Jewish Currents
May–June 2005
A Biography of Yiddish
by Moti Rieber
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, by Dovid Katz. Basic Books, 2004, 446 pages.
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million
Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky. Algonquin Books, 2004, 328 pages.
I hardly know a word of Yiddish. I am an observant, non-Orthodox American Jew in my early forties, deeply committed to Jewish life and reasonably knowledgeable about Jewish heritage. Yet all the Yiddish I know I learned from Leo Rosten or Michael Myers' "Linda Richman" character on Saturday Night Live. In this, of course, I am like nearly every Jew who grew up in America in the last three or four decades. I never heard Yiddish in my home, it wasn't taught to me in Hebrew School (of course!), and it was never impressed upon me as being anything but a quaint, sentimental inheritance that might be missed but was just as well left behind.
Purely from a sociological perspective, it's astonishing that a language that was at the very core of identity for millions of Jews over hundreds of years could have fallen into such desuetude in such a short amount of time. Intellectually, I understand the reasons for it – assimilation, Zionism and Shoah – but understanding does not alter the terrible loss that recent generations have suffered having no access to the depths and strengths of Yiddish culture except via those works available in translation. For a tradition that was so based on study, argument, and literacy, this lack has made us into strangers in our own tradition - connected on the level of emotion, perhaps, but not intellectually or, dare I say, spiritually. Still, I haven't attempted to learn Yiddish because, frankly, I spend what little brain-power I have for languages on Hebrew.
So I explore this ethnic sense-memory vicariously by reading books about Yiddish and Yiddishists. Two new books join the burgeoning bookshelf of English-language books about Yiddish and those who seek to study and protect it. The first, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish by linguist Dovid Katz, is a history of the Yiddish language, from its origins in medieval Ashkenaz (Germany), to its greatest literary flowering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to its collapse and, as the subtitle implies, into its future. Katz has written a biography of a language, and his book is literate, easy to read and understand, informative and, with a couple of exceptions, remarkably dispassionate for someone who has obviously dedicated his life to this cause.
As any knowledgeable person would, Katz treats Yiddish not as a "jargon" (the derisive term used by its enemies, maskil and Zionist, during the 19th and early 20th centuries) but as a fully authentic language, a link in the "linguistic chain" of the Jewish people. In Katz's view, linguistic continuity has been as important to the Jewish people as ethnic (which he calls "genetic") and religious continuity; this does not mean that a single language continues throughout history, or that a new language completely supplants a former, but rather that "… each new Jewish language is created by combining elements of the previous inherited language with the surrounding non-Jewish language. Each of the past Jewish languages has thereby been fated not to die but to morph into a vital component of its success and live on in a new incarnation."
Thus, Yiddish was the product of the contact between the classical Jewish languages of Hebrew and Aramaic and the dialects of medieval German, forming, in what Katz calls a linguistic "big bang," an ur-Yiddish that served as the basis for all permutations of the language that came after. The three Jewish languages continued to coexist throughout the period of Jewish settlement in Europe, with Hebrew preserved as the language of prayer and simple study, Aramaic as the language of elite study, and Yiddish as the language of the street and of literacy for those who were not well educated - particularly women.
In an overview that is deep but not overlong (the entire book clocks in just under 400 pages), Katz traces the history of Yiddish literary productivity. The earliest stage was translation of medieval European legends of romance and chivalry into Yiddish, followed by a reaction by pietists and their attempts to turn Yiddish readers' interests to more "worthwhile" pursuits, culminating in the famous Yiddish translation of Biblical stories and psalms known as the Tzene Rene. In those days, Yiddish was seen as a "women's language," since it was presumed that men would be educated enough to learn in the more elite languages.
Soon it became clear that "even men" were reading significantly in Yiddish, and as publishing technology developed and lowered in cost, creative writers, political activists and those dedicated to "uplifting the race" (primarily, ironically, by ridding it of Yiddish) were eventually forced to realize that the best way to communicate with the Jewish masses was through the language that those masses could actually read and understand. The ambivalence with which many of these intellectuals treated this conundrum is one of the most remarkable parts of Yiddish's story. Even some of the writers whom we today consider the core of Yiddish literary achievement, such as Mendele Mokher Sforim (1836-1917) and Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), initially thought of Yiddish as a lesser "jargon" that they used only at the risk of their literary reputations, which would be established, they believed, by the more highbrow endeavor of writing in Hebrew.
