Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish

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About Words On Fire: The Unfinished Story Of Yiddish

Product Description Words on Fire offers a rich, engaging account of the history and evolution of the Yiddish language. Drawing on almost thirty years of scholarship, prominent Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz traces the origins of Yiddish back to the Europe of a thousand years ago, and shows how those origins are themselves an uninterrupted continuation of the previous three millennia of Jewish history and culture in the Near East. Words on Fire narrates the history of the language from medieval times onward, through its development as written literature, particularly for and by Jewish women. In the wake of secularizing and modernizing movements of the nineteenth century, Yiddish rose spectacularly in a few short years from a mass folk idiom to the language of sophisticated modern literature, theater, and journalism. Although a secular Yiddish culture no longer exists, Katz argues that its resurgence among religious Jewish communities ensures that Yiddish will still be a thriving language in the twenty-first century. For anyone interested in Jewish history and tradition, Words on Fire will be a definitive account of this remarkable language and the culture that created and sustained it. From Publishers Weekly Yiddish was the common language of central European Jewry before the Holocaust. The catastrophic loss of millions of Yiddish speakers has led to the impression that Yiddish is a dying, if not dead, language. Not so, claims Katz, head of the Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, and in this ambitious, comprehensive and entertaining history he makes clear not only its past but its future. Most scholars claim that Yiddish began around A.D. 900, but Katz argues that many elements can be found "in a continuous language chain that antedated ancient Hebrew, progressed through Hebrew, and then Jewish Aramaic." Katz clearly explicates not only Yiddish's linguistic history, but how it helped shape, and was shaped by, Jewish culture. Much of the history is fascinating—for instance, 16th-century rabbis, worried that the printing press would allow women access to secular popular European stories, offered sacred writings in popular forms (plays and prose based on biblical themes and midrashic tales) that shaped Yiddish literature for centuries. Katz argues that Yiddish will continue as a spoken language not because of conscious efforts to "save" it (which, he writes, can "border on the downright meshuga") but because of the rapid growth of Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox movements. This scholarly work is quite readable and a strong contribution to the ongoing academic and popular interest in Yiddish. B&w illus, maps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist As fluent in cultural change as he is in etymology, linguist Katz provides a wholly enjoyable and many-faceted history of Yiddish, an essential chapter in the story of Judaism. He chronicles the great Jewish exodus from the Near East north into Europe, where the creators of Yiddish (which simply means Jewish) settled in German-speaking regions, called their new home Ashkenaz (the name of Noah's great-grandson), and forged a vibrant new language by fusing Semitic and Germanic tongues. Ashkenazim became a vibrant trilingual civilization: Yiddish was spoken, and sacred texts were read in Hebrew and Aramaic. But written Yiddish also thrived since women weren't taught to read Hebrew or Aramaic. Katz then follows the Ashkenazi diaspora to Poland and Lithuania, then on to America, tracking the flourishing of Yiddish letters until Yiddish was condemned as too Old World and began to die off. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved From the Back Cover "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." (Elie Wiesel) "Words On Fire is not only a great his