Tikkun
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish,
by Dovid Katz.
Reviewed by Mark Shechner
Visit the websites of some of the Judaic Studies programs in America, and you'll
see a distinct family resemblance. They're invariably strong in Bible studies,
Hebrew language, Israeli history and culture, Holocaust studies, and anti-Semitism.
There will be local variations: courses in Kabbalah at one program, medieval
philosophy and literature at another, and a remarkable amount about women everywhere:
"Esthers of the Diaspora," as one course description calls them. Yet
in virtually all these programs, you'll find the same gaping holes: centuries
of Jewish life left untouched or patched in thinly, as though the Jewish people
popped in and out of history at whim, like the magical creatures that float
blissfully above the miseries of the shtetl in Chagall paintings. Predictably,
Judaic Studies programs are weak in diaspora studies, most especially in the
history, culture, and language of the Yiddish-speaking, Ashkenazic civilization
that flourished in the heart of Europe for roughly a thousand years, until it
was destroyed by the Nazis in the early 1940s. Considering that only sixty-five
years ago Yiddish was the language of most of the world's Jews, remarkably little
trace of what Irving Howe called "the world of our fathers" can be
found in organized-that is, university-based-Jewish learning.
It is in an effort to help us overcome this amnesia that Yiddish historian Dovid Katz has written Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish. While Katz himself is under no illusion that such entrenched institutions as Judaic Studies can be significantly reformed, he has dedicated his work nonetheless to the correction of the historical record and the restoration of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit-what he calls the "vanquished view"-to its rightful place as a defining force in the creation of Jewish civilization and consciousness. "PC Judaism," as Katz refers to it, "today has erected its own mightily financed hallways of power and glory: rich and influential organizations, great universities, and prestigious publications. The 'vanquished' view is largely relegated to Internet chat rooms, old folks clubs, community centers, and dedicated individualists who are regarded as eccentric at best." If history is the rhetoric of the winners, then Judaic Studies is a winner's curriculum, lavishly furnished with faculty, students, administrators, and endowments.
It may even be symptomatic of this situation, an exiling of the exile, that Katz is currently professor of Yiddish and director of the Yiddish program at the University of Vilnius in Lithuania. Brooklyn-born and the son of Yiddish poet Menke Katz, Dovid Katz previously taught at Oxford and Yale universities and is presently making his academic home in Vilnius. Could this be because his scholarship and cultural politics find little support in England, America, and Israel or because Katz favors Vilnius for historical reasons: as the former center of Jewish learning in the Ashkenazic Diaspora and the original home of Yivo, the Jewish Scientific Institute, founded there in 1925? I can't say. But it is certain that the story told in Katz's book and his present place of study and teaching are of a piece, and it is a remarkable story after all.
Words on Fire, a labor of deep erudition, possesses all the tension and drama of a novel. Following the language of the Eastern European "Ostjuden" from its origins in the Rhineland about a thousand years ago-and early dates are most uncertain-to its catastrophic disappearance during the Holocaust, Katz gives us a turbulent story, with cloudy beginnings, a bloody and contentious middle, and a catastrophic finale. Its theme is taken from the 1908 Yiddish conference in Chernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine), where Matisyóhu Mieses (Mates Mizesh) admonished that should Yiddish die, "along with its language, our people will also lose its unique content, its soul, it will lose its living spiritual world of satire and emotion, the flashes of wit, the hues of texture of spirit... that are one of a kind, homey, that the Diaspora has given it for all time and with cosmic vigor."
