What Must be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine, by Yael Chaver. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004. 238 pp. $29.95. To tell story of loss is to create presence. This seems to be cardinal rule behind Yael Chaver's lovingly rendered world of Yiddish letters in Yishuv. What Must be Forgotten is a beautiful and important book, uncovering and resuscitating a part of Yishuv experience which was, as author demonstrates, a more essential part of life than mainstream historiography would have us believe. For anyone familiar with modern Hebrew literature, this book will be engrossing, enlightening, and occasionally provocative. Chaver's study alternates between case studies of individual authors (Zalmen Brokhes, Avrom Reiss, and Rikuda Potash) and historical surveys of role of language in modern Jewish nationalism. The detailed and well-researched panorama of modern Jewish letters analyzes both canonical and lesser-known works. Sometimes author leads us to a surprising place and then leaves us there-as in assertion describing Brenner and Agnon as the major voices of difference in cultural consensus (p. 44). While this study does read their work in a way that convincingly demonstrates both writers' proclivity for linguistic diversity, it is difficult to conceive of two such canonical giants as paragons of difference. Beneath extraordinary cast of characters that Chaver assembles is an important subplot concerning rise of Hebrew and demise of Yiddish as modern literary vernaculars. In contradistinction to familiar tale of Zionist, and later Israeli, institutional distaste (to put it mildly) for Yiddish and everything it stood for, Chaver's nuanced reading of Jewish culture in Yishuv demonstrates just how close average experience of most immigrants to Yiddish literature may have been. This is a more radical proposition than it perhaps sounds. However, just as Israeli sociologists and social historians have begun to depict Yishuv from down under, this study shows how Yiddish literary texts succeeded in representing psychological flavor of immigrant experience in terms that are both familiar and strange-the overwhelming tension between isolation and belonging, exoticness of landscape and its multitudes, pressures of collective upon individual-themes which Hebrew literature did not fully engage until much later. Scholars of literary history are increasingly sensitive to questions of geography and place, and Chaver's study is part of this general re-mapping of Jewish and Hebrew literary history. As centers of Hebrew literary production migrated out of Eastern Europe to Mediterranean, problem of naming emerged, and remains. …