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Loading... Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (original 2005; edition 2005)by Paul Kriwaczek
Work InformationYiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation by Paul Kriwaczek (2005)
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In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea. In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels. Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.4924History and Geography Europe Europe Military History Of World War I Illustrative material DramaLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4)
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Wikipedia in English (1)
7
So much history here, packed into such a small area. Yiddish(ele) is the language of diminutive suffixes, and really only arrives a quarter or a third of the way into the book, with the Cambridge codex from 1382 (found in Cairo, not Ashkenaz.) Kriwaczek deftly explains what Yiddish is: Definitely not a straightforward combination of the most useful parts of German and Hebrew and Slavic, but a mishmash of them, organically formed over the course of centuries.
In the beginning, Kriwaczek seems to conjecture, Jews may have moved deeper and deeper into the woods of sparsely-populated Eastern Europe from the more populated Mediterranean areas. And what about the infamous Khazar theory? Not discussed, perhaps indicating the author's unfitness for historiographic review, which could have made this highly contested topic more interesting. He mentions the influence of Tatar (think the nomadic Turkic-Mongols) on modern-day Hasidic dress (think furry black hats, shtreimels) via Polish nobility. He discusses the impact of the Protest Reformation on the Jews — seemingly a disastrous one, leading to turmoil and expulsions, following the ones from England and Spain. He discusses the Hassidic-Mitnaged split, and the many famous characters and heroes and even antagonists of Yiddish civ and of the Jewish world in general (like the Rama, the false messiah Shabtai Zvi, the Besht, Moses Mendelson...) One of my favorite parts was the story of Glikel of Hameln -- a matriarch who wrote a diary after her husband died, the tale of an ordinary life of a grieving Yiddish-speaking woman.
So much is missing, too! I was looking for some description of the Yiddish theater scene. Perhaps a word or two about Spinoza (did he not speak Yiddish?), and many more words about the exile of Jews from Palesine, and nothing, really, comes after the World War I in the this book. Alas. (