MOMENT MAGAZINE
February 2005
Words on Fire:
The Unfinished Story of Yiddish
by Dara Horn
Those of us who are students and teachers of Yiddish are unfortunately accustomed
to popular books that purport to tell "the story of Yiddish"-and inevitably
end up adding nothing but more grist for the mills of nostalgia, stereotypes,
and kitsch. Most of the time, the reader only needs to turn a few pages before
reaching the word "oy," and from there on in the reading public is
doomed to yet another book that chooses to treat Yiddish not as a language like
any other, but as some sort of mystical phenomenon, a miasma of imaginary memories
that one can feel free to love-without ever bothering to actually learn it.
Words on Fire is in this sense a breath of fresh air. It is easily the
first nonacademic book in English about the history of Yiddish that treats its
subject without the absurdities of sentimentalism. Dovid Katz, a Yiddish professor
and founder of the respected Yiddish language program at the University of Vilnius
in Lithuania (yes, Vilna), is a serious scholar and an institution-builder in
Yiddish studies. He has accomplished an astounding feat by gracefully condensing
a millennium of Jewish cultural history into an extremely readable, footnote-free
400-page book. The book's greatest triumph is its function as a comprehensive
popular history of Ashkenazic civilization. Readers with no background at all
in Jewish culture, as well as those with a somewhat deeper familiarity with
it, will come away from this book immeasurably enriched. Jewish educators especially
ought to read this book for its valuable layman's summaries of a part of Jewish
culture that is too often viewed with either soggy nostalgia or arrogant contempt.
From the point of view of the lay reader, the book's discussions of the future
of Yiddish are perhaps its most novel aspect. Katz postulates that developments
within nontraditional Jewish culture (his own status as a Yiddish academic,
for instance) are mere "secular outbursts" that occur throughout Jewish
history, enriching Jewish life but ultimately fading from it. Concerning Yiddish
in the 21st century, Katz dismisses the secular attraction to Yiddish in the
worlds of academia and among nontraditional enthusiasts, and instead points
to the exponentially-growing numbers of Yiddish-speaking Haredi (ultra-orthodox)
Jews as carrying the Yiddish language far into the future. This argument may
anger secular Yiddish speakers (indeed, the book received an unpleasant review
in a recent issue of the secular Yiddish-language Forverts newspaper), but there
is an honesty to this assessment which is rarely seen in popular works about
Yiddish. The respect which Katz gives to religious Jews in particular distinguishes
this volume. The Chatam Sofer (founder of modern Haredism) is given as much
attention as Sholem Aleichem, and this puts the world of Yiddish into multidimensional
perspective.
But Words on Fire is not nearly as objective as it seems. This is a book
with two agendas, an overt and a covert one. The book's overt agenda is to present
what it calls, in a somewhat defensive tone, an "unabashedly alternative
model of Jewish cultural history." It posits naturally-developing Yiddish,
rather than artificially-revived Hebrew, as the single true modern heir to what
Katz calls the "Jewish language chain"-a millennia-long history of
Jewish communication dating back to biblical Hebrew, and, as Katz sees it, stretching
far into the future. This is the kind of argument over which Jews came to blows
a century ago, as Katz vividly recounts. But as Katz admits in his book's opening
pages, the success of the Zionist movement, as well as an American Jewish community
which has chosen to promote Israeli Hebrew rather than Yiddish (if it promotes
a language at all), has largely made this debate moot. Katz's goals in this
book, therefore, purport to be more modest. He does not call for linguistic
revolution, but merely for awareness and appreciation of Yiddish as the natural
growth of the Jewish language chain in the last millennium. Of course, this
agenda by itself raises a few questions. It is unclear, for example, why Yiddish
must be considered the only important contemporary component of the Jewish language
chain, or why the profound Israeli-Hebrew influence on contemporary Haredi Yiddish
apparently counts as "natural" while Israeli Hebrew itself does not,
or why Judeo-English (a linguistic development that scholars are only beginning
to examine) would not be part of this "authentic" language chain.
But at least Katz is prepared to present this argument openly. The same cannot
be said of a deeper current within this book.
