Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.278 April 4, 1997 1) Yiddish Studies in Israel IV (Leonard Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Mar 97 23:48:26 IST From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il Subject: Yiddish Studies in Israel IV The Electronic Age Yiddish studies in Israel are thriving and will continue to do so because of the high motivation of its practitioners and the great opportunities offered by Israel's libraries and archives (of Itsik Manger, Meylekh Ravitsh, Dov Sadan, Avrom Sutskever, etc.). (9) Significant, too, are the new technological resources at the researcher's command: on-line searches, the ability to consult the catalogs of virtually every major world library, the availablilty of huge data bases and cumulative bibliographies on CD-ROM, not to mention microfilms, microfiches, sophisticated copying and fax machines, electronic mail, networking, periodic meetings, etc. The World Congress of Jewish Studies, which meets every four years in Jerusalem, has numerous sessions devoted to Yiddish language and literature. At the last meetings, a central theme was the Linguistic and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry , the first volume of which has since appeared (to be followed, we are promised, by seven more). This is surely the most ambitious Yiddish scholarly project ever attempted. Thanks to decades of hard work and preparation and to fruitful cooperation between American and German Yiddishists, the project is on the highest level of linguistic geography and dialectology. Generations of scholars will consult this seminal work. Now, the Old News Twenty years ago I published my first reflections on the subject of Yiddish in the academy, focusing on a few, now commonplace, ironies.(10) These have not worn thin in two decades, but the world in which we perceive them has changed substantially. I wrote at that time: "Among many older and younger Jews, there is today a certain awareness of Yiddish as one of the great monuments of the past millenium of Jewish life. This awareness often includes the sense of a tragic rupture with the past and reveals an effort to somehow relate to that past. Post-Enlightenment ideological issues have lost their relevance, thus facilitating the objective study of Yiddish and Yiddish literature. At the same time the relevance of such study, focused as it is on the past, continues to be questioned."(11) As long as there was an Eastern European hinterland with a vibrant Jewish life, diasporan and even Palestinian secularist Yiddishism (e.g., of the Left Poalei Zion brand) seemed to be a viable way of remaining a Jew in the modern world. With the physical destruction of most of Eastern European Jewry, this brand of Jewishness lost much of its raison d'etre, even though scattered groups of individuals continued to pattern their lives in the spirit of rational progressivism and Yiddish-language ethnicity. The Yiddishist scholarly enterprise,too, lacked the sense of historical connectedness and community once it nestled in the aloof academy. I noted, too, as so many observers continue to do, that the one segment of world Jewry which lives in Yiddish, the ultra-Orthodox (or charadim as they are called in Israel), are, as ever, indifferent to the great Yiddish cultural renascence of the past hundred years. In that earlier essay I dwelt at length on the quantitative growth of academic Yiddish programs and courses throughout the world on the one hand, and on the other, the actual paucity of high-level advanced studies in Yiddish and the difficulties which determine this scarcity. "Yiddishist" today is generally taken to be someone who specializes in Yiddish (cf. _zamler_ in American Jewish parlance, once 'book collector', today 'one who rescues Yiddish books (for others to read)'. In Israel the renativization of Hebrew was a resounding success; in the Diaspora Jewish languages everywhere declined in the face of increased integration or assimilation. Yiddishland, once the largest contiguous area of any European language -- from Holland to Siberia -- shrank to a few ultra-Orthodox reservations in Jerusalem, Bnai Brak, Williamsburg (New York), Stamford Hill (London) and a few other places. Since then Yiddish has continued to thrive among those who reject the world and decline among the world-affirming secular Jews, the thrust of whose cultural renaissance was to live in the world among the nations but in their own thousand-year old tongue. University of Haifa Endnotes 1. See Arye Pilovski, _Tsvishn yo un neyn_, chapter 4. 