The Philadelphia Inquirer
Nov. 18, 2001

“Yiddish: A Nation of Words”
By Miriam Weinstein
Steerforth Press. 300 pp. $26.

Review by Andrew Cassel

Yiddish can be a touchy subject. Those who love it can sometimes sound like cranky killjoys. I include myself. My own obsession with Yiddish began a decade ago. My grandfather, whom I never knew, published Yiddish essays and memoirs in the 1930s, describing his home and early life in Lithuania. These writings gathered dust for nearly 60 years, and when I discovered them they seemed like a locked treasure box whose key had long since disappeared.

Who knew what might be inside? Anyone who inherited such a box would certainly learn to pick locks, or at least hire a locksmith. Locksmiths – translators, that is – are expensive, so I set out to learn Yiddish.

It was more than worth the effort. Not only did I find a way back to my grandfather and his world; I also got access to such great writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem and Avrohom Sutzkever in the bargain. Yiddish brought me closer to a history and a heritage, in ways that simply are not possible without it.

The mother tongue of the Ashkenazim – northern European Jews – for 1,000 years, Yiddish has been largely discarded. How this happened is a complex, fascinating and terribly sad story, and it’s the story Miriam Weinstein sets out to tell in “Yiddish: A Nation of Words.” A freelance writer who lives in Massachusetts, she is at least up-front about her own lack of scholarly or literary credentials. But she claims to be filling an unmet need; other books written about Yiddish, she says, are either academic, too heavy for the casual reader, or schmaltzy nostalgic wallows without much serious content.

Given the number of books published every year by and about Jews, this seems almost incredible, but in fact Weinstein is right. And you can see why. Writing seriously about Yiddish for a general audience of English readers is not unlike writing about Mozart for deaf people. No matter how skilled you are, there are obstacles between the audience and the subject that you’re not going to overcome.

Weinstein herself isn’t a bad writer, but she stumbles quite a bit trying to present the history and dynamics of a language to people who think of it principally as a source of dirty-joke words and funny accents. Her desire to be user-friendly and inclusive leads her to try some truly weird things, such as illustrating how the Yiddish and Hebrew alphabets work by printing Roman letters backwards in the text.

Then there are the Yiddish proverbs and aphorisms she inserts much too frequently into her narrative. She’s trying to convey the language’s tam (Yiddish for “flavor”), but the effort is forced and self-conscious. Weinstein seems to lack confidence that her readers will make it through a chapter without a snappy one-liner every couple of paragraphs. In later chapters, when she relaxes a bit and just writes, she’s fine. But the overall effect is uneven, even sloppy.

Creditably, Weinstein touches most of the historical bases, from the polyglot world of the Eastern European shtetl (town) in which Yiddish thrived to the language’s rise and fall under the Soviets and its enthusiastic suppression by Zionists intent on reviving Hebrew in the new Jewish state of Israel. Less well-covered is the all-too-brief period of Yiddish’s flowering as a formal literary language, during which hundreds of writers published tens of thousands of titles and scores of Yiddish newspapers and magazines were printed on virtually every continent. Not bad for a language that even many of its native speakers openly despised as zhargon.

Even an occasional factual flub – she mixes up two generations of American Yiddish poets, for instance – can be forgiven in the context of filling some woeful gaps in the general public knowledge of Yiddish’s cultural trajectory. But to do justice to the legions of poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists and journalists who worked and lived in Yiddish would be to write another of those “heavy” books that Weinstein doesn’t think will reach a mass audience. She may be right; certainly she’ll get further on the synagogue-lecture circuit than most of the serious scholars who have made Yiddish a respectable academic discipline.

But it’s ultimately not clear to me what this book will actually accomplish. Those who want only to think warm thoughts about Yiddish will find more here than they can use. Meanwhile, those hoping to learn enough to pick the locks on their own Yiddish treasure boxes will find they need much more than Weinstein’s book offers.