The Independent
5 March 2005
Words on Fire by Dovid Katz
Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky
More Chutzpah than Schmaltz
By Julia Pascal
Yiddish is a 4,000-year-old language organically developed from Aramaic, classical
Hebrew, German dialect and Slav. As the lingua franca of Eastern European Jewry,
it thrived there rather than in England or France because Christianity rooted
so much later in the East, and paganism was more tolerant of Jews. While the
French and Germans were butchering Jews as "Christ killers", and the
English monarchy deported them in 1290, medieval Eastern Europe was, as Dovid
Katz remarks, "a multiculturalist pluralist haven". Katz has produced
a major work on Yiddish which is both scholarly and entertaining. It will illuminate
readers new to the subject and inform those with Yiddish-speaking families.
But why is the language still important to us?
It has permeated American culture, although it hardly touched British English.
We are finally learning words such as schmoozing, chutzpah, shmuck and shyster.
We recognise it in the zany conceit of Mel Brooks's Yiddish-speaking Indians
in Blazing Saddles and from that outrageous Yiddish joke - the meschuggenah
song "Springtime for Hitler" in his The Producers.
Woody Allen has given us the eternal Jewish archetype of the nebbish. Sholem
Aleichem's Teyve the Milkman was celebrated in the Hollywood movie Fiddler
on the Roof. The late, great Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in Yiddish but
his stories (translated into English) popularised the complexities of shtetl
life. The mass migration of Jews to the US and Britain took place between
l880 and l930. This wave was accompanied by films and theatre in Yiddish as
popular entertainment for the masses. Even Shakespeare was Yiddishised; posters
proclaimed it to be "translated and far better"!
Even after most Yiddish speakers were murdered in the gas chambers and the Nazi
killing fields, Yiddishisms trickled into US popular culture. But as Yiddish
was forgotten, huge resources of Yiddish books, sheet music and plays were jettisoned.
This loss was international. Although Stalin first championed Yiddish schools
and theatres, by the 1930s he was murdering many Jewish artists, including the
brilliant Yiddish actor, Solomon Mikhoels.
As Katz painfully points out, Yiddish was also assassinated by the emergence
of the hastily-constructed modern Hebrew which accompanied the setting up of
the state of Israel. He rejects modern Hebrew as Israel's language and suggests
it be called "Israeli", distancing it from classical Hebrew and disconnecting
it from the many languages associated with Jewishness.
The war between Yiddish-speaking Jew and Hebrew-talking Israeli can also been
seen as a struggle between the feminine and the masculine. Yiddish is often
criticised as "kitchen language". Women, and unlearned men, spoke
it. Hebrew was the domain of prayer and masculine duty. The struggle between
"Jew" and "Israeli" is also a war between competing ideologies.
Yiddish was the language for a people without a land. Hebrew was the language
for the myth of "a land without a people".
European and American Jews disturbed by an Israeli military state crave a model
of Jewishness they can accept. Yiddish seems to offer that positive sense of
a counter-culture. The problem is, who is now going to bother learning Yiddish?
Certainly, there are pockets of enthusiastic young learners, and a multiplying
Chassidic orthodoxy made up of people who live in the Yiddish language while
denying the plural, secular elements of Yiddish culture. But these movements
are hardly going to make Yiddish a living experience for today's Jewish population.
Aaron Lansky's book is an adventure story about the survival of Yiddish. This
fast-moving, funny account of his 25-year mission to save Yiddish books from
the dumpster is a very exciting read. Lansky is the founder and president of
the National Yiddish Book Center and his struggle is punctuated with crazy scenes
from Jewish America.
Lansky describes how each donor tearfully hands over every book with a long
description of the work and how he got hold of it. Not only must Lansky listen
politely; he also has to accept mountains of food. After 24 hours, he feels
his arteries are flooding with cholesterol. Eventually, he decides to collect
with two others: one to drive, one to listen to stories, and the third as the
"designated eater".
The mass of Yiddish-speaking immigrants left their books to non-Yiddish speaking
children and grandchildren, who threw away a literature they couldn't read.
Lansky, horrified that the People of the Book are discarding theirs, becomes
a missionary for a lost culture. He makes the same point as Katz. To study the
language is not to entertain nostalgic schmaltz; rather, it is an acknowledgement
that Yiddishland is a microcosm of the outside world. For example, the black
fur hats and long coats of Chassidim are the clothes of 18th-century Polish
noblemen.
Both these books are wonderful reads. Katz's is denser and needs slow digestion,
whereas Lansky's is a whistle-stop journey to the end of the Jewish world. These
two baby boomers are re-exploring the intellectual struggle between Zionist
Hebraists and Socialist Yiddishists. What a pleasure to have them offering the
muscularity of this political and linguistic debate, which is still at the heart
of Jewish argument.
Julia Pascal's play 'The Yiddish Queen Lear' is published by Oberon Books