Up until COVID, I started my Tuesday evenings shlepping on the subway to the mid-Manhattan Workers Circle for a Yiddish class. As a child, I’d studied the language in an afternoon
shule/school in the Bronx. Now, decades later, I felt a quiet pull to study it once again.
Kolya Borodulin is the director of Yiddish programming at the Workers Circle as well as our Tuesday night teacher. He is warm and impassioned, pacing up and down our classroom, literally bending over backwards or dropping to one knee, and doing all manner of spontaneous gymnastics to make a point.