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Words On Fire
by Dovid Katz
Published by Basic Books
Format: Hardcover, 434 pages
ISBN: 0465037283
Dovid Katz is an American-born linguistics professor and Yiddish expert who
has made an ongoing project of leading expeditions to discover and record the
remaining native Yiddish speakers in East European towns. Based on thirty years
of original research, Words on Fire traces the origins of the Yiddish language
to the Europe of a thousand years ago, and shows how those origins are themselves
an uninterrupted and living continuation of the previous three thousand years
of Jewish history and culture in the Near East. Thanks to what Katz calls a
"linguistic Big Bang," Yiddish appeared as a fully-formed language
fairly suddenly in medieval Europe around the year 1000. Katz examines the development
of the new civilization, Ashkenaz, that sprang up in Central Europe around this
time, as well as the relationships between Yiddish and the other two Jewish
languages of the same society: Hebrew and Aramaic. The book is structured almost
as a biography, as it traces the steps of a language identified with women and
uneducated men from medieval times onward, and how efforts to raise its profile
and prestige were often met by opposition from the powers that be. Katz traces
the development of literary Yiddish from the late fourteenth century onward,
particularly as literature for and by Jewish women. But it was in the wake of
secularizing and modernizing movements of the 19th century that Yiddish rose
spectacularly in a few short years from a mass folk language to the language
of sophisticated modern fiction, theater, poetry, newspapers and scholarship.
Katz makes the somewhat contrarian claim that Yiddish represents a high point
in Jewish civilization. Although the thriving secular Yiddish culture is in
deep crisis today, Katz takes issue with those who proclaim it a dead language,
and claims that well-meaning attempts to revive it artificially through college
classes are significant but do not constitute a basis for serious continuity
of the sophisticated literary language. He argues that the high birth rate and
stunning cultural loyalty of Hasidic Yiddish speakers and the resurgence of
its use-including a rapidly expanding new literature-among traditionally religious
Jewish communities ensure that Yiddish will be a thriving language for generations
to come.
Biography
Dovid Katz is one of the world's foremost academics in the field of Yiddish
studies. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he is the son of the late Yiddish poet
Menke Katz, and as a high school student, founded a Yiddish-English student
journal. He has a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University
of London. He taught at Oxford for 18 years-where he established the university's
Yiddish program-as well as at Yale. He is currently professor of Yiddish at
Vilnius University and director of research at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001-2002. He divides his time between
Lithuania and the hills of North Wales.