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Author: Neal Karlen
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061860115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
Yiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story is the notion that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and worse. Karlen charts the beginning of Yiddish as a minor dialect in medieval Europe that helped peasant Jews live safely apart from the marauders of the First Crusades. Incorporating a large measure of antique German dialects, Yiddish also included little scraps of French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance languages, and a dozen other tongues native to the places where Jews were briefly given shelter. One may speak a dozen languages, all of them Yiddish. By 1939, Yiddish flourished as the lingua franca of 13 million Jews. After the Holocaust, whatever remained of Yiddish, its worldview and vibrant culture, was almost stamped out—by Jews themselves. Yiddish was an old-world embarrassment for Americans anxious to assimilate. In Israel, young, proud Zionists suppressed Yiddish as the symbol of the weak and frightened ghetto-bound Jew—and invented modern Hebrew. Today, a new generation has zealously sought to explore the language and to embrace its soul. This renaissance has spread to millions of non-Jews who now know the subtle difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel; hundreds of Yiddish words dot the most recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Story of Yiddish is a delightful tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together.
Author: Neal Karlen
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061860115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Get Book
Book Description
Yiddish—an oft-considered "gutter" language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story is the notion that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and worse. Karlen charts the beginning of Yiddish as a minor dialect in medieval Europe that helped peasant Jews live safely apart from the marauders of the First Crusades. Incorporating a large measure of antique German dialects, Yiddish also included little scraps of French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance languages, and a dozen other tongues native to the places where Jews were briefly given shelter. One may speak a dozen languages, all of them Yiddish. By 1939, Yiddish flourished as the lingua franca of 13 million Jews. After the Holocaust, whatever remained of Yiddish, its worldview and vibrant culture, was almost stamped out—by Jews themselves. Yiddish was an old-world embarrassment for Americans anxious to assimilate. In Israel, young, proud Zionists suppressed Yiddish as the symbol of the weak and frightened ghetto-bound Jew—and invented modern Hebrew. Today, a new generation has zealously sought to explore the language and to embrace its soul. This renaissance has spread to millions of non-Jews who now know the subtle difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel; hundreds of Yiddish words dot the most recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Story of Yiddish is a delightful tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together.
Author: Yenta Mash
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 160909249X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
In these sixteen stories, available in English for the first time, prize-winning author Yenta Mash traces an arc across continents, across upheavals and regime changes, and across the phases of a woman's life. Mash's protagonists are often in transit, poised "on the landing" on their way to or from somewhere else. In imaginative, poignant, and relentlessly honest prose, translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy, Mash documents the lost world of Jewish Bessarabia, the texture of daily life behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Moldova, and the challenges of assimilation in Israel. On the Landing opens by inviting us to join a woman making her way through her ruined hometown, recalling the colorful customs of yesteryear—and the night when everything changed. We then travel into the Soviet gulag, accompanying women prisoners into the fearsome forests of Siberia. In postwar Soviet Moldova, we see how the Jewish community rebuilds itself. On the move once more, we join refugees struggling to find their place in Israel. Finally, a late-life romance brings a blossoming of joy. Drawing on a lifetime of repeated uprooting, Mash offers an intimate perch from which to explore little-known corners of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A master chronicler of exile, she makes a major contribution to the literature of immigration and resilience, adding her voice to those of Jhumpa Lahiri, W. G. Sebald, André Aciman, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Mash's literary oeuvre is a brave achievement, and her work is urgently relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.
Author: Paul Kriwaczek
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307430332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.
Author: Irving Howe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Short stories, English
Languages : en
Pages : 630
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Book Description
Author: Rachel Rojanski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253045169
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
“A pioneering study” of how two languages have coexisted in the Jewish state, with “a wealth of information” on Yiddish newspapers, theater, and more (AJS Review). Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language’s varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, as well as the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel’s early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel’s leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the twenty-first century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.
Author: Kadya Molodovsky
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253040779
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Book Description
“This novel invites the reader inside the mind of a Polish Jewish woman who has recently arrived in New York just after WWII began in Europe.” —Jeffrey Shandler, author of Anne Frank Unbound Rivke Zilberg, a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the United States, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiancé who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American “allrightnik.” In this fictionalized journal originally published in Yiddish, author Kadya Molodovsky provides keen insight into the day-to-day activities of the large immigrant Jewish community of New York. By depicting one woman’s struggles as a Jewish refugee in the United States during WWII, Molodovsky points readers to the social, political, and cultural tensions of that time and place.
