Jiddisch: Geschichte und Kultur einer Weltsprache (review)

Abstract

Jiddisch: Geschichte und Kultur einer Weltsprache, by Marion Aptroot and Roland Gruschka. Beck'sche Reihe 1621. Munich: CH. Beck, 2010. 192 pp. $15.90. While Yiddish may have endured more than its share of popularizing by nonexperts like Leo Rosten a generation ago (Joys of Yiddish, 1968) and Neal Karlen (The Story of Yiddish, 2008) more recently, the interested Anglophone reader is nonetheless well supplied with a variety of types of expert and competent introductions to the character, history and structure of the Yiddish language, ranging from Max Weinreich's masterful multivolume History of the Yiddish Language (Yidd., 1973; Engl. 2008), to Solomon Birnbaums Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar (1979), to Neil Jacobs' meticulous Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction (2005) - all three for linguists - and Dovid Katz's more popularly accessible Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2004), all written by scholarly experts who are thoroughly conversant with both the language itself and the broad range of scholarship in the vat ious relevant fields of research. While rhere may be fewer book-length surveys of Yiddish in other languages, there are nonetheless some very useful ones, such as Jean Baumgartens Le yiddish (1990) and Eva Geller s Jidyszijczyk Zydow polskich (1994). German, like English, has had its share of popularizing books that often make experts cringe. The book under review here, by Marion Aptroot (Professor of Yiddish at the Universitat Dusseldorf) and Roland Gruschka, immediately and clearly sets itself apart from all that ilk and provides German readers with a thorough and expert general introduction to the history and character of the Yiddish language. While aiming for a lay audience, the authors construct their subject neither as a prompt for quasi-vaudeville-esque jesting nor nostalgic mame-loshn sentimentality, but rather as an object of scholarly research to be made accessible to a general readership. They make copious use of literary examples throughout the book (transcribed using an idiosyncratic, Germanized system, and ttanslated into idiomatic German), but indicate already at the outset that their purpose is a survey of Yiddish language - not literary - history. In nine brief chapters (each with a very short and idiosyncratic list of further readings at the end of the book), organized generally chronologically, the linguistic and cultural history of Yiddish is unfolded from its beginnings a thousand years ago in Central Europe to the scattered Hasidic communities of the twenty-first century, where - alone - the language still thrives as a community language. …