YIDDISH AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
Reviewed by Anna Shternshis

YIDDISH AFTER THE HOLOCAUST. Joseph Sherman, ed. (Oxford: Boulevard Books, 2004), 326 pp.

In the early 20th century, most of the world's Jewish population
spoke Yiddish on a daily basis. Turbulent events during subsequent
decades, including assimilation of North American Jews, educational
policies of the early Soviet government towards Russian Jewry, and
cultural experiments in Poland, steadily eroded this number.

The assimilation of North American Jewry, mostly voluntary,
nevertheless led to dramatic secularization of the community. During
the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet state supported an elaborate system
of Jewish secular (which in the Soviet context meant anti-religious)
education, supported publications in Yiddish which were hostile to
Judaism as a religion, and developed a network of Yiddish press,
theaters and clubs, all designed to separate Jews from the Jewish
religion. In Poland, numerous Jewish political parties, including
radicals (Bundists), left-wing Zionists (Poaley Zion), religious
Zionists (Mizrakhi), and other religious movements (such as Agudat
Israel), all competed for membership among Polish Jewish youth by
establishing numerous schools and camps, organizing theatrical
performances and concert evenings, and, most of all, by publishing
new literature. But because the Polish state never supported most of
these movements, and, most importantly, did not fund any of the
Jewish schools, the Jewish elite, followed by the middle class, was
well on the way to assimilation and acculturation, whereas the
majority of Polish Jews still spoke Yiddish on a daily basis, and
were aware of their ethnic and religious identity.

During 1939-1945, the Holocaust physically destroyed a majority of
remaining Yiddish speakers. The Soviet government, led by Joseph
Stalin, eliminated the last Yiddish-speaking elite in 1952. Since
then, Yiddish language and culture have no longer been part of the
Jewish mainstream. However, as Joseph Sherman, the editor of the new
anthology Yiddish after the Holocaust (Boulevard Books, 2004)
remarks, "the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have
proved dramatically resilient, and the Yiddish language managed to
become a focus of serious intellectual artistic and scholarly
activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of
World War II." The sixteen essays collected in this volume strive to
explore various aspects of the surviving Yiddish culture, which,
according to the authors, ranges from the early post-Holocaust
creativity of talented Yiddish writers such as Avraham Sutskever to
Yiddish textbooks of Ultra-Orthodox girls' schools in Montreal.
Another important issue discussed in this work, is "the future" of
the Yiddish language, its speakers, its literature, its theater and
its education.

Judging by the quality of the essays collected in the volume (almost
all written by professional Yiddishists, including literary scholars,
historians, sociologists and educators), the future of Yiddish
studies seems to be almost as diverse and controversial as early 20th
century predictions about the Yiddish language. Dovid Kats, arguably
the world's foremost Yiddish linguist and scholar (whose writings are
not included in this anthology) argues that the future of Yiddish
belongs to the Hassidic community, where children learn this language
and use it for everyday life. Some authors of this anthology agree
with this theory, and indeed, some of the most interesting essays are
devoted to contemporary communities such as the Hassidim that use
Yiddish on a daily basis.

In her essay "Languages Sometimes in Contact: Components in Yiddish
Hasidic Children's Literature," Miriam Isaacs observes that language
signifies more than just vernacular in many contemporary Hassidic
books for children, but rather is used to address different kinds of
Hassidic audiences. English versions of Yiddish texts seem to be
explanatory, whereas Yiddish ones are targeted for more religious
audiences. Isaacs argues that because normal patterns of language
transmission have been disrupted during the post-Holocaust period,
Hassidic educators and writers themselves often have limited
proficiency in Yiddish. The Yiddish that children learn from such
books is far from the standardized language taught at the
universities and secular schools, but it is most likely to survive
among contemporary native Yiddish speakers around the globe.
Isaac's theory is confirmed by the study "Commitment to a Language:
Teaching Yiddish in a Hasidic and Secular Jewish School," by Anna
Fishman Gonshor and William Shaffir, who closely compared how Yiddish
is taught in two schools in Quebec: Bialik School in Montreal and
Beys Tsirl Skul for Ultra-Orthodox girls located some 25 km. away.
While Bialik teachers know standard Yiddish, the administration's
interested in the subject has been declining due to the school's
perceived lack of practical uses of the language. In contrast, in
Beys Tsirl, teachers speak grammatically incorrect Yiddish, but the
language is thriving because it is seen as an important part of every
girl's education, as she is expected to speak Yiddish better than any
other language. As a result, Orthodox communities manage to keep the
Yiddish language, albeit in a non-standard form, alive and well for
the generations to come.

