Yiddish: A Nation of Words

Overview

About a thousand years ago, European Jews began speaking a language that was quite different from the various tongues and dialects that swirled around them. It included Hebrew, a touch of the Romance and Slavic languages, and a large helping of German. In a world of earthly wandering, this pungent, witty, and infinitely nuanced speech, full of jokes, puns, and ironies, became the linguistic home of the Jews, the bond that held a people together.

Here is the remarkable story of ...

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Yiddish: A Nation of Words

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Overview

About a thousand years ago, European Jews began speaking a language that was quite different from the various tongues and dialects that swirled around them. It included Hebrew, a touch of the Romance and Slavic languages, and a large helping of German. In a world of earthly wandering, this pungent, witty, and infinitely nuanced speech, full of jokes, puns, and ironies, became the linguistic home of the Jews, the bond that held a people together.

Here is the remarkable story of how this humble language took vigorous root in Eastern European shtetls and in the Jewish quarters of cities across Europe; how it achieved a rich literary flowering between the wars in Europe and America; how it was rejected by emancipated Jews; and how it fell victim to the Holocaust. And how, in yet another twist of destiny, Yiddish today is becoming the darling of academia. Yiddish is a history as story, a tale of flesh-and-blood people with manic humor, visionary courage, brilliant causes, and glorious flaws. It will delight everyone who cares about language, literature, and culture.

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Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
Once the mother tongue of 8 million people, Yiddish has been impoverished and marginalized around the globe. Award-winning journalist Miriam Weinstein charts the course -- and the potential -- of a language that continues to inspirit even strangers.
Publishers Weekly
"How did a language that cursed and crooned for a thousand years fade in the course of one little lifetime?" asks freelance journalist Weinstein. Her engaging, elegiac popular history fills a gap between more academic tomes and lexicography ? la Leo Rosten. She traces the language's roots in German lands and in Poland, then sketches Yiddish-drenched shtetl life, drawing on the writing of Israel Joshua Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer, before describing how Yiddish both influenced and was shaped by two late-19th-century movements, Bundism and Zionism. In the Soviet Union, Yiddish garnered its first recognition as an official language only to be constrained to Communist expression. Pre-Soviet Yiddish literature, therefore, was not to be found in schools. In Israel, Weinstein reflects sadly, the fervor for Hebrew led pioneers to reject Yiddish with contempt. Early 20th-century New York boasted a wide variety of Yiddish schools and radio stations, yet the urge to assimilate led Jews to "squander" their national treasure. After half the world's Yiddish speakers died in the Holocaust, Yiddish has survived mostly thanks to the Hasidim who emigrated to America and elsewhere and built large families. The language has made some recent gains in America thanks to the 1980s klezmer revival and the upstart National Yiddish Book Center but serves more as linguistic influence than common tongue, the author concludes. While not comprehensive, this evocative, informative and accessible book should perform solidly on the Jewish book circuit. 16 pages of photos. (Oct. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Freelance journalist Weinstein here makes the story of the Yiddish language accessible to the general reader. Complete with two time lines, a glossary, and a bibliography, her work outlines the rise and decline of the language that united a dispersed people. Especially effective are biographical sketches of influential individuals such as playwright Sholem Aleichem and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Weinstein presents these profiles as part of the language's development in various countries, including Poland, Russia, and the United States. Aspects of 20th-century history, such as the Holocaust, the revival of Hebrew, the popularity of klezmer (Yiddish) music, and the language's future, receive special attention. Complementing Weinstein's international view, Sol Steinmetz's Yiddish and English: The Story of Yiddish in America (Univ. of Alabama, 2001. 2d ed.) closely examines this language as spoken in the United States. Recommended for larger public libraries, academic libraries, and specialized collections. Marianne Orme, Des Plaines P.L., IL Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Filmmaker/journalist Weinstein's first book is an ambitious but disappointing treatise on the "nation" that existed only as a language. Although most of the world's Jews spoke Yiddish in the period before WWII, they were scattered across the globe. Growing out of medieval German, with elements drawn from Slavic languages and the holy tongue of Hebrew, Yiddish was a lingua franca for Ashkenazi Jews throughout Eastern Europe and Germany, gradually spreading to far-flung Jewish communities in the US and Australia. But history played a series of ugly tricks on Yiddish. The Nazis wiped out half of its speakers in the Holocaust, and Stalin crushed another large segment, but in some ways the worst damage was done by the comforts of the US, as assimilation drained Jewish-Americans of the need to speak a language all their own. This compelling story has been told piecemeal many times before, but seldom with a focus on the language. Regrettably, Weinstein lacks the understanding to tell it well. Her version of the Jews' millennia-long saga is grossly oversimplified and often romanticized in ways that betray a lack of familiarity with recent literature on either linguistics or history, particularly in her recounting of the birth of Hasidism. She frequently makes generalizations that lead to errors, describing Yiddish, for example, as "a conscious part of the identity of European Jews," which will come as a shock to Ladino speakers from Greece, Turkey, and Italy. And her prose is rife with irritating mannerisms, especially the gratingly coy humor and the frequent and distracting recourse to Yiddish proverbs to underline points. Though they exhibit the same flaws, chapters on developments in Russiaand the Soviet Union nonetheless make for compelling reading. Would that the rest of this study were so good. Max Weinreich's classic History of the Yiddish Language first appeared 21 years ago, so the time is definitely ripe for a cogent new interpretation. This isn't it. Author tour
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781586420277
  • Publisher: Steerforth Press
  • Publication date: 8/17/2001
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 304
  • Lexile: 1130L (what's this?)
  • Product dimensions: 5.75 (w) x 8.76 (h) x 1.21 (d)

