Review: The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

Author: Neal Karlen

ISBN: 978-0-06-083711-2

Neal Karlen points out in The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews that for hundreds of years mavens have considered Yiddish to have as many linguistic meanings as the word oy. It has been considered a jargon, dialect, vulgar street slang, language, secret code, medium of high art, punishment, Jewish Esperanto, or at times even an embarrassment to its people. Yet as Karlen reminds us, "it´s always been anything but trivial."

Moreover, it has saved the Jews from assimilation or disappearance. It is a unique language that has always been considered to be dying and that is unable to find its mother, father, or, as with the Hebrew language, divine roots. Instead, as Karlen rightfully states, "it sprung naturally from the Jewish experience and need to survive the murderous sabers of Crusaders on the way to Jerusalem. The Language, for good and rotten over the last thousand years, held the Chosen together with their own Esperanto as they were chased and kicked around the world."

Dividing itself into fifteen chapters the book attempts to answer the following question: "Not long ago, this mish-mosh of other peoples languages and worlds was thought to be a dialect of Jewish pig Latin. How could such a mongrel tongue that includes French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance Languages, and a dozen other tongues native to places where Jews were briefly given shelter save the Jews at the same time it was so derided? The answer is this: The Story of Yiddish."

In order to answer the question as completely as possible in what makes Yiddish such a different language from any other, Karlen explores such topics as what is Yiddishkeit, the soul of Yiddish, its history, sounds and secrets, what does Bob Dylan, Sandy Koufax, the Duchess of York, Fergie and Woody Guthrie have to do with Yiddish, the Chasidim and Yiddish, the old world shtetls and ghettos, Yiddish weaklings, beliefs, God, and Yiddish revenge, coming to American and German-Jewish self-loathing, the Yiddish daily newspapers, and present day Yiddish and Yiddishkeit today.

The beauty of these chapters is that they don´t have to be read in sequence and can easily be read out of order, by pages, paragraphs, or sentences.

As the book mentions, Yiddish was conceived as slang meant for illiterate Jewish peasants, women, children, and intellectual nincompoops. And yet it was voted least likely to succeed even by its own people as it eventually began to morph into a linguistic sponge borrowing from every country from which the Jews were chased out of as they wandered the globe during their mostly hideous Diaspora. In the words of Karlen, it was invented piece by piece by the Jews.

In writing this book, Karlen has sidestepped academic gobbledygook, and as we can appreciate, The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews is a labor of love as well as reflective scholarship evidencing a great deal of exhaustive research which at the same time is not exhausting for the reader.

There have been other books about Yiddish, however, Karlen´s tome will probably take us as close as we can get to the truth about why and how it has survived, and it is a most enjoyable journey for anyone, Jewish and non-Jewish, who wishes to know more about a language that was supposed to have died years ago.

Karlen began speaking Yiddish at home well before he became a staff writer at Newsweek and Rolling Stone. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and he has authored six books. He studied Yiddish at Brown University, New York´s Inlingua Institute, and the University of Minnesota´s Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches non-fiction writing.

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