The Ultra-Orthodox might be the only major community that will speak
Yiddish in the twenty-first century, but this is a group which is,
for the most part, not interested in the secular and even religious
culture created in this language in the past. All other Yiddishists
attempt to find some sort of "useable past" in the rich Yiddish
heritage, including its literature, folklore, and other cultural
products. Klezmer music and pre-Holocaust and Holocaust accounts in
the Yiddish language are just a few examples of the materials that
keep interest in Yiddish alive and well among secular Jews and even
non-Jews.

One concern facing the new generation of secular Yiddish speakers,
who learn their Yiddish in an academic environment, is that their
Yiddish is quite "artificial," as it is not typically used in daily
life. More importantly, their knowledge of Yiddish might be
sufficient to understand song lyrics, but not nearly enough to
adequately understand and translate more complicated texts written by
native speakers during the first half of the twentieth century. In
her essay, "The Perils of Idealizing Yiddish," Ewa Geller, a Polish
historian, argues that many Holocaust memoirs are not translated
correctly, simply because translators could not understand the
vocabulary. Moreover, even one-on-one oral histories conducted by
Yiddish students with native speakers seem to lack an interactive
nature, as interviewers often do not understand interviewees because
of the latter's dialect and pronunciation. Therefore, it is quite
possible that Yiddish literature and source material in English
translation does not fully reflect the original, and can even
misinterpret it, just as often occurs in bilingual Hassidic books for
children, as discussed by Miriam Isaacs.

Another model for the survival of Yiddish is elaborated by Regine
Robin, a Montreal-based scholar and Holocaust survivor, who argues
that Yiddish culture will survive in memory and through nostalgia.
Canadian scholar Ben-Zion Shek, in his essay on literary works by
Robin entitled "Pour l'amour du yiddish:: The Literary Itinerary of
Regine Robin," argues that Robin herself wrote about Yiddish because
of her personal experiences associated with this language, namely
surviving the Holocaust in Paris. She writes her books in French, but
her works will probably spark interest in learning the Yiddish
language among students and the lay public.

Paradoxes have always marked the history of the Yiddish language and
its survival. Who would have thought, as Zachary Baker reminds us in
his essay "Yiddish Publishing after 1945," that young Yiddish writers
who gathered around Arn Vergelis, the chief editor of the Communist
Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland, would become instrumental
in producing Forverts , the most popular North American Yiddish
weekly today. Yiddish also survives through other languages. Elaine
Gold, a Toronto-based linguist, reveals that numerous Yiddish words
have found their way into mainstream English-language Canadian
publications ("Yiddish Words in Canadian English: Spread and
Change"). Furthermore, post-modernist art is still being created in
Yiddish by authors such as Mikhail Felsenbaum, as Astrid Starck
analyzes in her fascinating essay "Shabesdike shvebelekh: A
Postmodernist Novel by Mikhail Felsenbaum."

Sherman's anthology is proof that Yiddish studies will probably
survive well beyond the twenty-first century. The book has its flaws,
namely that not all essays are at the same high academic level;
virtually all articles would benefit from additional copy-editing,
and most importantly, the selection lacks coherency and a unifying
base. However, there are also many valuable essays, as discussed
above, and these benefits greatly outweigh their flaws. I would
recommend this book to anyone interested in modern Yiddish studies.