Meet the Author

MIRIAM WEINSTEIN grew up in the Bronx following World War II, a time and place where Yiddish was standard fare. Once a documentary filmmaker, she is now a freelance journalist whose features have won several awards from the New England Press Association. She lives in Manchester, Massachusetts with her husband, and has two grown children. This is her first book.
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Read an Excerpt

MY PARENTS LOVED to travel. They were not rich people, but in the years after World War II they would leave our Bronx apartment and head off on vacations, first to Europe, and then little by little to almost every continent. They visited big famous cities and dusty crossroads towns. Often, they would return telling a variant of a familiar tale: "There we were, in this little shop in . . ." (fill in the blank: Dublin, Johannesburg, Tashkent). "I don't know; somehow I got the idea." (From what? A tilt of the head? A look in the eyes?) "So I says to him, 'Vus makhst?'" (what's doing). "And this guy who, two minutes before, wouldn't give us the time of day becomes all of a sudden our buddy, our friend. He invites us home, shows us around the whole neighborhood, a regular landsman" (fellow countryman).
For a thousand years, this was the standard Jewish story. Yiddish was the secret handshake, the golden key. It was the language that defined a world and a people. Yiddish means "Jewish." Its words were, simply, the sound of Jewish life.
Babies were born into rooms full of women crooning in Yiddish; corpses were washed and prepared to the sounds of Yiddish grief. For a people without a country, without a government, without protection of any dependable kind, language became a powerful glue. It connected European Jews to each other even as it separated them from their neighbors - people among whom they may have lived for hundreds of years. It also linked them to their past through their sacred language, Hebrew.
Because it was so easy for words and phrases from the Hebrew prayers they recited every day to slip into their ordinaryYiddish speech, their place in "Jewish time" was confirmed, from the beginning of the world until the coming of the Messiah and the End of Days. It allowed them to live outside Christian or secular history and keep their vision of peoplehood alive. In the meantime, when they wandered in the real, here-and-now world, it was their passport and amulet. It was their strength.
The tale my parents told on a dozen returns is hardly heard anymore. These days, unless your travels are circumscribed - retirement homes, Holocaust museums, Hasidic enclaves of Brooklyn or Jerusalem - you will not hear Yiddish in the shop or the street, the synagogue or the house. That is not to say that a few words of it aren't sprinkled through English, like raisins in rugelach. Politicians have chutzpah, tv personalities kibbitz, Americans of all ethnic backgrounds have learned to slap their hands on their hips and demand, singsong, "So what does that make me, chopped liver?" But as a living language, Yiddish barely qualifies. It is a speech system that is faltering, even on life support. (With one big exception: the ultra-Orthodox. Their astounding fecundity, history's latest surprise, may change the epilogue but does not alter the bulk of the tale.)
So how did it happen? How did a language that cursed and crooned for a thousand years fade in the course of one little lifetime? What could have happened to its self-contained world? (Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew would be the appropriate Yiddish proverb here.) And why was the tongue itself perhaps einstik, unique, in the history of languages? (Yes, I know that is an enormous claim.)
When my parents were born, in the early years of the twentieth century, something like eight million souls called Yiddish mame loshn, mother tongue. Their world was bursting with Yiddish schools offering competing political philosophies, newspapers on every side of every burning issue, plays that ranged from melodramas like Isaac Zolatorevsky's Money, Love, and Shame to significant dramatic works like Jacob Gordin's Jewish King Lear or Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance. It had journals of every stripe, thousands of book titles in print. Radio broadcasting and an international film industry developed as technologies grew.
By the time my parents died three-quarters of a century later, Yiddish books were being thrown out wholesale in trash cans and Dumpsters. New York's great newspaper the Forverts (Daily Forward), which had outlived competitor after competitor, was reduced to a weekly written by people who, in more commodious times, would never have been caught dead sharing the same page. Not only did my parents' grandchildren not know the Yiddish language, but even the Hebrew they learned in Hebrew school had been systematically cleansed of the Yiddish pronunciation that had been ubiquitous in my parents' youth, and in mine.
