COMMENT ON WORDS ON FIRE: THE UNFINISHED STORY OF YIDDISH
Alan Dershowitz
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jerold Frakes
Ruth Gay
Dov-Ber Kerler
Carl J. Rheins
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel:
"Dovid Katz's book on Yiddish reflects the beauty, the variety, and the
warmth of a language that refuses to be extinguished. Its miraculous survival
brings joy to its readers."
Alan Dershowitz:
"I love this book. It's a treasure trove of nostalgia and a beacon of hope.
It warmed my heart to read how the rich emotional Yiddish jargon became an elegant
language of literature; then it broke my heart to read about the near-total
destruction of Yiddish civilization, one of the great cultures of the world.
This book revives hope that Yiddish will still flourish, even in a small way."
Ruth Gay:
"This is a book whose time has come. Dovid Katz presents the complex and
international origins of Yiddish over a thousand years in a delightfully readable
narrative that belies the enormous scholarship in many languages that underlies
his work."
Jonathan Safran Foer:
"Words On Fire is not only a great history, it's a great read. Dovid
Katz writes with the precision of a scholar, and the heart of a poet."
Carl J. Rheins (Executive Director, YIVO Institute for
Jewish Research):
"In Words on Fire, Professor Dovid Katz reaffirms his role as one
of the world's leading scholars in the field of Yiddish Studies. Katz's command
of Yiddish linguistics, Yiddish literature and Eastern European Jewish cultural
history is unsurpassed. Words on Fire is a bold and timely book that
deserves to be read not only by specialists in the field of Jewish Studies but
also by anyone concerned about the future of Yiddish and Jewish culture."
Dov-Ber Kerler (Professor of Yiddish at Indiana University
at Bloomington):
"This amazing book is as provocative as it is profound. Written with verve
and passion, it goes far beyond recycling accepted 'truths' about the Yiddish
language, European Jewish civilization, and modern Jewish cultural politics.
Its bold new conceptualization of the still evolving saga of Yiddish is a product
of decades of inspired research, inspiring teaching and penetrating thinking
of one of the most brilliant Yiddish scholars of my generation. It will stimulate
further debate among scholars and laymen who are concerned with the ethos, history,
and significance of Yiddish, the Ashkenazic cultural heritage, and Jewish identity
in our contemporary post-modern world."
Jerold Frakes (Professor at the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles):
"In a field in which ingrained myth is regularly served up as truth, and
amateurs pose as experts, this accessible history of Yiddish, written by a native
speaker who is also a scholar of historical linguistics, systematically clears
the debris in order to set the record straight about the past, the present,
and even to offer some reasonable speculations about the future of Yiddish."