Yiddish Lives On

The language of a thousand years of European Jewish civilization that was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust, Yiddish has emerged as a vehicle for young people to engage with their heritage and identity. Although widely considered an endangered language, Yiddish has evolved as a site for creative renewal in the Jewish world and beyond in addition to being used daily within Hasidic communities. Yiddish Lives On explores the continuity of the language in the hands of a diverse group of native, heritage, and new speakers. The book tells stories of communities in Canada and abroad that have resisted the decline of Yiddish over a period of seventy years, spotlighting strategies that facilitate continuity through family transmission, theatre, activism, publishing, song, cinema, and other new media. Rebecca Margolis uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies from history, sociolinguistics, ethnography, digital humanities, and screen studies to examine the ways in which engagement with Yiddish has evolved across multiple planes. Investigating the products of an abiding dedication to cultural continuity among successive generations, Yiddish Lives On offers innovative approaches to the preservation, promotion, and revitalization of minority, heritage, and lesser-taught languages.

Looking at Montreal's Jewish community during the first half of the twentieth century, Margolis explores the lives and works of activists, writers, scholars, performers, and organizations that fuelled a still-thriving community. She also considers the foundations and development of Yiddish cultural life in Montreal in its interaction with broader issues of diasporic Jewish culture. An illuminating look at the ways in which Yiddish culture was maintained in North America, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil is the story of how a minority culture was transplanted and transformed.

Adventures in Yiddishland examines the transformation of Yiddish in the six decades since the Holocaust, tracing its shift from the language of daily life for millions of Jews to what the author terms a postvernacular language of diverse and expanding symbolic value. With a thorough command of modern Yiddish culture as well as its centuries-old history, Jeffrey Shandler investigates the remarkable diversity of contemporary encounters with the language. His study traverses the broad spectrum of people who engage with Yiddish—from Hasidim to avant-garde performers, Jews as well as non-Jews, fluent speakers as well as those who know little or no Yiddish—in communities across the Americas, in Europe, Israel, and other outposts of "Yiddishland."

In interwar and post-Holocaust New York, Yiddish autobiographers responded to the upheaval of modern Jewish life in ways that combined artistic innovation with commemoration for a world that is no more. Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers is the first comprehensive study of the autobiographical genre in Yiddish literature. Jan Schwarz offers portraits of seven major Yiddish writers, showing the writer's struggles to shape the multiple identities of their ruptured lives in autobiographical fiction. This analysis of Yiddish life-writing includes discussions of literary representation, self and collectivity, and memory in modern Jewish literature. Schwarz shows how Yiddish autobiographical fiction fuses novelistic elements and memoiristic truthfulness in ways that also characterize Jewish life-writing in English and Hebrew. His accessible style, biographical sketches, glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish words, and careful survey of notable texts takes readers on an incomparable journey through modern Yiddish literature.

Worldwide interest in Yiddish has often concentrated on its secular forms of expression: its literature, its theater, its journalism and its political-party associations. This all-encompassing study, covers these phenomena as well as investigating the demographic and political mushrooming of Yiddish-speaking Ultra-Orthodoxy, both in America and in Israel. As the title suggests, this volume attempts to show that Yiddish is now finally on the path towards recovery. The volume consists of 17 papers grouped into five sections: Yiddish and Hebrew: Conflict and Symbiosis; Yiddish in America; Corpus Planning: The ability to change and grow; Status Planning: The Tshernovits Conference of 1908; Stock-taking: Where are we now? Each section is prefaced by an introduction. In addition there are also five papers written in Yiddish. The work emphasises an empirical and theoretical approach to the growing Ultra-Orthodox sector, that until now, has largely been ignored. Fishman's interest in Yiddish (among other Jewish languages) has previously been difficult to access and it is hoped that the appearance of this book will go some way toward alleviating this situation. The volume also includes a statistical appendix bringing together data on Yiddish for the past 100 years from the Czarist Empire, the USSR, Poland, Israel, the USA, and other parts of the world. This extensive and enlightening study should be of interest to sociolinguists and all those engaged in efforts on behalf of small languages everywhere.

The phenomenal rise of Yiddish language and culture is one of the most interesting and colorful sagas of modern Jewish history. In this significant book, Dr. Goldsmith relates the growth of Yiddish to the explosion of Jewish literature, the surge of Zionism, and the popularity of Socialism that impacted upon the Jews of Europe, America, and Israel. Including a study of the major personalities associated with the first Yiddish Language Conference (1908, ) this is the first comprehensive work to explore a movement that affected the lives of millions of Jews before the Holocaust and continues to influence Jewish life throughout the world.

WINNER 2001 CANADIAN JEWISH BOOK AWARDS Izzy and Betty Kirshenbaum FoundationPrize for Yiddish translation Montreal of Yesterday was originally published in Yiddish in 1947. It had earlier appeared in installments in the pages of the Keneder Adler - the Canadian Eagle - Montreal's legendary Yiddish-language newspaper. For the first time, this captivating classic on Jewish immigrant life in Montreal (1900-1920) is available in English. In the 54 short chapters of Montreal of Yesterday Medres writes with charm and gentle humour about immigrant life, class divisions, the first socialists, the first Jewish bookstore, Canadian life, the press, art and business, Yiddish vaudeville, politics and citizenship, Jewish soldiers, writers, the poor, and religious observance.

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989 by recovering and analyzing the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust.