ReviewsAmazon.com Review
"Positive, upbeat, practical, deeply rooted in Jewish history. That's our language. That's Yiddish." These words refer to the first recognizable Yiddish sentence extant, dated 1272, translated as "A good day will happen to the person who brings this mahzor [prayer book] to the synagogue." Yiddish: A Nation of Words is a popular history of this dying Jewish language, an amalgam of Hebrew and European languages, which dates to the early Middle Ages. Author Mariam Weinstein, a freelance journalist in Massachusetts who grew up in the Bronx when Yiddish could still be heard on almost any street corner, takes to her subject with enthusiasm. Her casual tone doesn't compromise her considerable intelligence, which shines especially in her discussion of the leading roles that women have played in the history of the language. (For centuries, women were not educated in Hebrew, so Yiddish became their particular idiom.) Another of the book's strengths is its account of the demise of Yiddish, which Weinstein attributes primarily to the trauma of the Holocaust and its aftermath of rapid assimilation. Perhaps the most pleasing and important thing about Weinstein's book, however, is that it does for Yiddish something like what, she argues, Yiddish did for Hebrew. "By letting words and phrases slip from the prayers of the older language into the younger, it kept the sacred tongue available to people who did not speak it every day." --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
"How did a language that cursed and crooned for a thousand years fade in the course of one little lifetime?" asks freelance journalist Weinstein. Her engaging, elegiac popular history fills a gap between more academic tomes and lexicography … la Leo Rosten. She traces the language's roots in German lands and in Poland, then sketches Yiddish-drenched shtetl life, drawing on the writing of Israel Joshua Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer, before describing how Yiddish both influenced and was shaped by two late-19th-century movements, Bundism and Zionism. In the Soviet Union, Yiddish garnered its first recognition as an official language only to be constrained to Communist expression. Pre-Soviet Yiddish literature, therefore, was not to be found in schools. In Israel, Weinstein reflects sadly, the fervor for Hebrew led pioneers to reject Yiddish with contempt. Early 20th-century New York boasted a wide variety of Yiddish schools and radio stations, yet the urge to assimilate led Jews to "squander" their national treasure. After half the world's Yiddish speakers died in the Holocaust, Yiddish has survived mostly thanks to the Hasidim who emigrated to America and elsewhere and built large families. The language has made some recent gains in America thanks to the 1980s klezmer revival and the upstart National Yiddish Book Center but serves more as linguistic influence than common tongue, the author concludes. While not comprehensive, this evocative, informative and accessible book should perform solidly on the Jewish book circuit. 16 pages of photos.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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