Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 235 April 30, 1992 1) Review of Harshav's THE MEANING OF YIDDISH (Arnold J. Band) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 29 Apr 92 11:16 PDT From: "Arnold J. Band" Subject: review (Continued from Vol 1 234) In order to explain the peculiar linguistic nature of Yiddish, Harshav begins by defining the "dialogic" features of post-Biblical Jewish literature written in both Hebrew and Aramaic so that he can later demonstrate the dialogic aspects of modern Yiddish discourse in Chapter Four which treats the "Semiotics of Yiddish Communication." By doing so, he roots the semiotics of modern Yiddish discourse as demonstrated in passages from Sholom Aleichem or M. L. Halpern in the very nature of Talmudic and Midrashic discourse. While specialists might find problems with such broad generalizations, they do help to contextualize the analysis of lexical and syntactic items. Relying heavily as one should on the work of Max Weinreich, Harshav deftly explains the former's theory of Yiddish as a language of fusion. In its earliest stages, probably in the tenth century, Yiddish was a dialect spoken by Ashkenazic Jews in Northern France and the Rhineland which had already fused within it Hebrew -Aramaic, Old French, Old Italian, and perhaps even Latin dialects which preceded Old French and Old Italian. The second and third stage of fusion involved, respectively, the engagement with the Slavic languages beginning in the sixteenth century, and English at the end of the nineteenth century. While the general lines of Weinreich's fusion theory are widely accepted and generally well known, Harshav concretizes this process in some twenty pages (pp. 40-61) of carefully chosen and sensitively explained lexical and morphological examples. The grafting of suffixes derived from one language on roots derived from a second language or the comparisons of certain Yiddish words with "Idealized Ashkenazi Hebrew" or Israeli Hebrew are especially illuminating. The dazzling mixture fused into a language with enormous expressive flexibility -- not a bastardized "zhargon" as it was regarded by certain Hebrew witers and hostile Gentile observers. Harshav summarizes: "In spite of the pervasive fusion, the German component seems to be in the center, to dominate the Yiddish text and to provide its 'floor,' as it were -- its basic morphology, syntactic framework, and the bulk of its vocabulary -- with the other two [[Hebrew/Aramaic and Slavic] coloring it in a variety of ways" (p. 43). And yet, he is open enough to assert that "The crucial component of Yiddish, what gives it its 'Jewish legitimation,' is Hebrew." The "openness" of Yiddish, its ability to absorb words from other languages while adapting them to its own basic grammatical framework, its dialogic discourse, and its referencing of Hebrew or Aramaic texts, its the emphasis Harshav would insist upon within or in addition to Weinreich's fusion theory. While he would agree with Weinreich and the Introspectivist poets in New York in the 1920's and 1930's that Yiddish is independent from its source languages and functioned as one integrated language in one integrated society -- two of the basic Herderian criteria of national identity -- he argues that this independence is balanced by a openness to infusions from other cultures. While this argument holds for the poets who interest him and whose marvelous poetry he has collected, one wonders how valid this argument is for the bulk of Yiddish speaking Jewry who were pious and relatively indifferent or hostile to the "modern Jewish revolution" which he describes in Chapter Five. Two of the more intriguing notions which Harshav advances in this essay are his ideas on the "semiotics of Yiddish Communication" in Chapter Four and "the historical perspective" on Yiddish -- and Hebrew -- literature which he outines in Chapter Six. In the first, he refers to "a second level of language built above its vocabulary, morphology, and syntax" by which he means the dialogic discourse with its associative digressions, its references to canonized sacred texts, and its penchant for analogies. In the second, relying on his prodgious knowledge of both Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Harshav identifies certain literary norms, i.e. Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, with specific periods in European, Yiddish, and Hebrew literature and determines, sketchily but suggestively, when each literature adopted which norm. The panorama is breathtaking, grossly oversimplified, but thought-provoking. As we witness the revival of nationalisms throught the post-Cold War world, THE MEANING OF YIDDISH, in addition to its value as an acutely intelligent introduction to Yiddish culture, can be useful in helping us to understand the intricacies of the linguistic components of national identity and conflict. Even after the rise of modern nationalism, for instance, the same Jewish writers composed in both Hebrew and Yiddish. It was only at the turn of this century, under the pressures of competing ideologies, that the two languages were identified with distinct and separate, often opposed camps. And it is only now, late in the century, after Hebrew has been firmly established as the language of State of Israel and Yiddish is no longer an ideological contestant, that this book could have been written -- not with a sense of triumph, but with a slightly wistful detachment which barely masks the underying secular Jewish modernism that delicately balances nat ionalism with cosmopolitanism. Arnold J.Band ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.235 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.