But the object of this book is not breast-beating for the good old days of yore, when there was singing every shabes, Sabbath, chicken soup in every pot. The object, as any self-respecting yid, Jew, would know, is to strengthen the golden chain of continuity.
To that end, I have written history-as-story, filling the tale with flesh-and-blood people with obsessive humor, visionary courage, brilliant desperate causes, and glorious flaws. As will immediately be obvious, I am a journalist, not a historian, linguist, or any kind of scholar. I did my research - meeting mavens, experts; working my way through lights-on-timers library stacks - as a yederer, an everyman.
What I soon learned was that no language has been so adored, so despised, so ostentatiously ignored. Aaron Lansky, the book rescuer who invented the midnight Dumpster run, estimates that out of thirty-five thousand different Yiddish titles that have been published, only 0.5 percent have been translated into English. We won't even go into the number of folk tunes, music hall ditties, and poignant poems of labor or love that are known only to the Yiddish-speaking few.
So this is a story that begs to be told. The last book that chronicled the Yiddish language was a four-volume history written in Yiddish during and after World War ii by the brilliant scholar Max Weinreich. Two volumes have been translated into English. They are heavy going. In the 1960s and 1970s Leo Rosten wrote marvelously funny books describing the way that Yiddish was used at the time, but they assumed some Yiddish or Jewish background or inclination.
This book requires nothing more than an open heart and a curious mind. Well, maybe also a certain flexibility with regard to spelling. Standardized Yiddish orthography was not even invented until 1936 and has been adopted, grudgingly, only in the last several years. Then there is the matter of standardized transliteration. (If you don't know what that means, don't worry, you'll learn.) Although I have tried to use it where possible, I have sometimes substituted more familiar versions, like the common rendition of Chanukah instead of the more correct khanike. I have tried to strike a middle ground between foreignness and flavor. Readers will learn how, for a language that has been roundly maligned and famously praised, even spelling proclaims a writer's political, religious, and cultural stance.
For me, this tale qualifies as a miracle. A language is born in shadow with the lowliest of aims - only for women, only for the untutored, only for ordinary, workaday use. Yet that very dailiness and lack of expectation allow it to grow. It expands, sweet and light as a New Year's honey cake, pulses with life for a thousand years. It links its people to their illustrious past. It has the world's best sense of humor, unable to resist the virtuoso joke even in the curse. (May you turn into a blintz, and may your enemy turn into a cat, and may he eat you up and choke on you, so we can be rid of you both.) It gets discovered by a generation of intellectuals and politicos. Time and again the highbrow thinks he will just use Yiddish to lure the uneducated masses to listen to him expound his brilliant ideas. And time and again it is he who does the listening and learning, in thrall to the language and to its folk.
Then, just when this poor no-account tongue goes into creative overdrive, winning a crumb of respect and even hope for a bit of glory, it all disappears. Holocaust, assimilation, executions, displacement, language police, and then, incredibly, stone silence. One brief moment of flame, a pintele yid, a spark of Jewishness, burns and then sputters. A few thousand folk songs, a few hundred ways of parsing the fine points of human behavior - shnuk, shlemiel, shlimazl - and those thirty-five thousand different books.
But even in dying, this most practical of tongues has a job to do: It allows Hebrew, the ancient, holy, pre-Yiddish tongue, to be reborn. Yiddish gives up its life for its parent/child. What could be more Jewish-motherish, more hartsik, caring, than that?
One staple Yiddish Hasidic tale concerns a poor bedraggled beggar who shows up in the snow of a cold Russian night while the family celebrates Chanukah warm and safe within. As the story unfolds, after the mendicant has come and gone, this shnorer turns out to have been, perhaps - it is never entirely clear - the Prophet Elijah, herald of Moshiach, the Messiah. Whatever he is, this ragged pauper, whether tattered or divine, has managed to bring at least the idea of the Beyond to this relentlessly commonplace earth.
The moral? Don't be so fast to dismiss the lowly. You never know who or what they truly are.
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Table of Contents