Author: Jeffrey Shandler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190651962
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
"This book provides an introduction to Yiddish, the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, both as a subject of interest in its own right and for the distinctive issues that Yiddish raises for the study of languages generally, including language diaspora, language fusion, multilingualism, language ideologies, and postvernacularity. By approaching the study of Yiddish through the rubric of a biography, rather than following a more conventional chronological, geographical, or ideological approach, this book examines the story of Yiddish thematically. Each chapter addresses a different "biographical" topic concerning the character of the language and how it has been conceptualized, ranging across time, space, and speech communities. These chapters interrelate discussions of the language's origins, characteristics, and development with the dynamics of its implementation in Ashkenazi culture from the Middle Ages to the present. These thematic chapters also examine the symbolic investments that both Jews and others have made in Yiddish over time, which are key to understanding both general perceptions and scholarly analyses of the language, especially in the modern period"--
Author: Harvey Pekar
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1613122284
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
A “fascinating and enlightening” collection of comics and writings that explore the Yiddish language and the Jewish experience (The Miami Herald). We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz, but how did they come to pepper American English? In Yiddishkeit, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle trace the far-reaching influences of Yiddish from medieval Europe to the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. This comics anthology contains original stories by such notable writers and artists as Barry Deutsch, Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez, and Sharon Rudahl. Through illustrations, comics art, and a full-length play, four major themes are explored: culture, performance, assimilation, and the revival of the language. “The book is about what Neal Gabler in his introduction labels ‘Jewish sensibility.’...he writes: ‘You really can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.’ The book does this with gusto.” —TheNew York Times “As colorful, bawdy, and charming as the culture it seeks to represent.” —Print magazine “Brimming with the charm and flavor of its subject...a genuinely compelling, scholarly comics experience.” —Publishers Weekly “A book that truly informs about Jewish culture and, in the process, challenges readers to pick apart their own vocabulary.” —Chicago Tribune “A postvernacular tour de force.” —The Forward “With a loving eye Pekar and Buhle extract moments and personalities from Yiddish history.” —Hadassah “Gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers.”––Tablet “Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely...because [it] is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.” —Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, from his introduction “A scrumptious smorgasbord of comics, essays, and illustrations...concentrated tastes, with historical context, of Yiddish theater, literature, characters and culture.” —Heeb magazine
Author: Sue Macy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481472216
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
Recipient of a Sydney Taylor Book Award for Younger Readers An ALA Notable Book A Bank Street Best Book of the Year “Text and illustration meld beautifully.” —The New York Times “Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Inspired...[a] journalistic, propulsive narrative.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The story comes alive through the bold acrylic and gouache art.” —Booklist (starred review) From New York Times Best Illustrated Book artist Stacy Innerst and author Sue Macy comes a story of one man’s heroic effort to save the world’s Yiddish books in their Sydney Taylor Book Award–winning masterpiece. Over the last forty years, Aaron Lansky has jumped into dumpsters, rummaged around musty basements, and crawled through cramped attics. He did all of this in pursuit of a particular kind of treasure, and he’s found plenty. Lansky’s treasure was any book written Yiddish, the language of generations of European Jews. When he started looking for Yiddish books, experts estimated there might be about 70,000 still in existence. Since then, the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has collected close to 1.5 million books, and he’s finding more every day. Told in a folkloric voice reminiscent of Patricia Polacco, this story celebrates the power of an individual to preserve history and culture, while exploring timely themes of identity and immigration.
Author: Barbara Davilman
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316050202
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
What do George and Laura Bush have in common with Dick and Jane? Well, both hail from prototypical WASP families. And, perhaps more to the point, both exhibit a natural resistance to moral complexity (i.e., reality). That's the premise of this hilarious new primer-style book in which George, Laura, and the entire Bush family communicate with uncharacteristic expressiveness, conveying shades of of feeling and nuances of meaning that plain old English can't deliver -- by peppering their conversatuon with Yiddishisms. See George's mother. Her name is Bar. She wears a lot of pearls and is a farbisseneh. "You are late, George," Bar says. "Of course I am late," George says. "I am the President of the United States. I am a big macher." Like all good primers, Yiddish with George and Laura tells a simple story -- and, in the end, important life lessons are imparted.
