Yiddish: The Biography of a Language

This first-ever biography on Yiddish is “a charming and highly readable history of the language” that “recreates the sound of a world . . . gone forever” (The Washington Post)

For a thousand years Yiddish, was the glue that held a people together. Through the intimacies of daily use, it linked European Jews with their heroic past, their spiritual universe, their increasingly far-flung relations. In it they produced one of the world’s most richly human cultures.

Impoverished and disenfranchi...