Several years ago, I was asked to be a tummler at a Japanese wedding in New York. Tummler is Yiddish for a person “who makes a racket,” a jester, entertainer and emcee all rolled into one. My friend, David, the groom, is Jewish, but his family was outnumbered by the bride’s, who flew in from Japan for the ceremony. It was an awkward arrangement at best: His relatives were mainly from the Five Towns on Long Island, and hers were from Nakameguro. David hoped I might provide some social lubricant.

Getting over the language barrier was tough. I noticed the groom did not translate my “Take my wife … please” joke out of fear a guest would take it literally. David’s great-aunt told someone she would never forget where she was the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. One of the bride’s friends told me he was eager to learn about American Jews because they controlled the world’s money supply.

After a dinner of sushi, datemaki and daifuku, it was time for a hora. It fell to me to explain the traditional Israeli circle dance to the crowd. Executing the moves — holding hands and circling around ad nauseam — struck me as a lot easier to do than the group karaoke of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” performed at the rehearsal dinner the previous night.

I wanted to distill the hora tradition to its essence. “Could everyone repeat after me?” I said. “Chutzpah.”

All I got were murmurs and confused-looking faces.

“Now let’s try l’chaim.”

I was getting nowhere, and it didn’t help that at this moment the speaker system blared feedback. I was going to have to distill the essence down to its essence.

“Huch,” I said. “Everyone just say ‘huch.’”

The crowd voiced the universally recognized onomatopoeia for hocking a loogie.

Next, I fake-conjugated it. “Hecch.” “Hicch.” “Hocch.”

The crowd repeated the words after me. Everyone was laughing.

* * * * * *

In retrospect, this story says a lot about how little I knew about Yiddish. Jews spoke the language for hundreds of years while living in Eastern Europe. I’d reduced their experience to guttural sounds of phlegm clearing.

I knew Yiddish as a series of words and phrases my parents bandied about — yichus (pedigree), nachas (pride), tuchas (rear end) and alter cocker (old fart).

At Hebrew school, we learned about the Bible and modern-day Israel, skipping over Eastern Europe. I’ve forgotten everything I learned at Hebrew school, but if I hadn’t, I would say I was done a terrible disservice.

Last fall, I took the class “Yiddish Culture in the Modern World” at Brandeis alongside half a dozen undergraduate and graduate students. Taught by Ellen Kellman, assistant professor of Yiddish, the class was conducted as a seminar, with lots of discussion and provocative questions. Every now and then, Kellman livened things up by bringing in a music recording and letting us sing along.

Covering the mid-1800s to today, the course explored such topics as shtetl life, literature and theater, assimilation in America, and the revival of klezmer. To Kellman’s great credit, we didn’t spend a lot of time on the Holocaust. This was Eastern European Jewry on its own terms, not nostalgized, mourned or distorted by anger over the Nazi horror. We were not going to reduce the Jews in Russia, Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere to mere martyrs.

At its height, Yiddish was spoken by several million Jews living in Russia and neighboring countries. It’s a synthesis of German, Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, Slavic languages. Sentences lilt upward at the end so that statements sound like questions, begetting more questions, until the whole thing has to be settled by the rabbi.

There’s no agreed-upon definition of shtetl, a small town or village where Jews lived in Eastern Europe. I discovered shtetls weren’t the isolated, insular places I’d always envisioned. Gentiles lived there and intermingled with Jews. In addition to a temple, a marketplace, a school and a cemetery, shtetls usually included a church.

Nor was life so bad there, another surprise to me. Pogroms — anti-Jewish riots — were actually rare until the late 19th century. Jews found gainful employment as horse traders, purveyors of alcohol, shopkeepers, carpenters and shoemakers.