The New York Sun
3 November 2004
The Persistence of Yiddish
by Jeremy Dauber
Few languages resonate as powerfully as Yiddish in the minds of those who do not speak them. Whether representing an obscure link to lost family history, a sacred symbol of a murdered people, or simply a repository of funny words, the language itself means something, regardless of its words' content: When an abandoned Jewish demon in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story derives his meager sustenance from the printed alphabet in a Yiddish storybook, saying that "the letters are Jewish," we know exactly what he means. Yiddish redt zikh, Yiddish speaks itself, the old saying goes. In a time when few are qualified to understand what precisely it's saying, Aaron Lansky and Dovid Katz are here to help.
It is almost certain that the National Yiddish Book Center, founded by Mr. Lansky, is one of the few cultural institutions ever devised that has actually and definitively completed the mission it set for itself. At the end of the 1970s, Mr. Lansky, at that time a graduate student in Yiddish at McGill University, decided to take a leave of absence to "save the world's Yiddish books before it was too late." He thought there were about 75,000 books and that the project would take two years.
"Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 316 pages, $24.95) is written a quarter of a century and 1.5 million books later. (Slightly more than a decade ago, I was an intern at the National Yiddish Book Center and shelved a few of those 1.5 million books myself, and I have remained involved with the Center ever since.) We read tales of ruined books abandoned by grandchildren who care little and understand less and institutions whose supporters have passed on. One of Mr. Lansky's quietest successes is to portray the tragedy of the physical destruction of a book. But ultimately this is a tale of triumph over tragedy: The Center has not only saved myriads of actual books, but has digitized almost every work published in Yiddish between hard covers.
Mr. Lansky tells his story and that of the Book Center with remarkable brio
and cheer. It is an almost archetypically American story, of a bright young
man with a good idea who's told it can't be done - then goes ahead and does
it. He is a nice Jewish boy, as well, making countless entertainingly rendered
visits to (and consuming uncountable calories at the tables of) nice Jewish
grandparents who want to make sure their stories are heard as
their books are collected.
Mr. Lansky's largely American perspective, though, begs the question he knows to underlie his enterprise: For whom, and for what, is he saving these books? The title of his book comes from a remark of Max Weinreich, one of the greatest scholars of Yiddish, to the effect that "Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history."
Yet Mr. Lansky treats Yiddish language and literature as increasingly belonging to history - a history that prominently features, as it must, the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust, communist repression of Yiddish, and the linguistic assimilation of the American Jewish community. He also seems to feel that the best he can do is to perpetuate interest in Yiddish books as a contemporary act of cultural reclamation and continuity for an audience for whom Yiddish itself will always remain exotic. Late in the book he writes, "Despite our abiding commitment to history, my colleagues and I at the Yiddish Book Center do not pine for the Old Country or for the past. We are who we are, where we are, when we are."
Dovid Katz would almost certainly also agree with Weinreich's statement, though his Yiddish outwits history in an entirely different way from Mr. Lansky's. In "Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish" (Basic Books, 430 pages, $26.95), Mr. Katz contends that Yiddish has yet to breathe its last. Though he calls for "a virtual network of small, serious islands of culture and creativity in the Internet age," binding together those in universities and else where who are committed to the maintenance of secular, literary Yiddish, Mr. Katz points out that the world's Chasidic communities provide a rapidly growing base of native Yiddish speakers, and he indicts the contemporary community of scholars for ignoring this phenomenon in their elegiac approach to the story of Yiddish.
Such a counterintuitive (not to say iconoclastic) approach is symptomatic of Mr. Katz's tendency to take the long view: His perspective on the special nature of Yiddish - as a possessor of "authentic came-down-the-line Jewishness" that no other language has today (including, provocatively, Hebrew as it is spoken in Israel today) - is based on a reading of nothing less than the entire history of Jewish language, one which starts with the oft-observed phenomenon of the multilingual nature of Jewish society and then places Yiddish at that society's heart.
You don't have to agree with all of Mr. Katz's conclusions about the centrality of Yiddish to appreciate the value that such an approach gives the book. Mr. Katz is interested in rendering the massive scope and sweep of Yiddish, placing it not only in the context of Eastern Europe and a brief moment in America, but over its thousand-year history. In telling this history of Yiddish, Mr. Katz tells the history of a significant portion of Jewish life over the last millennium: intellectual currents, observations about the various audiences for Yiddish materials, and enough bibliographic and biographical curiosities to gladden the heart of any lover of language and booklore.
Mr. Katz is a scholar by training, one of the most important Yiddish linguists of the last 100 years, and his work is intensely erudite while still quite readable. (Anyone who has ever read an academic article in linguistics will recognize the magnitude of this achievement.) In addition, the beautiful illustrations, many of which are taken from the personal collection of the author's father, the noted Yiddish poet Menke Katz, are astonishing.
Ultimately, the twin pictures of the present and future of Yiddish these books
present are at odds with each other. But readers can be happy that we have both
these authors to paint each of them.
Professor Jeremy Dauber teaches Yiddish literature at Columbia University
in New York.