Yiddish: A Nation of Words

Preview:

THIS FIRSTEVER popular history of Yiddish is so full of life that it reads like a biography of the language. For a thousand years Yiddish was the glue that held a people together. Through the intimacies of daily use, it linked European Jews with their heroic past, their spiritual universe, their increasingly farflung relations. In it they produced one of the worlds most richly human cultures. Impoverished and disenfranchised in the eyes of the world, Yiddishspeakers created their own alternate reality wealthy in appreciation of the varieties of human behavior, spendthrift in humor, brilliantly inventive in maintaining and strengthening community. For a people of exile, the language took the place of a nation. The written and spoken word formed the Yiddishland that never came to be. Words were army, university, citystate, territory. They were a peoples home. The tale, which has never before been told, is nothing short of miraculous the saving of a people through speech. It ranges far beyond Europe, from North America to Israel to the RussianChinese border, and from the end of the first millenium to the present day. This book requires no previous knowledge of Yiddish or of Jewish history just a curious mind and an open heart. Yes God we are your chosen people. But why did you have to choose us?(Yiddish saying)

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