Yiddish: A Nation of Words

by Miriam Weinstein

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345447302
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/27/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1130L (what's this?)

About 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. Her other books include The Surprising Power of Family Meals, also available from Steerforth Press.

Read an Excerpt

Copyright 2002 by Miriam Weinstein

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

[A] charming and highly readable history of the language . . . Weinstein succeeds in her efforts to recreate the sound of a world that is gone forever.”
—The Washington Post


“[YIDDISH: A NATION OF WORDS] READS LIKE A FOLKTALE PEPPERED WITH PASSIONATE CHARACTERS.”
—The Boston Globe


“Almost everyone knows a little [Yiddish], a word or two, a joke perhaps, but what do they really know of the history, the tragedies, and bitter controversies that characterized a language now on the U.N.’s endangered list, but once spoken by eleven million people. . . . Part of the problem has been the lack of a serious, yet accessible book to fill the gap between glib entertainments. . . . Weinstein’s [book] aims to do that and her success . . . is substantial.”
—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

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.

bn.com

"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.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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

Kirkus Reviews