Yiddish: A Nation of Words
- ISBN-10
- 1586420275
- ISBN-13
- 9781586420277
- Series
- Yiddish
- Category
- Religion / Judaism / History
- Pages
- 303
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2001
- Publisher
- Steerforth Press
- Author
- Miriam Weinstein
Description
THIS FIRST-EVER 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 far-flung relations. In it they produced one of the world's most richly human cultures.
Impoverished and disenfranchised in the eyes of the world, Yiddish-speakers 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, city-state, territory. They were a people's 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 Russian-Chinese 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)
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2016-09-23
- 544 pages
- Ebook
- University of Toronto Press
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