At a crowded conference today on language, which encouraged me to keep writing funny poems in Yiddish, the lectures after mine were concerned with the way the intentional demise of Yiddish in Israel led to a great depression among Yiddish speakers and the Hebrew imperative destroyed many other languages at the same time.   Not just Ladino and many other Jewish dialects as in Jewish Moroccan, Iraqi, etc.  Thinking about it in retrospect, we Jews who lived in other countries always created some kind of way to communicate secretly, even while using the lingua franca of our neighborhood. 

Multilingualism has always been attractive to me – a comment coming from another direction always gives a perspective to the situation.  

I have a feeling it makes you smarter.  My parents spoke Russian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Esperanto, Lithuanian, and who knows what else…