Katz's covert agenda will go unnoticed by anyone unfamiliar with the contemporary
worlds of Yiddish (Haredi, secularist, and academic)-that is, by the audience
for whom the book is written, and perhaps that is for the best. By eschewing
the scholarly burden of footnotes, he is free to state as fact, for example,
that Yiddish originated first in Bavaria-without acknowledging that this view
contradicts the theory of Max Weinreich, the twentieth century's greatest Yiddish
linguist, whose seminal History of the Yiddish Language posits the Rhineland
as the cradle of Yiddish. (In fact, Katz greatly respects Weinreich, and the
two theories could complement one another. But Katz, free from footnotes, does
not play this idea out.) He is free to give seemingly comprehensive descriptions
of the development of Yiddish literature, while omitting major canonical figures
like Yankev Glatshteyn. Most subtly-and most disturbingly-he is free to casually
drop the names and dates of certain writers, like "Peretz Markish (1895-1952)."
That "(-1952)" was not the date of Markish's death from cancer, but
the date of his execution by Soviet firing squad. While Katz does discuss the
Soviet government's fondness for murdering Yiddish writers and in particular
the infamous date of August 12, 1952 (Katz repeats as fact the old rumor that
twenty-four writers and cultural leaders were executed that day; recently opened
archives reveal somewhat different numbers, and tie these executions directly
to the Stalin-founded Jewish Antifascist Committee, a historical nightmare described
in the excellent recent volume by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin's
Secret Pogrom), he never reveals that Markish, along with essentially every
other Soviet Yiddish writer he mentions, were among the murdered. For the casual
reader, Markish might as well have died a peaceful death in what Katz devotes
most of his space to describing as the wonders of a Yiddish-supporting Soviet
state.
To non-academics, this may sound like nitpicking. But it isn't. It is part of
the fundamental problem with this otherwise magisterial book. Throughout its
pages, Yiddish culture is heralded for its passivity, its non-violence, and
especially its "humanism"-most often in contrast to Zionism, which
Katz describes at one point as "ultranationalist." (Why Zionism is
described as "ultranationalist," while tyrannical European regimes
are merely "nationalist," is never explained; nor are we told why
the creation of a Jewish state in Israel was an "artificial" exercise,
while Stalin's creation of a Soviet Jewish republic in the far-eastern, Korean-populated
region of Birobidjan-considered by many today to be Stalin's attempt to eliminate
the Jews through exile-is praised in Katz's book as "progress.") What
Katz fails to say directly here-and what he evades by painting rosy pictures
of people like Markish, a Yiddish poet who like many others was fooled into
throwing his entire career behind the regime that ultimately murdered him-is
that the passive nonviolent humanism of Yiddish culture was not blameless in
that culture's ultimate destruction. Again and again in the modern era, Yiddish-speaking
Jews were fooled by humanistic movements of the day into believing that they
could live their lives as part of a world that respected all people-and again
and again, that world turned around and murdered them, knowing that there would
never be any consequences for murdering a Jew, because for thousands of years,
Jews had never bothered fighting back.
Katz touches on this problem in his unusual treatment of the Holocaust, but
he avoids its implications. Words on Fire essentially states that, yes,
"the vast majority of Ashkenazic Jewry did go to the slaughter without
putting up even such resistance as might have been possible," because that
was what hundreds of years of religious faith had taught them to do. Those who
did resist, Katz claims (and, as a result, those who did survive) were disproportionately
drawn from among the ranks of secular Jews who had cast off this religious passivity.
If one accepts this premise, then Katz's entire book, and especially its ending,
suddenly becomes horrifyingly illogical. Katz is counting on the heirs of these
same passive religious Jews to carry Yiddish into the future. But how can he
count on them to have a future at all, when the only reason Jewish civilization
still exists today is because of the energies of those involved in what he downplays
as "secular outbursts"? Haredim in Israel's Bnai Brak may speak Yiddish
and refuse to serve in the Israeli army, but it is clear that they would be
annihilated without other, less passive Jews to defend them. And even American
Haredim's cultural autonomy is sustainable only by the ongoing work of less
religious Jews to ensure America's legal protection of minority rights. The
colossal failure of this culture to ensure its own survival is a deeply disturbing
subject, and one that deserves more serious attention than Katz is willing to
give it. Katz concludes his book on a note of hope for Yiddish's future: the
book's last words are "Moreover, small is beautiful." Small may be
beautiful, but dead certainly isn't. It isn't clear from this book whether Katz
appreciates the relationship between the two.
Despite this, Words on Fire is a book that ought to be welcomed –
if not by scholars (for whom most of its insights are old news), then certainly
by lay readers, for whom this book will be a wonderful addition to any library
of Jewish culture. At the very least, it will make readers think.