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Reform Judaism online
Summer 2007

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish by Dovid Katz
(Basic Books, 432 pp., paperback $17.95)

“The genesis of Yiddish is a key event in Jewish history that gave rise to a new European culture,”writes Dovid Katz, professor of Yiddish at Oxford, Yale, and currently Vilnius University in Lithuania. For Katz, “language is at the heart of a distinct living civilization,”and in this survey, he covers the full sweep of cultural creativity in Yiddish, from its religious core to its “secular outbursts.”

The history of Yiddish was always fraught with controversy. Rabbis in the Middle Ages tried to discourage the writing of books in Yiddish, fearing that men would abandon learning directly from the Bible and Talmud-in Hebrew and Aramaic. Yiddish books were deemed appropriate only "for women and unlearned men." Yet Yiddish was the vernacular of all the people-men and women-and after the invention of the printing press, publishers were quick to seize on the potential market for Yiddish books. Only then did the rabbinic establishment revise its stance, considering it better "for women" to read religious books in Yiddish than translations of secular epics and romances. From these beginnings, Katz traces the evolution of Yiddish publishing, from classics (and bestsellers) like the Tsenerene (the Yiddish Women’s Bible) and Mayse bukh (a midrash anthology), to the Hasidic collections Praises of the Baal Shem Tov and Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, to the birth of a world-class European literature with Mendele Moykher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem.

Unlike other popular books on Yiddish–based on nostalgic idealizations of shtetl life or collections of jokes and curses—this masterful text by a master linguist presents a cohesive intellectual history of Ashkenazic Jews through the story of the Yiddish language.

Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.

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