Ellin speaks to Yiddish Vinkl on College Street October 3.

My Uncle Al, an American who lived in Pennsylvania,  never talked much about his service in the Second World War, except to tell his nephews and nieces about the  times when he spoke Yiddish to arrest some Germans and take them prisoner. Toronto’s Norman Gulko also used his knowledge of Yiddish on the battlefield: once to try to flush out some Germans from a wooded area, and the second time to scream abuse at a long line of captured German POWs as they marched past the Canadian soldier’s truck. Hy Chud used his Yiddish to communicate with a Jewish widow in Antwerp when he liberated the city; she had been hidden in a monastery during the war. Ellin will speak about these and other stories in her book “Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and WWII” when she is the guest at the monthly Yiddish Vinkl luncheon. Hear how Yiddish played a role when 17,000 Canadians of Jewish faith put on a uniform, helped defeat Hitler, and rescued the survivors of the Holocaust.