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Sunday Telegraph
27 February 2005


A Tongue that Many have Failed to Silence

Tom Payne reviews Words on Fire: the Unfinished Story of Yiddish by Dovid Katz

There's a Jewish joke about two children playing mummies and daddies in an empty house. They pretend to go shopping and feed a child, but don't know what to do next. Then the mischievous girl says: "Let's go upstairs into the bedroom, draw the curtains, turn off the light, hide under the covers - and talk in Yiddish."

It's easy to think of Yiddish as an abrasive language, whose words give English a kick in the kishkes. We borrow choice insults from it - nudnik, schlemiel, shmendrik, schmuck, shnorrer - that Dovid Katz describes as off-colour, fun words. But, as the joke suggests, Yiddish is also an intimate, heimish tongue, in which God can be tatenyu (dear daddy) and your grandparents are called bubbe and zeyde (may they live to be 120). And it's a tongue that many have tried to silence.

As Katz points out, it has been "subject to attack from within and without". When Eastern European Jews flocked to the emerging state of Israel, those who tried selling Yiddish newspapers had their kiosks firebombed. Printers of Yiddish received threatening letters. It was not the first time that Jews had sought to repress Yiddish. Early in the 19th century, "enlightened" German Jews headed east and tried to civilise their co-religionists, but ended up having to speak Yiddish to do it. Only then did they discover its charms.

One writer, Yehoyshue-Mordechai Lifschitz, depicted Yiddish as a seductive wife who says, "If you pamper me and caress me, you will work yourself into a sweat"; she is a woman who must lure her speakers back from a high-maintenance mistress, Hebrew. Yiddish words for Yiddish include vayber-taytsh (translation for women) and mama-loshn (mother tongue).

Hebrew was a biblical language that was intended for scholarly debate between men, and usually written down, rather than a language for everyday use; in a close parallel to Christian uses of Latin, religious authorities objected to the less learned studying the Torah and the Talmud in Yiddish. So women began to read tales of princesses and undesirable suitors instead, stories that had been adapted from Christian romances. (One heroine wards off a knight by hiding a rotten chicken under her arm.) Only then did the rabbis conclude that biblical texts in Yiddish might be acceptable.

Katz's narrative starts by tracing the pre-Hebrew roots of Yiddish words, and shows how Hebrew fused with Aramaic before that hybrid in turn fused with medieval German. Then, as Jews fled their German-speaking persecutors and headed east, Slavonic versions of the language appeared. Throughout all this, debates would rage and recur in different forms: how should Hebrew be translated into Yiddish, who should translate it, what was fitting reading matter, and should the Hebrew script include vowels or not? The resulting story is not only the clearest account of the language I've come across, but also the most readable history of European Jewry I've seen.

By the 20th century, Yiddish had come away from the hearth. It became a language of open satire, of poetry that transcended Germanic doggerel, and of novels that could compete with the best that other cultures could offer.

Then the vast majority of European Jews were murdered. This has led many to think that Yiddish is dead. It explains why many Israelis - even those who had grown up with Yiddish - despised it. They thought it was the language of the ghetto, and of placid victims.

But there are academics who sustain it, and Dovid Katz has a hope that, if their students work at it hard enough, Yiddish will have a future. He assures us that whatever the future of Yiddish in universities, the language will be safe: it is spoken in Brooklyn, in Hackney, in Antwerp, in the parts of Jerusalem where men wear ringlets and women cover their hair. And since Hasidic couples have on average six or seven children, this community is growing rapidly. Yiddish books continue to appear, for a large, distinct readership; and the spoken language flourishes in homes where few of us can eavesdrop.

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