Katz's book is a whirlwind of Yiddish literary achievement, from the great names such as I. L. Peretz (1852-1915), the "third master," after Mendele and Sholem Aleichem, and the scholars Ber Borochov (1881-1917) and Max Weinreich (1894-1969), to lesser known (today) names such as the pedagogue and Bundist revolutionary Esther (Esther Frumkin, born Malke Lifschitz, 1880-1943), and the poet and intellectual defender of Yiddish, Matisyohu Mieses (1885-1945). Katz also gives credit to those in the Orthodox world who contributed to the growth and acceptance of Yiddish, particularly the Khasam Soyfer (Moyshe Shreiber, 1762-1839), who is considered the founder of ultra-Orthodoxy. Shreiber believed Eastern European traditional Jewish life to have attained a level of spiritual perfection, and part of that perfection was the use of Yiddish, which he elevated virtually to a religious imperative. Such a figure is usually given unfairly short shrift in (secular, leftist) treatments of Yiddish language and literature, and Katz goes a long way toward remedying that slight.
Katz also takes pains to avoid what Salo Baron called the "lachrymose" interpretation of Jewish history, meaning that he doesn't look at Yiddish culture through the prism of its end. This helps him to assess the achievements of Yiddish on their own terms and in their own contexts. On the other hand, some oddities result from this approach, such as giving the dates of the Soviet Yiddish writer Peretz Markish's life (1895-1952) without indicating that his death date was unnaturally advanced, shall we say, by Stalin.
Katz's treatment of the Holocaust lasts but a couple of pages and prominently features a defense of the essential pacifism of the Jewish tradition, which led to many victims being more concerned with the sanctification of God's name - [the saying of shema yisroel - than with any idea of fighting back. To Katz, pacifism is one of the greatest measures of the essential holiness of the Ashkenazi way of life, despite the Israelis' and others' attempts to make it a mark of shame - attempts that only further victimize the martyrs.
This view is in keeping with Katz's somewhat troubled attitude toward Zionism generally and the resuscitation of Hebrew in particular. Although he takes pains to say that a respectful assessment of Yiddish would not in any way compromise the commitment of Jews either to the state of Israel or to the Hebrew language, in fact his attitude toward modern Hebrew is rather dismissive. He considers it an invention- a successful one, to be sure, but not as authentic an expression of the Jewish "linguistic chain" as Yiddish. To some degree this mirrors the discussion (a polite word for it) that took place in the early part of the 20th century between acolytes of the two languages; in the end, history decided the question, but Katz represents the "losing side," and his attitude toward modern Hebrew is no doubt colored by his feelings about earlier Zionist anti-Yiddishism.
The other area where Katz lets his emotion come through is in his discussions of America. He points out that whereas Hebrew language instruction is today a key element of virtually all supplemental and day school education, there is not a single Yiddish day school in the whole country. The fact that the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in America chose to privilege the linguistic invention of Palestinian settlers over the authentic expression of their own culture and history drives Katz a little crazy. I was reminded of his treatment of the issue when, sometime after reading the book, my mother, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, told me she was going to take a basic Hebrew class "to get closer to (her) roots." Of course, Yiddish is her roots, but the fact that she would say this speaks to the complete victory of Hebrew, even in a land outside of the main arena of Yiddish versus Hebrew contention.
Aside from the "linguistic chain," the second of Katz's intriguing metaphors is that traditional Judaism serves as the trunk of a tree, from which every so often a period of great secular expression flowers, before falling off and leaving us, once again, with the original tree - in today's parlance, an Orthodox tree. To Katz, this is what happened with Yiddish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The fact that the secular flowering did not so much fall off as get cut off by the middle of the 20th century sped up the process but did not change its essential nature.