2. Leonard Prager and David L. Gold, "Hebrew-Yiddish Relations in Israel," _The Jewish Quarterly_ 1988, vol. 35, no. 22, p. 46. 3. In eulogizing him in _Di goldene keyt_ 1990, vol. 128, p. 5. 4. English title: _Studies in Jewish Culture in Honour of Chone Shmeruk_ (edited by Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, Chava Turniansky, Jerusalem, 1993). Six of the essays are in English, twelve in Hebrew, and one in Yiddish by the present chairperson of the Department of Yiddish of the Hebrew University, Chava Turniansky, who was herself trained by Shmeruk, and who authored the twenty-five page Shmeruk bibliography in the volume. 5. Word play on the similar-sounding _Talmud_ and _talmid_. 6. See his "Problems of Reversing Language Shift," _Di goldene keyt_ 1990, vol. 130, pp. 6-16 [in Yiddish]; _Reversing Langage Shift; Theoretical and Applied Foundations of Asssitance to Threatened Languages_, London: Multilingual Matters, 1991. 7. See Alexander Beider, _A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire_, Teaneck, NJ: Avoteynu, 1993. 8. One of them was Johannes L. Brozi, who wrote "A gebentshter ziveg fun a yortsendlik" in _Di goldene keyt_ 1992, vol. 133, pp. 199-201; other non-Jews have also written for this Israeli Yiddish quarterly. 9. The Yiddish archivist at the National Library in Jerusalem is the Yiddish (and now also Hebrew) writer Yosele Birshteyn, who is in many respects a "discovery" of the influential Hebrew critic Menachem Perry. Birshteyn may stand as a symbol of a new Hebrew-Yiddish symbiosis. 10. See "Yiddish in the University," _The Jewish Quarterly_ (London) 1974, vol. 22, nos. 1-2, pp. 31-40. 11. Reprinted in _Never Say Die_, p. 532. References Novershtern, Abraham. "From the Folk to the Academics: Study and Research of Yiddish after the Hololcaust," _Encyclopaedia Judaica Yearbook 1988/1989_, Jerusalem: Keter, 1989, pp. 14-24. Pilovski, Arye. _Tsvishn yo un neyn; yidish un yidish-literatur in erets-yisroel, 1907-1949_, Tel Aviv: World Council for Yiddish and Jewish Culture, 1986. Prager, Leonard. "Yiddish in the University," in Joshua A. Fishman, ed., _Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters_, The Hague / Paris / New York: Mouton, 1981, pp. 529-545 (reprinted from _The Jewish Quarterly_ 1974, vol. 22, nos. 1-2, pp. 31-40. Prager, Leonard. "Hebrew-Yiddish Relations in Israel,", _The Jewish Quarterly_, 35:2 (1988), 46-50 (with David L. Gold). Roskies, David. "The Emancipation of Yiddish," _Prooftexts; A Journal of Jewish Literary History_, 1981, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 28-42. Shmeruk, Khone. "Yidish in universitetn," _Di goldene keyt_ 1971, vol. 91, pp. 39-48. Postscript: 1. The editors of _La Rassegna Mensile di Israel_ preferred the conventional forms of Yiddish names over the standard Yivo romanization, e.g Sholem Aleichem rather than Sholem Aleykhem; Avraham Sutzkever rather than Avrom Sutskever. There is a real dilemma when the writer himself prefers a spelling which does not conform to Yivo rules. 2. The editor of _Haifa Studies in Jewish Theater and Drama_ (JTD) recently announced that, notwithstanding its original intentions, the journal would be devoted to drama in general. 3. Technological aids: the recently announced electronic pen (scanner, memory chip with huge glossaries) which translates French, German, Spanish, Hebrew and potentially many other languages from and into English may someday help students in reading printed Yiddish texts. Again, the question arises (as it has over the problem of fonts), how many gadget-savvy Yiddish-users are there? Will Yiddish interest really profit from technological advances in the absence of crucial socio-cultural conditions? Leonard Prager [end of Part 4] ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.278