Yiddish: Biography of a Language by Jeffrey Shandler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Yiddish: Biography of a Language by Jeffrey Shandler Gennady Estraikh Jeffrey Shandler. Yiddish: Biography of a Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 264 pp. It is no coincidence that Jeffrey Shandler turns in his new book to anthropomorphism, which is widely used in school education, making historical and other narratives more vivid and engaging. Yiddish: Biography of a Language has to be seen not as purely an academic work, but as largely a reading for those who know little about Yiddish. Moreover, it is a portrayal of the language depicted from a very personal vantage point, giving the book its own interesting twist to make it different from other works on and around Yiddish. Attribution of human characteristics to Yiddish implies unavoidably that the language has a lifespan, from birth to death. True, Yiddish is not pronounced dead in the book. Rather, the language continues to live in ultra-Orthodox communities (which are of obviously little interest to the author) and operates, predominantly in a "postvernacular"—symbolic—mode, among less or nonobservant Jews as well as non-Jewish enthusiasts. As we know, Shandler's term "postvernacular Yiddish" has found a niche in the academic discourse. The contention of seven cities for the birth place of Homer pales in comparison with the debate on where Yiddish—or proto-Yiddish—saw the light of day for the first time. Who were its speakers? Were they really directly related to the Jews from the Land of Israel? Was it in its early years a Germanic language or, rather, did it first develop as a Slavic vernacular and adopt Germanic traits later? Application of contemporary DNA methods adds a Jurassic Park spice to the discussion, with participation of historical linguists and lay researchers. Shandler carefully navigates this treacherous terrain in one of the best chapters of his book. It is an open secret that a millennium or so after the "birth" of the language, many vital "organs" of Yiddish have become entirely or partly atrophied. One of the organs is academic work in Yiddish. From the 1910s onwards, academic [End Page 176] publications in Yiddish aimed to show in particular that Yiddish belongs to the category of languages rather than to lexically deficient "jargons." Shandler argues that all Yiddish "research institutions, established in the 1920s and 1930s, were liquidated during World War II." In fact, the Soviet authorities closed the Minsk and Kiev institutes as early as 1936, leaving a smaller academic unit in Kiev (and in evacuation during the war) operational until its liquidation in 1949. In the 1950s and later, Yiddish studies found a growing recognition in American, Israeli, and other universities. However, English, Hebrew, German, and, to a lesser degree, a few other languages have been the working mediums for Yiddish studies. The YIVO Institute, established in Europe almost a century ago as a trend-setting scholarly and language-planning Yiddish Olympus, functions in New York almost exclusively as an exceptionally important library-cum-archive. The 1990s saw the last noteworthy attempts to produce academic publications in Yiddish, though lectures on academic topics have continued to be delivered on some occasions. The decline in the 1990s of the Tel Aviv literary journal Di goldene keyt (The golden chain), its Moscow counterpart Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland, called in its post-Soviet years Di yidishe gas—The Jewish street), and a couple of smaller literary periodicals effectively marked the end of secular Yiddish literature as an institution. This became particularly clear after the failure of the Oxford-based monthly journal Di pen (The pen, 1994–1998) to demonstrate that Yiddish literary creativity had not lost its vitality. The journal was discontinued due to lack of contributors and readers. There are talented people who continue to write in Yiddish (Brooklynite Boris Sandler is arguably the most significant among them) and have an Internet-based regular and occasional readership of, probably, several hundred worldwide, which does not amount to what can be called an institution. The reader of Yiddish: Biography of a Language gets predominantly a telescopic view on Yiddish and its associated culture. It is probably good for a popular book not to overload the reader with facts and names. However, the...