Na’amath Woman
Spring 2005 (volume 20, no. 2)
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish
by Dovid Katz
New York: Basic Books. 446 pages.
Reviewed by Barbara Trainin Blank
If you're a non-Yiddish speaker, have roots in an region that never spoke Yiddish, or think Yiddish is a "dead" language of no relevance to your life, think again. As Dovid Katz argues persuasively in this love song to the mamaloshen (mother tongue), to overlook the intimate interweaving of Yiddish with a yeoman's share of Jewish history - among the Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe but having influence beyond - is to write a truncated history of the Jewish people. Katz traces the links of Yiddish to Hasidism and the spread of Kabbalah; the rise of Reform, Conservative, neo-Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and even Zionism.True,Yiddish has suffered serious blows in recent years. Most dramatic was the loss of millions of Yiddish speakers during the Holocaust, but the ascendancy of modern Hebrew (Israeli Hebrew, as Katz calls it), the passing of the golden age of Yiddish literature and even the assimilation of American Jewry in a manner even non-observant Yiddishists would have seen as too secular, have also taken their toll.
Still, says the author, director of research at the Vilnius (Lithuania) Research Institute and son of renowned Yiddish poet Menke Katz, reports of the demise of Yiddish have been greatly exaggerated. Its future lies in an unlikely place: The language embraced by secular, left-wing, universalistically oriented Jews who broke away from generations of traditionalists is being "saved," asserts Katz, by the rapid growth of Yiddish-speaking, ultra-Orthodox Jews.
If Katz's book were nothing more than a testimony to the vibrancy of Yiddish, it would have been much shorter and less engaging. But a readable style and the book's valuable nuggets of history and cultural history will draw you in, making Words On Fire much more compelling than that.
There is, for example, the reminder that Yiddish was an integral part of the
trilingualism of Ashkenaz, which included Hebrew for sacred texts and Aramaic
for even-higher levels of scholarship (because it is the language of the Talmud),
even after the latter had ceased to be the lingua franca of Jews. Katz demonstrates
the richness of Yiddish, which uses many different words (often from different
linguistic sources) to describe related but not identical concepts. Thus, "frage"
(from German) means a "question" in general, whereas a question for
a rabbi about Jewish law is a "shayle" (Hebrew) and "kashe"
(Aramaic) refers to an intellectual challenge to a text.
We learn or relearn interesting facts: that Christian printers were major publishers
of Yiddish books in the 1500s; that while Zionists battled Yiddishists over
whether Hebrew or Yiddish was the real language of the Jews, some authors, such
as I. L. Peretz, wrote in both. And jokes aside, there really are regional differences
in the pronunciations of Yiddish.
Katz also offers an additional intriguing explanation of the decline of Yiddish – its association not only with the "old" and "passive" culture of the Jews destroyed by the Nazis but with the less-educated (often female) masses. It is interesting to be reminded that for women, Yiddish was the language of entree into secular popular European stories but paradoxically also into sacred Jewish writings in popular forms.
Despite Katz's many years of research, scholars may question his conclusion that elements of Yiddish existed "in a continuous language chain that antedated ancient Hebrew, progressed through Hebrew, and then Jewish Aramaic. And despite the author's insistence that the book is "not intended" against Hebrew, one senses both a defensiveness on his part toward it – perhaps because Hebrew is considered by many even outside of Israel to be the Jewish language – and an "ethnocentrism" about Yiddish. After all, even at its height, Yiddish did not take in thousands upon thousands of Jews who spoke Ladino or Judeo-Arabic, even if there are Jews of Middle Eastern descent who speak Yiddish today in Israeli yeshivot.
In his description of the ongoing Yiddish-Hebrew battle, Katz fails to mention the common ground, for example, how modern Orthodox day schools that once shunned Yiddish now include it in the curriculum. And surely Katz knows that Hebrew was the language not only of the Five Books of Moses but of the entire Tanakh (Bible), as well as of thousands of Jewish texts.
Still, there is much to read, enjoy and be inspired by in Words On Fire. If you hadn't thought about Yiddish for a while, or thought about it only wistfully, Katz offers both knowledge of the past and hope for the future.