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Newsday

7 October 2004

Saving a Lost Language
According to two new books, the story of Yiddish is far from finished

by Jacqueline Osherow

OUTWITTING HISTORY: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky. Algonquin, 316 pp., $24.95.

WORDS ON FIRE: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, by Dovid Katz. Basic, 446 pp., $26.95.

Thirty years ago I attended a reading by Isaac Bashevis Singer. "Mr. Singer," someone asked, "what do you think of the future of the Yiddish language?" His answer? "Ask me first if it has a present." So I was a bit taken aback by the subtitle of Dovid Katz's "Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish."

The impression one gets from Aaron Lansky's memoir is that the story of Yiddish was all but finished before he rescued a million books no one knew existed and created the (truly remarkable) National Yiddish Book Center. His memoir's title comes from a prediction that Yiddish would "outwit history." Still, it's one thing to make such a claim for a language, another to appear to make it for yourself.

Don't misunderstand me. I loved Lansky's book. It's full of unforgettable characters and hilarious, affecting anecdotes. I was hooked from the moment Lansky and his friends - students of Yiddish in search of out-of-print Yiddish books - are "hugged, kissed, smeared with lipstick, pinched and blessed" by elderly fellow diners in a Lower East Side cafeteria.

The book's true heroes are Sam and Leah Ostroff, working-class intellectuals whose lives have been devoted to their beloved Yiddish culture. Tireless collectors of books for Lansky, they're the sort of people who stop a New York Times reporter's questions with, "Oh no, mister, a car doesn't go without gasoline, a reporter doesn't go without eating. First you'll eat, then we'll talk," and ply him with platters of smoked fish. And then there's Sarah Rosenfeld, who responds to the question "Why do you spend so much time worrying about a dying language?" with "Nu, and you're not going to die someday? I don't see how that stops you from worrying about yourself."

What a pity that Lansky, who so appreciates this language with its special genius for deflating self-importance, should fail to use it on himself. At one point he compares himself, unironically, to Moses; at another, he mentions "one of my few regrets." Could such a phrase even be uttered in Yiddish? Well, maybe, but with that particular inflection that makes "few" a quantity slightly larger than infinite.

Lansky seems to miss the irony of Yiddishist Ruth Wisse's description of the National Yiddish Book Center as "the most beautiful ... dwelling place that Yiddish has ever had." Once Yiddish didn't need a beautiful dwelling place. It thrived in streets, at market stalls, on people's tongues. At times, Lansky seems to know this. He describes weeping at an Eastern European Jewish cemetery "for the lost illusion that the Yiddish books in our little van ... could somehow make amends for Vilkomir and a thousand other cities and shtetlekh like it." So what's this talk of outwitting history?

Dovid Katz argues convincingly that Yiddish is the product of history: not a makeshift jargon, but the complex linguistic outgrowth of a thousand years of European Jewish life and culture, a dynamic coming together of Germanic and Semitic languages. He makes clear that Yiddish was always rebellious, posing a challenge to elitist scholarly authority from the moment the printing press was invented.

"Words on Fire" abounds in surprising information. Who knew that medieval romances were de-Christianized and translated into Yiddish? That there were Yiddish women poets in the 16th and 17th centuries? That a 1620 Yiddish manual of behavior declared the signature of a man who even threatened to beat his wife legally null and void? That the new state of Israel was so rabidly anti-Yiddish that a Yiddish daily couldn't get a government license, and kiosks and bookshops carrying Yiddish writing were set on fire? (The current American interest in Yiddish brings the process full circle. Just as early Israelis loathed Yiddish as a weaklings' language, Americans uncomfortable with Israeli militarism now escape to Yiddish.)

My favorite moments in "Words on Fire" are its forays into the minutiae of the Yiddish language itself, like the distinction between groyser makher (big shot) and groyser knaker (hot shot) or the acknowledgement of great Hebrew scholarship with óyskenen zikh in di shvártse píntalakh: "literally, 'to be expert in the little black dots.'" I wish Katz had given us even more of this. Take the 1541 hope that the Messiah "may ... lead us right into Jerusalem, or at least to a village nearby." What a quintessential mix of humor and humility, its willingness to make do unable to suppress a suspicion that the Messiah won't show up.

Katz's sometimes revisionist history is nuanced and persuasive. Even his claims for the future are not outlandish. They arise from an ultraorthodox requirement to speak a Jewish (but not, for mundane purposes, a holy) language. Since projections for population growth among the ultraorthodox are very high, Katz predicts ever-increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers.

But how can the future of anything be hinged on a culture so inexorably hidebound? Can a language have a future if it won't embrace the present? Katz himself argues that the great Yiddish literary explosion of the 19th and 20th centuries was produced by the encounter between Jewish tradition and modernity. Secular texts are anathema to the ultraorthodox. They won't go near the books Lansky's saved.

To me, what both "Words on Fire" and "Outwitting History" unintentionally demonstrate is that a great literature will soon have no willing, able readers, much less practitioners. I hoped to learn something from Katz about my beloved Yiddish poets. "Words on Fire" doesn't even mention some of them. I don't fault Katz; his book is, after all, an overview, and an interesting, informative and nuanced one at that. But how sad for Jacob Glatstein, Celia Dropkin, Itzik Manger and Rachel Korn. Manger does turn up in "Outwitting History." He apparently "hit rock bottom" and lived off the Ostroffs for two years, controlling, to their son's dismay, the television's channels. ("I'd have to explain to him that Manger is a very great writer," Mrs. Ostroff says. "If he wants to watch a certain show, we have to let him watch.")

The translation Lansky offers when he quotes Manger's poetry demonstrates just how much the world stands to lose. Manger's Hagar soothes her son, Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arab people, with "Veyn nisht, Yishmeylikl tate." Lansky's "Ishmael, darling, dry your tears" in no way conveys the line's transgressive appeal. Appending tender Yiddish diminutives to Ishmael's name has the effect of turning, say, Gamal Abdel Nasser into a
skinny kid in horn-rimmed glasses selling Yiddish papers on a corner, with a violin tucked underneath his arm. Will any of Katz's projected thousands produce its like? And even if they did, the Ostroffs and their ilk are quickly disappearing. Who will give these future poets homes?

Jacqueline Osherow's fifth book of poetry, "The Hoopoe's Crown," will be published next year.

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