Though Words on Fire is a protest in the spirit of Mieses' admonition, the broader story is a meticulously plotted linguography of Yiddish, as revealed by its surviving documents, and the folk epic of an embattled language and its champions. Yiddish had its origins in the Rhineland cities where Jews had settled around a thousand years ago. It was a "fusion" language that brought together elements of the surrounding German with the Semitic languages that the Jews had bought with them from the Middle East (Aramaic and Hebrew): "The Yiddish language is only a thousand or so years old. But many of its elements-words, turns of phrase, idioms, embedded historical references-are much older. They fed into Yiddish in a continuous language chain that antedated ancient Hebrew, progressed through Hebrew and then Jewish Aramaic, and ended up in today's Yiddish-without interruption, seam, or discontinuity, despite an ever-shifting geography and changing historical circumstances." This linguistic confrontation of Semitic with the wholly different German produced Yiddish, a "big bang," as Katz calls it. To the frequent charge that Yiddish was a "jargon" and a grab bag of linguistic odds and ends, Katz demurs that all languages in their origins were "fusion" languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and English. The myth of a pure language is a sentimental reconstruction at best, a cruel delusion at worst. It was the improvisational genius of medieval Jews to blend together disparate elements: Semitic, Germanic, and Slavic in the main, which gave their language its unique character-its loose-jointed zest, its ability to master experience in so many different registers.
Amending Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich's formula about the internal bilingualism of the Ashkenazim, Katz argues that the Jews were internally trilingual (quite apart from what they knew of their surrounding host languages) and that they spoke Yiddish on the street but were conversant (if they were men) with Hebrew and Aramaic through study and prayer. Aramaic was the language of the Babylonian Talmud, and modern Jews may utter it even now unawares in reciting the mourner's kaddish. Because Aramaic and Hebrew formed a "sacred canopy" (Weinreich's phrase) over the world of Yiddish speech, Yiddish had to fight for its legitimacy as a written language against the charge of being a language for illiterates and women. Was there behind this resistance a fear that women might start writing? I find it hard not to think so.
Much of the drama of Words on Fire lies in its account of the embattled efforts of Yiddish to gain acceptance in print, starting with a page in the Passover Haggadah of Gershom ben Solomon Cohen in 1526, followed in 1541 by the Yiddish poetic masterpiece, the romance Bovo of Antona. This latter was published by Christian publisher Paul Fagius, establishing a pattern of Christian publishers being freer than Jews to publish in Yiddish. Throughout the late sixteenth century, Yiddish books would appear in increasing frequency, from the Tseneréne (the Yiddish Women's Bible) in the 1590s to the "lifestyle encyclopedia" The Burning Mirror of about the same time. In an outburst of Yiddish publication, there appeared in 1602 "the stories about mystical wonders said to have been worked by... Samuel ben Kalonymus of Speyer and his son Judah of Regensburg." Forming the backbone of Yiddish folklore and storytelling for hundreds of years, they were "codified in a text best known in the age of printing from the 1602 Book of Stories (Máyse bukh)." None of this took place without bitter resistance from traditionalists, who saw in Yiddish publishing a contaminant to scholarship and a coarsening of intellectual life.
Most of us are likely to think of the origins of Yiddish literature as the secular outburst of the late nineteenth century. Katz, however, locates the great breakthrough of Yiddish in "the Yiddish-Kabbalah partnership" of the eighteenth century and the Hasidic revival, much of whose doctrinal writing was in Yiddish. With the emergence of Hasidism in Ukraine, "Yiddish was ready to join Hebrew and Aramaic as the third great language of Jewish spiritual life." Particularly influential was the publication in Yiddish of Praises of the Baal Shem Tov, "the most sacred book of Hasidism." But it was the second Hasidic Yiddish book that appeared around 1815 that remains the first actual literary masterpiece of East European Yiddish, perhaps of East European Jewry altogether. It is the book of original stories by Hasidic master Nachman Bratslaver, who, though a master of Hebrew and Aramaic, elected to make his stories available in Yiddish.
But with the Yiddish-Hasidic revival came renewed efforts to crush Yiddish, including campaigns on the part of the maskilim, or enlighteners, of Germany, who regarded Yiddish as "a subhuman, degrading jargon." In the words of David Friedlander, a disciple of Moses Mendelssohn, "The Judeo-German that is common among us has no rules, it is vulgar, and it is an incomprehensible language outside of our own circles. It must be eradicated completely ...." Shocking words, are they not? To the maskilim, it was a double curse for Yiddish to be not only a jargon but associated with a spiritual movement that was casting the Jews back in time and separating them, in dress, habits, religion, and language itself even farther from the populations of their host countries. They could not imagine Jewish modernization so long as the Jews were shackled to an uncouth and ungainly máme-loshn, or mother tongue, so ignorant of science, so innocent of art, so impenetrable to enlightenment. But Yiddish had its own self-generated route to modernization that was little touched by the Haskalah, and the fateful encounter of Yiddish culture with modernity would take place not in the salons of Berlin but the cafés of Warsaw and Vilna and later New York.
