Jewish Renaissance
July 2005
WORDS ON FIRE. THE UNFINISHED STORY OF YIDDISH
DOVID KATZ
Basic Books 2004, hb, 436 pp, $47.95
YIDDISH CIVILISATION. THE RISE AND FALL OF A FORGOTTEN NATION
PAUL KRIWACZEK
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2005, hb, 347 pp, £25
Reviewed by Barry Davis
Dovid Katz's book is the result of a lifelong passion for Yiddish and is a welcome
contribution to Yiddish studies. He seeks to place Yiddish within the wider
historical context, but is most effective when dealing with issues of language
per se. This includes his ideas on the origins of Yiddish and the character
of the 'common denominator Yiddish' of early publications. He also analyses
the different writing styles of New York Yiddish newspapers as well as the nuanced
interplay between Hebraic, Aramaic, Germanic and Slavic elements, and between
religious and secular meanings. His examination of the language of Sholem Aleichem
is both instructive and highly entertaining.
He provides compelling biographical sketches of leading philologists of Yiddish, including the Zionist Ber Borochov and the energetic Max Weinreich, the key figure in Yivo (The Yiddish Research Institute) both in Wilno (Vilnius) and later New York.
There is a compendium-like quality to the book, so that very little of what one would like to know about Yiddish is left out.
Katz offers us a dialectical view of Ashkenazi history, whereby recurring revolts against traditional religious authority are absorbed into the system. Yiddish has always been represented in this revolt, frequently expressing popular feeling. Chasidism was the last great religious revolt, to be followed by the 'Great Secular Outburst' of the 19th century that is only now coming to its end.
This outburst produced an extraordinarily creative period of Yiddish literature, both dynamic and confident. Despite the divorce from its religious roots, this Yiddish culture would still have been able to flourish on Eastern European soil, but for the Holocaust, because there Yiddish was the 'natural' language of the Jews and the processes of assimilation were inhibited, unlike in the United States.
He asserts that while secularism will continue, tradition will reassert itself in Yiddish and the future of the language will be amongst the ultra-orthodox. What is novel here is Katz's exploration of the role of these religious Jews in building up the positive role of Yiddish from the early 19th century. He sees the action of Eliezer Shapira, the Munkatsher Rebbe in 1920, in forbidding the speaking of languages other than Yiddish for God-fearing Jews as decisive. Though he talks of the hatred of Yiddish by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) and from lovers of Hebrew in the 19th century, he reserves his harshest words for the militant tactics of 'defenders' of Hebrew in Mandate Palestine, who exaggerated the threat from Yiddish. This was carried over in the antagonism of the new Jewish state. But, says Katz, they were arguing against something within themselves, for Modern Hebrew was a language 'recast' from the framework of Yiddish, which represents an organic linguistic continuity from post-Talmudic times.
Today, though the Yiddishists can connect with the great literary traditions and feel that their Yiddish is correct, the language of many of the younger ones strikes Katz as arid in comparison with the rich colloquial and natural Yiddish of the Chasidim. Clearly a critical mass is required for the sturdy development of any language, and it is unlikely that anything similar to the impressive Yiddish literary and cultural productivity of the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be matched. Yet, as Katz himself points out, the work of Yitskhok Niborski and the Medem Library in Paris shows how much can be contributed to the development of Yiddish from a relatively small base of Yiddish speakers.
Katz himself has played a key role in the growth of the academic study of Yiddish and in interest in it amongst young people, particularly with the courses he founded in Oxford and in Vilnius. Despite a difficult past, the study of the language is not in peril. Katz does, however, suggest that the Yiddish writers of the future will emerge from the religious background, as they did in the earlier period.
Although Paul Kriwaczek's book is entitled the rise and fall of Yiddish civilization, it is more a general history of Ashkenazi Jewry, the product of prodigious reading in many languages, and as such is a capable introduction. There are observations on his family fleeing from post-Anschluss Austria, his own youth in London and his many European travels, where he describes what remains of Jewish life (or as he might say 'Yiddish Civilization').
Kriwaczek criticises the 'lachrymose' view of Jewish history, but his narrative fits into it very well, as a tale of persecution and dispersion and final tragedy. He claims that the story of Yiddish as a European civilisation was finished with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the subsequent pogroms. But, few would dispute, especially Dovid Katz, that Yiddish prospered in Eastern Europe until the Holocaust.
Interestingly, both make use of a major geographical divide. For Kriwaczek it is between Central and Eastern Europe, the intellectual and progressive versus the emotional and backward. For Katz it is the north-south divide within Jewish Eastern Europe, the cold logical intellectual and poorer north – the Litvaks – versus the warm obscurantist and richer South, the Galitsyaner (the Poles, the Ukranians and the Romanians).
Kriwaczek is better on the European background, than is Katz, whether of the Crusades or the Reformation or the growth of the state and its impact on nationalism. His assessments are more sophisticated, though hardly novel. There are, perhaps, too many asides on topics not directly relevant to the main theme, but the book conveys the author's enthusiasm and bears his very individual mark.