Yes," he responded, his heart leaping because she had struck just the right chord. "I must remember that way of putting it. Mimi thinks there should be more, extracting the last bit of tribute, making them always feel that they haven't done enough somehow, keeping that tug of guilt in force, always taut. She whines to them constantly on the phone. I tell her she's wrong, but she insists that daughters must care more. We have two daughters. I keep telling myself I love them, but I sometimes have doubts. They are not really very nice people."

"What a terrible thing to say!"

"It's the truth." He blushed, wondering if she sensed the special joy of telling it. He had vowed to himself that he would never express anything but the truth in Yiddish, in this special language between them.

"Where is it written that parents should love their children and vice versa?" he had pressed, the Yiddish rolling easily off his tongue.

"It is a forbidden thought," she responded, but the idea of it intrigued her. David, her husband, had always been the sentimentalist, the worrier. It was he who fidgeted when the children didn't call at their accustomed intervals.

"The Ten Commandments talk of 'honor,' not love."

"So you've become a Talmudic scholar in your old age," she bantered, a sure sign that they were growing closer, he thought.