Timeline
Cast of Characters
A Note on Yiddish Spelling
Map of Yiddish Lands
Introduction: Talking Jewish 1
Pt. 1 Birth and Growth
Ch. 1 Long as the Jewish Exile 9
Ch. 2 Poland: Rest Here 25
Ch. 3 Shtetl: A Separate World 32
Ch. 4 Enlightenment and Hasidism: The Head and the Heart 42
Pt. 2 The Modern Era
Ch. 5 Eastern Europe: Opening the Gates 57
Ch. 6 The Road to Czernowitz: The Politics of Language 71
Ch. 7 Russia: Kissed by a Thief 84
Ch. 8 The Soviet Union: Marching and Singing to Birobidzhan 100
Ch. 9 Israel: Language Wars in the Holy Land 112
Ch. 10 America: The Golden Land 129
Ch. 11 Poland: Drinking in the World 146
Ch. 12 Eastern Europe: Language as History 160
Pt. 3 Annihilation
Ch. 13 Singing in the Face of Death 173
Pt. 4 Aftermath
Ch. 14 Europe: Life from the Ashes 191
Ch. 15 America: Golden Land, Goyish Land 202
Ch. 16 Russia: The Heartthrob Yiddish Poet 217
Ch. 17 Israel: A New Nation, a New Tongue 229
Pt. 5 Present and Future
Ch. 18 Europe and Israel: Bulletins from Now 241
Ch. 19 America: Preserving Tomorrow's Song 257
Glossary 275
Sources 279
Acknowledgments 291
Index 293
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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 28, 2001

    Amazingly Informative Book

    This book is easy to read, it taught me the history I've always wondered about while keeping me interested. The small 'yiddishisms' and stories, kept the book light and fun. I couldn't put it down! I have always been interested in Jewish studies but never studied it formally. This was a great introduction.

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