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Chicago Jewish Star
Vol. 15, no. 335 (March 11-24 2005)

Words on Fire. The Unfinished Story of Yiddish.

Reviewed by Gila Wertheimer

I grew up hearing, but never speaking or understanding, Yiddish. In short, my knowledge of the language could be summed up in a single word: goornisht.

My father, however, was fluent — speaking reading and writing. He taught my mother enough so that she could understand, but he never even attempt to teach his children.

A wonderful raconteur, the phrase my sisters and I most often heard was, "It loses in the translation," as he would sometimes try to convey to us the feel of one of his "stories".

But he never felt it was important for us to know Yiddish. Hebrew was the language of the Jewish future, and its revival was what captured his imagination.

As an adult, he switched his prayerbook Hebrew, learned in the afternoons in cheder in Winnipeg, from the Ashkenazic pronunciation to the Sephardic, because that was the Hebrew of the State of Israel.

A passionate Zionist, it gave him a genuine thrill to hear Hebrew spoken, and to make attempts to speak it.

Despite his fluency in Yiddish, he felt no nostalgia for the language which, in his view, was dying out and would be replaced by Hebrew.

I've often thought how amazed he would be to see not a demise, but a revival. From Yiddish taught at universities to translations of Yiddish literature into English to the popularity of klezmer to the sense of nostalgia that exists today (whether or not one even knows the language).

A valuable contribution to this revival is a recently published history of the language, Words on Fire by Dovid Katz (Basic Books, 2004, 430 pp., $26.95).

In describing the state of Yiddish today, perhaps "revival" is overstating the case. Yiddish as a living language exists and is perpetuated mainly in the ultra-Orthodox communities.

As the expression of a secular Jewish culture, however, Katz shows that it has pretty much died out, extinguished by the Holocaust.

Yet it's too soon to write its obituary. So Katz has subtitled his study "The Unfinished Story of Yiddish." And a fascinating tale it is.

Dovid Katz, the Brooklyn-born son of a Yiddish poet, teaches at Vilnius University in Lithuania, and is director of research at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. He holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of London and has taught at Oxford and Yale.

So much for his credentials. Together with the scholarship, what comes across in his book is that Katz is a man in love with the Yiddish language — its history, its development, its integral role in the religious, cultural and secular life of European Jewry.

He writes with energy and enthusiasm, mixing scholarly and conversational styles as he examines and analyzes — sometimes in minute detail — the language.

Katz traces the beginnings of Yiddish back 1,000 years, to the Jews of Central Europe. This is where and when "a big bang" occurred, a linguistic confrontation that resulted in a new language, Yiddish.

It was "the language of Ashkenaz", loshn Ashkenaz, or Yiddish, meaning Jewish.

"The genesis of Yiddish," writes Katz, "is a key event in Jewish history that gave rise to a new European culture. It produced a living linguistic organism that developed continuously from that initial meeting of language and people from the Near East with language and people in Europe."

As is all too familiar in Jewish history, one component of that early meeting was persecution, which, Katz shows, gave rise to the first dated, written Yiddish.

In 1096, during the first Crusade, Jews were massacred as infidels. So that they would not be forgotten, their survivors wrote down their names, in a Memer-bukh (Book of Commemoration), the first dated appearance of Yiddish words.

These books, according to Katz, are also the genesis of the Yizkor books that recorded destroyed Jewish communities after the Holocaust.

Medieval Eastern Europe added a Slavic element to the Germanic Yiddish of the west. The area was, Katz says, more religiously tolerant than the west, providing "a multicultural pluralist haven". The spread of Christianity, and with it Jew-hatred, came later.

So Jews began moving east, and "Ashkenaz" was expanded to take in eastern as well as western European Jews.

As Katz details and analyzes the development of Yiddish, he makes a case for what he calls a "Yiddish rebellion" that "empowered" the Jewish masses.

With the advent of printing, the classic Jewish texts became available and, notwithstanding controversy, some were translated into Yiddish.

Secular works were also translated, reworked to remove any Christian references, but at the same time bringing in the influence of the wider European community.

New genres began to rise in Yiddish, such as poetry, plays and stories. It was the time of the publication of the Tsenerene, the Bible for women, written in Yiddish, as stories, published at the end of the 16th Century.

Katz details the rise of hasidism in the 18th Century, a movement which he says added a religious divide to the existing linguistic one between Lithuania in the north and Ukraine, Poland and Hungary in the south.

To the Litvak-Galitsyaner language divide was added the misnagdim-hasidim religious split, with the two becoming pretty much synonymous.

With Zionism came another split, this time Yiddish vs. Hebrew, with the victory, of course, going to Hebrew, a fact about which Katz is none too happy.

In agreement with Israeli scholar Ghilad Zuckermann, who posits that modern Hebrew is a new Middle Eastern language that he calls "Israeli", Katz uses this term.

Katz brings his history right up to the present day where, in this country at least, Yiddish has gone through "the wily American PR mill", where it has been transformed into a popular culture of music, comedy and theater.

As a vibrant, living, day-to-day language, Yiddish survives mainly amongst the ultra-Orthodox, in particular, the hasidim. As they increase demographically, use of the language will also increase, Katz believes.

Its words "continue to burn with ancient passion, humor, and psychic content that have come down the line of generation-to-generation language transmission..."

It is "spiritually melodious ... as the instruments of a fine orchestra".

Dovid Katz continues to play and sing that melody. And I think he might have convinced even my father that Yiddish is a language and a culture that deserves to be perpetuated.

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