Book Review: The Story of Yiddish - How A Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews by Neal Karlen

Like myself, journalist Neal Karlen is a Jew who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking environment of Eastern European Jews. Even though my family spoke primarily English, and according to commentators on other Yiddish book reviews of mine here did not even speak correct Yiddish, I still remember and am comforted by the lingua franca of my people. To this day, whenever someone pisses me off and I am confident they won’t understand me I will mutter “Koosh mir in tuchus!” (“Kiss my ass!”).

So who better to take on, from both a journalistic/academic and personal perspective, the history of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit (literally the soul of Yiddish)? Especially in America where so many Yiddish words and phrases are now part of the common vernacular (I mean, very few people don’t know what ”Oy”, “Mensch”, “Kibitz”, “Goy” mean? Karlen seeks to give his reader a sense of the old world origins of Yiddish, the sounds of Yiddish, the life and soul of Yiddish. History, sociology, and entertainment collide in this work which is interesting on many levels.

Yiddish is the language of the Jews, a mix of old German dialects, French, Italian, Aramaic, ancient Hebrew, and the Slavic, Romance, and at least twelve other languages that were picked up from places that sheltered Jews, however briefly. By 1939 Yiddish was the main language of over 11 million Jews, many of whom were killed in the Holocaust. After the Holocaust many Jews themselves, in the interests of assimilation, tried to erase Yiddish. Yiddish was viewed as the old world embarrassing symbol of the weak and scared Ghetto Jews, something not needed by the modern Zionists in Israel or the contemporary Jews in other countries.

Yiddish was carried on in small pockets, such as the Chasidic Jewish communities in New York and beyond. And Yiddish was certainly inserted in the comedies of Mel Brooks, in the Marx Brothers films, in the work of Woody Allen, Barbara Streisand, Zero Mostel, and Lenny Bruce. And who can forget Saturday Night Live’s Linda Richman always “getting verklempft”?

But then you also have the stories of people like Irving Berlin, the composer of “White Christmas”, who in his early career as Israel Isodor Baline wrote and published Yiddish songs. Why did he change? Perhaps his memory that “any Jew who mistakenly ventured into Irish territory on All Saints Day was, if caught, dragged to the East Side docks, then tossed into the East River.”

This book is a treasure; it is a gift. Karlen’s thesis that Yiddish is the Jews’ mother tongue and is what has helped us to survive over many generations and many killing times is compelling. Reading this book felt like going home as hearing Yiddish feels like home. Despite all attempts to quash it Yiddish is still here, as vital and strong as ever. Jews have survived, Yiddish has survived, and Yiddishkeit has survived. This is our story.

Article Author: Lynda Lippin

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