This is important when we consider Katz's subtitle. If the story of Yiddish is "unfinished," then who is to continue it? Certainly not a couple of dozen doctoral students learning Yiddish in their twenties. The only large-scale community that speaks Yiddish as an intrinsic part of its daily life and culture is the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in America and Israel. To say this is ironic is an understatement, for if Yiddish was the language of women, of secular expression, of the labor union, of the revolution - well, you couldn't find a population less sympathetic to any of those things than the people who are actually keeping Yiddish alive as a language today. To his credit, Katz acknowledges this community for their contribution, particularly for the scope and quality of their Yiddish-language publishing. On the other hand, the best he (or any of us, I suppose) can hope for is that in a couple of hundred years another secular flower will blossom from this unsympathetic tree. It's not a promising prospect, granted, but it's all that Yiddish has.
One of those who learned Yiddish in their twenties was Aaron Lansky, founder of the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. His memoir, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, is an account of his exploits.
During his college years, Lansky was shocked to discover that as Yiddish speakers aged and moved to nursing homes or died, their extensive libraries of Yiddish books would either be left rotting in someone's basement or tossed into a Dumpster. Lansky and his friends started going around in a truck to collect some of these books. He later farmed the work out to a group of zamlers (collectors, borrowed from a similar term used in building the original collection at the Vilna YIVO in the 1920s). Over the course of twenty years or so, Lansky's tireless labors built the Yiddish Book Center as a major Jewish nonprofit organization with an impressive building, a staff, an endowment, summer programs and internships, and - most remarkable of all – the ability to instantly make available, through digitization, virtually any Yiddish book that has ever been published. As Lansky points out, this ability means that Yiddish has gone from a language with almost no publishing to being likely the most published language in the world.
Lansky's memoir is a fairly quick read, a collection of anecdotes about the people he's met and the Ashkenazi cooking he's had inflicted on him (the book could be called Eighty-Year-Olds I Have Eaten Kugel With). Of course, he spends the most loving effort on friends and supporters who have had the deepest connection to him, and he does us a service by giving them this modicum of fame and credit.
He tells us in a personal tone about the extensive emphasis that secular, Yiddish-speaking Jews placed on literature, art, personal growth and learning. Working-class Jews would join book groups, and the pride of every home, union hall and cooperative association was the library - which, many years later, Lansky was to rescue.
Although his book is by nature more restricted in its breadth and far more anecdotal than Katz's, it's interesting to examine areas where they intersect. The politics in Katz's book is of the large-scale, Yiddish-vs.-Hebrew variety, while Lansky puts into print rather more petty account-taking - reporting, for example, about the sniffing of self proclaimed more "authentic" Yiddishists against Leo Rosten. (Lansky has come up against this Yiddishist perfectionism a couple of times in his own career as well.) Katz, by contrast, sees Rosten as a kind of outreach worker for Yiddish, calls his books "delightful" and recognizes that they might have inspired some of those younger Yiddish doctoral students to deepen their involvement with the language.
The two books also noticeably differ in their treatment of Orthodox Jews. I've already mentioned that Katz gives the Orthodox, from the Khasam Soyfer to tomorrow's haredi schoolchildren, a lot of credit for developing Yiddish and keeping it going. His position comes close to a kind of Yiddish essentialism that holds the fact that the language continues to exist to be more important than the fact that the values it was purported to represent are held in disdain by most of the people speaking it now. Lansky, on the other hand, has nothing nice to say about the ultra-Orthodox with whom he has come into contact; they consider him an apikoyres (ignoramus) at best, don't help him load the trucks, and are guilty of other such misdemeanors. The one practicing Jew he is sympathetic to, one of his favorite zamlers, gets the "he was Orthodox, but a nice guy anyway" treatment. Lansky doesn't deal at all with the fact that it is the ultra-Orthodox who are keeping Yiddish alive as a language. If Katz is living the Hebrew-vs.-Yiddish debate, Lansky is living the secular-vs.-religious one and can't bring himself to see anything of value in the "other side."
Both of these books, particularly Katz's, are recommended for those who deepen
their knowledge of this so-important aspect of Jewish heritage, and who, sadly,
need to fulfill their Yiddishism vicariously.
Moti Rieber is a writer and editor and serves as rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom, a Reconstructionist community in Naperville, Illinois.