Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish

There is much research that went into this study on the history of the yiddish language. Some readers may object to the emphasis on the religious aspect of the survival of spoken yiddish. Unfortunately the native yiddish speakers are a small lot, having died out. Real yiddish depends on having lived in a yiddish community, having spoken it as the primary language, being able to think in yiddish rather than thinking in english and interpreting the english into yiddish. Unfortunately, most of the present teachers of yiddish (especially in the universities) are passing on a second-hand yiddish that they themselves learned, not lived.To learn yiddish, one must be able to read it in the hebrew letters rather than in the transliteration mode.

anyone who is interested in Yiddish should read this book. Dovid Katz is a scholar who knows his stuff, and who has an appreciation for the difference between real Yiddish and the stuff that passes for Yiddish in college courses.

This is an extremely readable, comprehensive overview of the history of the language, social movements and other factors that impacted its changes over time. The best I have read on the topic.

For political reasons, a serious study of Yiddish language and culture has been ignored and shunted aside. Because of the stress on Israel and modern Hebrew, the world of the Ashkenazi Jew has been consigned to a double death in the aftermath of churban Europe (the holocaust). This has created a skewed and distorted view of Jewish history, culture and mores. It has even had a devastating impact on the modern synagogue, which has been stripped of its Ashkenazi roots, and consigns the traditional Cantor and choir of Eastern European tradition to the ash-bin of history. This book goes a long way to correct the common-place distortions and misapprehensions. Along the way, Dovid Katz presents an eminently readable, insightful and interesting account. It also points the way for future fruitful studies.

Any reader in the world with an open mind will find much of value (about culture, civilization, even something of psycholinguistics) in this history of Yiddish by Dovid Katz. His scholarship is immense, meticulous, and veritable as he traces the emergence of Yiddish from its Semitic roots, the assimilation of medieval German dialects, the conjunction with Slavic around 1300, and its complex life continuing into the 21st century. Knowing nothing about Yiddish and very little about early Jewish history in Europe, I was surprised by many descriptions, such as this one-- "While West Europe was butchering the `Christ killers,' much of Eastern Europe was shaping up as a multicultural pluralist haven in which a Jew had a good chance of living out his or her life in peace and quiet, and adhering to Jewish traditions without being abused, killed, or expelled because of them. Eastern Europe, which moderns often associate with lagging progress, was far ahead of the West in not slaughtering, torturing, or expelling people of a different faith or race." I find the enduring story of women and Yiddish to be fascinating. Katz points out, "Men had up to three languages to choose from. Women usually had only one." Well before the Modern Age, Yiddish provided Jewish women "a form of intellectual liberation" where their prayers were "a significant genre." Furthermore, "No Jewish law says, `Don't enjoy a good story in your native language.'" It was "revolutionary that a work written by a woman would appear with her name as the author." The poet Toybe "is a woman talking sternly to God in a time of community crisis, not afraid to take on God and argue with him." Toybe was published in the 17th century. Not only gathering a universe of facts, Katz is telling a larger story, one that reads with the vivacity and mystery of a novel with narrative twists, intrigues, ascents of light-hearted eloquence, descents of starkest sorrows. But beyond analytical insights, any reader with an open heart stands also to gain still more from this book--more of the youth and joys that the adventures of this people bring about, and much more of the tragedies. A forceful movement becomes evident in the chapter "A Yiddish-Kabbalah Partnership." Katz observes "The relationship between Yiddish and the Kabbalah [Jewish mysticism] is mysterious," and yet concretely "Kabbalah became a motivating factor in the enfranchisement of women and unlearned men." This paradigm shift dates to the late 17th century. In the 18th century comes Hasidism, "stressing the capacity of every person to communicate with God ... a grassroots movement for the empowerment of the masses of simple people, women and men." With gathering momentum, the story of Yiddish arrives in the 19th and 20th centuries and the New World. Katz describes how classical Judaism "gave way to the modern Jew .... In many individual cases, it happened sometime close to the moment that an ancestor got off the boat at Ellis Island, had a l