It came in the secular outburst of the late nineteenth century, in the writing of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz, who fashioned the máme-loshn into a remarkably resilient instrument of imaginative fiction, in which the voices of the Ostjuden found outlets in magazines and books with increasingly cosmopolitan audiences. It was in this writing that the Jews realized themselves as people worthy of being literary subjects entirely as they were, neither idealized, as in devotional literature, nor degraded, as in maskilic polemics. Says Katz, "What happened is sometimes considered one of the great wonders in the history of languages. In the absence of legal or educational authority, spread over a number of countries belonging to two separate empires, and with a good percentage of the native Jewish intelligentsia advocating Hebrew or Russian or German as the language of literary culture, written Yiddish nevertheless developed a standard form capable of rapid growth to the level of the great languages of Europe."
Cut to Palestine, where the Zionist settlement, the Yishuv, was even more bitter toward Yiddish than the German-Jewish maskilim and the Mendelssohn circle had ever been. The stakes in the early days of the Yishuv was not simply the choice of a language but that of a national identity; Zionists believed the only course was to revive Hebrew and eradicate Yiddish entirely. The new Israeli had to be the opposite of the old Jew; the Jewish image, to the Jew himself and to the world, had to be transformed irrevocably. Hebrew scholar Joseph Klausner wrote, "The new sanctity of language has to be as grave in our eyes as the old sanctity of religion... And whoever knows Hebrew but speaks a foreign language shall be in our eyes as an 'apostate for spite,' as a worshiper of idols, as a public desecrator of the Sabbath." The urgency behind this message spilled over into violence, as printers who dared set type of a Yiddish-language magazine or newspaper in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv were threatened with firebombing. In some of the more disturbing pages of his book, Katz outlines the tactics of threat and intimidation used by the early Zionist Hebraists to keep Yiddish at bay, as if at any point it posed a genuine threat to the victory of Hebrew as the language of the new Jewish settlement and eventual state.
The fate of Yiddish in Europe, in Israel, in America is all too well-known to need repeating: only in certain Hasidic communities does it remain a spoken daily language. Otherwise it is increasingly an academic subject for specialists and antiquarians-wherever, that is, you can find them. Katz observes that "the American Jewish establishment, working closely with the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, rushed ahead with a program to 'Israelicize' American Jewish culture too. Synagogue after synagogue and school after school, whose members and pupils were often almost all of East European heritage, switched to Israeli ("Sephardic") Hebrew, labeling the Ashkenazic rending of Hebrew and Aramaic 'wrong,' 'ghetto-drone,' or 'bastardized.'" The exclusion of Yiddish was virtually axiomatic.
As a history and a reminder of the amnesia that undergirds contemporary Jewish education, Words on Fire strikes me as a necessary and magisterial study. It is, however, just a first step. Because Katz is a textual scholar and a classically trained philologist, he has little to say about the street and home life of Yiddish: its passion, its domestic intimacy and commercial wisdom, its vernacular robustness, its fertile comedy, its genius for insult, for melody, for mimicry and parody, and what Mieses called "its living spiritual world of satire and emotion, the flashes of wit, the hues of texture of spirit." That too needs to be taken up and dusted off and restored to living memory and to memory's handmaiden, the curriculum of Jewish learning.
Mark Shechner's most recent book is Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading
Philip Roth, from University of Wisconsin Press. He is also co-editor with Jean
K. Carney of the essays of Mark Krupnick, Jewish Writing and The Deep Places
of the Imagination, forthcoming from Wisconsin.