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Words On Fire
by Dovid Katz

Published by Basic Books
Format: Hardcover, 434 pages
ISBN: 0465037283

Dovid Katz is an American-born linguistics professor and Yiddish expert who has made an ongoing project of leading expeditions to discover and record the remaining native Yiddish speakers in East European towns. Based on thirty years of original research, Words on Fire traces the origins of the Yiddish language to the Europe of a thousand years ago, and shows how those origins are themselves an uninterrupted and living continuation of the previous three thousand years of Jewish history and culture in the Near East. Thanks to what Katz calls a "linguistic Big Bang," Yiddish appeared as a fully-formed language fairly suddenly in medieval Europe around the year 1000. Katz examines the development of the new civilization, Ashkenaz, that sprang up in Central Europe around this time, as well as the relationships between Yiddish and the other two Jewish languages of the same society: Hebrew and Aramaic. The book is structured almost as a biography, as it traces the steps of a language identified with women and uneducated men from medieval times onward, and how efforts to raise its profile and prestige were often met by opposition from the powers that be. Katz traces the development of literary Yiddish from the late fourteenth century onward, particularly as literature for and by Jewish women. But it was in the wake of secularizing and modernizing movements of the 19th century that Yiddish rose spectacularly in a few short years from a mass folk language to the language of sophisticated modern fiction, theater, poetry, newspapers and scholarship.
Katz makes the somewhat contrarian claim that Yiddish represents a high point in Jewish civilization. Although the thriving secular Yiddish culture is in deep crisis today, Katz takes issue with those who proclaim it a dead language, and claims that well-meaning attempts to revive it artificially through college classes are significant but do not constitute a basis for serious continuity of the sophisticated literary language. He argues that the high birth rate and stunning cultural loyalty of Hasidic Yiddish speakers and the resurgence of its use-including a rapidly expanding new literature-among traditionally religious Jewish communities ensure that Yiddish will be a thriving language for generations to come.

Biography

Dovid Katz is one of the world's foremost academics in the field of Yiddish studies. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he is the son of the late Yiddish poet Menke Katz, and as a high school student, founded a Yiddish-English student journal. He has a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of London. He taught at Oxford for 18 years-where he established the university's Yiddish program-as well as at Yale. He is currently professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University and director of research at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001-2002. He divides his time between Lithuania and the hills of North Wales.

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