In 1974, two languages dominated the bar mitzvah speech of my father, Joe Mishell, “Yossi” to his family. One was English, but the other was not Hebrew.

Like many bar mitzvahs, he read from the Torah and gave his bar mitzvah speech. However, the speech, which he wrote for months, was in Yiddish.

Yiddish is Dad’s first language, and he did not learn English until kindergarten. His parents and my grandparents-William and Pola Mishell-were Lithuanian Holocaust survivors. Along with giving his speech in Yiddish, this gave my dad a different insight in what it meant to be a bar mitzvah.

“Growing up, there was always a presence of the family we’d lost in the Holocaust,” Mishell said. I had cousins, an uncle, and grandfathers who were all killed in the war. That made my bar mitzvah even more meaningful to me and my family.”

My grandma, Pola Mishell, survived the Stutthof Concentration Camp along with her female family members. Her father and only brother were killed. My grandpa, William Mishell, survived the Kovno Ghetto and Dachau Concentration Camp. His experiences are chronicled in his memoir, Kaddish for Kovno . William lost his father, many cousins, his niece, and brother-in-law. He survived, as did his mother and sister.

My father, an avid history-lover, grew up listening to stories of his older relatives, granting him a familiarity with previous generations.

Also, his two sisters and female cousins became 12 before it was the norm for girls to have bat mitzvahs. As a result, my dad was the first in his family to even have a bar mitzvah in America.

To his entire family, Joe’s bar mitzvah represented triumph-a positive Americanization of the family. After surviving the Nazis, his family could bar mitzvah a boy in America, the land of opportunity and religious freedom.

“I always felt American, and my parents really loved this country. After the war, my parents worked so hard to integrate into American life, and here it was. A very American-Jewish practice that they could participate in.”

B’nai mitzvahs happened in pre-war Europe, but they did not have the American touch of a party, grandeur, and a speech, which thanked all the guests for coming.

Joe’s parents still felt a strong connection to their Lithuanian-Jewish roots. So they wanted their son to do his speech in English to demonstrate their love of America. But they also wanted him to do another speech in Yiddish, their native language.

This was an unusual occurrence in Joe’s generation at bar mitzvahs in the 1970s. He was on the younger side of being a son of Holocaust survivors. Therefore, Yiddish was the language of his peers’ grandparents and, often, great-grandparents.

“At first, I was a little embarrassed. It was an old language that my friends didn’t hear very often. I thought it might be kind of weird for them to sit through one bar mitzvah speech, and then to have to sit through another one that they couldn’t even understand,” he paused, “Looking back on it, I realized this day wasn’t about my peers. This day was about me and my family.”

And my dad made his family proud. Our family loved America, but they never forgot their roots.