The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

by Neal Karlen
The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

by Neal Karlen

eBook

$13.49  $17.99 Save 25% Current price is $13.49, Original price is $17.99. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

Yiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story is the notion that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and worse.

Karlen charts the beginning of Yiddish as a minor dialect in medieval Europe that helped peasant Jews live safely apart from the marauders of the First Crusades. Incorporating a large measure of antique German dialects, Yiddish also included little scraps of French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance languages, and a dozen other tongues native to the places where Jews were briefly given shelter. One may speak a dozen languages, all of them Yiddish.

By 1939, Yiddish flourished as the lingua franca of 13 million Jews. After the Holocaust, whatever remained of Yiddish, its worldview and vibrant culture, was almost stamped out—by Jews themselves. Yiddish was an old-world embarrassment for Americans anxious to assimilate. In Israel, young, proud Zionists suppressed Yiddish as the symbol of the weak and frightened ghetto-bound Jew—and invented modern Hebrew.

Today, a new generation has zealously sought to explore the language and to embrace its soul. This renaissance has spread to millions of non-Jews who now know the subtle difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel; hundreds of Yiddish words dot the most recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Story of Yiddish is a delightful tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061860119
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 02/27/2024
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 338
File size: 761 KB

About the Author

Neal Karlen was speaking Yiddish at home well before he was a staff writer at Newsweek and Rolling Stone. A regular contributor to the New York Times, he has studied Yiddish at Brown University, New York's Inlingua Institute, and the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches nonfiction writing.


Neal Karlen was speaking Yiddish at home well before he was a staff writer at Newsweek and Rolling Stone. A regular contributor to the New York Times, he has studied Yiddish at Brown University, New York's Inlingua Institute, and the University of Minnesota's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches nonfiction writing.

Read an Excerpt

The Story of Yiddish
How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

Chapter One

You Don't Have to Be Jewish to "Get" Yiddish

To begin to understand the soul of Yiddish, one needn't understand the homely language as much as its bipolar worldview. Mere answers of how this mutt language saved the often fatally stubborn and proud Jews over the last thousand years doesn't begin to tell the full tale of the mamme-loshn (mother tongue) any more than the correct answers on Jeopardy! reveal anything beyond the memorization of trivia.

Over the centuries, experts have thought Yiddish had as many linguistic meanings as the word oy. At various times it was considered a jargon, dialect, vulgar street slang, language, secret code, medium of high art, punishment, Jewish Esperanto, or even an embarrassment to its people. Yet it's always been anything but trivial.

Not that Yiddish doesn't bear enough Neat Facts to titillate Alex Trebek. How could it possibly be, for example, that Steve McQueen, Jimmy Cagney, American war hero General Colin Powell, and Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann all knew Yiddish—while few of Israel's prime ministers have had even a passing knowledge of the language.

Yet this is not a history of Yiddish, but the story of Yiddish. True, there are names, dates, and places important to the language's development lurking not too deeply in its one-thousand-year history as perhaps the world's most loathed and loved patois.

These historical truths are critical. Still, this is really the story of how Yiddish's heart and spirit evolved from its status as the worst-ever,quasi-linguistic equivalent of the 1962 New York Mets into, simultaneously, the most sonorous, wisest, ironic, funereal, and joyous language in the world.

Yiddish has forever been granted least-favorite-nation status by the Jews' enemies. Never mind that der yidn (Jews), wandering forever in Diaspora, never even were a nation, as they were kicked around like an always-deflating soccer ball in a match of global proportions that was never good for the Jews.

Yet there were good times, many of them, and all reflected in Yiddish. I hope that joy will be captured in these pages; Yiddish is as much about the humor and magic of life as it is about seemingly never-ending pogroms and cataclysm. Many of those laughs have come through clenched teeth and lost hopes. Yet Yiddish, in all of its feeling, longing, and laughter, is available to anyone. You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy's rye bread, as in the famous ad read in New York subways; nor do you have to be Jewish to read this book.

In fact it might be better if you're not. Besides gaining a further insight into the Yiddish-based mind of many Jews, there is always the enjoyment that comes with going up to a group of Chasidic or ultra-Orthodox men at a gas pump or convenience store, and begin talking to them in Yiddish.

For Jews, Yiddish is the easiest way to see who we and the world are, and were, to der yidn and der goyim (Gentiles). It is understanding Yiddishkeit—the spirit and essence of living life like a Jew—at a time when too many yidn have forgotten or never knew the story of the language that saved them more than any rabbi ever did.

The book can be read out of order, by pages, paragraphs, or sentences. This is a book to be carried and tattered; in a world of A.D.D. and short attention spans, including my own, I have tried to write in digestible giblets as well as chunks. Five hours of reading time? Fine. Five-minute intervals, just long enough to learn a filthy Yiddish phrase? Also fine. As the Band sang, "Just take what you need and leave the rest"—but in this book please feel free to take whatever you feel is Yiddish's very best.

The oft-repeated tale, complete with names, is a staple of Yiddish: It was how Jewish history was memorized and one's own dead relatives kept alive. I include a couple of twice-told tales in honor of that tradition. I believe German poet Heinrich Heine's declaration of insincerity after he converted from Judaism to Catholicism is worth hearing twice. (Heine, who switched teams for social mobility, said no such conversion to Christianity could be honest, because no Jew could believe any other Jew was Divine.)

The question this book tries to answer is short, as many Yiddish queries are. Not long ago, this mish-mosh of other peoples' languages and worlds was thought to be a dialect of Jewish pig Latin. How could such a mongrel tongue save the Jews at the same time it was so derided?

The answer is this: The Story of Yiddish.

During their diaspora, in place of a spot on the map, Jews made Yiddish into an invisible homeland with unmarked boundaries, encompassing virtually any place on the planet where yidn lived, or were violently bounced, whether they were in a cluster of three million, or three. With no place to turn as they wandered a world that largely despised them, Jews had to settle on the mamme-loshn (mother tongue), wrote journalist Miriam Weinstein, as their borderless "nation of words."

"Yiddish culture was more than ever an international culture," wrote Irving Howe, author of the magisterial World of Our Fathers, "a fraternity of survivors across the globe."

To foes of the Jews, Yiddish was the chicken-squawk gibberish of a historically chickenhearted people literally demonized as horned Christ killers with yellow stripes down their backs. That might be expected. Curiously, however, Yiddish is also the story of a language almost equally loathed by its own.

Nevertheless, Yiddish saved the Jews from assimilation or disappearance. Yiddish—this forever-dying language with no mother, father, or, as with Hebrew, Divine roots. Instead, it sprung naturally from the Jewish experience and need to survive the murderous sabers of Crusaders on the way to Jerusalem. The language, for good and rotten over the last thousand years, held the Chosen together with their own Esperanto as they were chased and kicked around the world.

The Story of Yiddish
How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews
. Copyright © by Neal Karlen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews