Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.010 June 9, 1996 1) Ruth Wisse on the survival of Yiddish (Morrie Feller) 2) New life form for Yiddish (Morrie Feller) 3) More Bashevis (Roberta Saltzman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 16:22:42 -1000 From: feller@indirect.com Subject: Ruth Wisse on the survival of Yiddish The recent (May 27, 1996) article in The New Republic by Ruth Wisse, Professor of Yiddish and Comparative literature at Harvard, with the title "Shule Daze" and a secondary heading "Is Yiddish back from the dead?" should be read by all Mendelniks who are concerned about the survival of Yiddish. For those who might not have access to the original article, I would like to summarize it here and now: The fact that there are individual Yiddish sites such as the National Yiddish Book Center, as well as many universities offering courses in Yiddish, does not mean that a Yiddish renaissance is in the offing. Most immigrant groups, including most Jews, have replaced their native tongues with English because English is the key to the benefits of citizenship. Although in the early part of the 20th century Yiddish flourished in many ways. yet the American immigrants, who produced a vast and rich culture , were quick to give up their language. One reason for the rapid decline of Yiddish in America was lack of opportunity, after the Holocaust, for Jews to visit their linguistic homeland in Europe. Jews can effect a Yiddish revival only if they "de-assimilate" enough to regenerate their own language. This they are not likely to do. Some religious groups, notably the "ultra-orthodox",which have resisted assimilation, still speak Yiddish. In Hasidic communities the use of Yiddish for any purpose other than to explain Jewish law is not condoned. The few scholars trained in Yiddish cannot bring about a revival of Yiddish. This can only be accomplished by programs of formal and serious study. But because English is the key to equal opportuniy in America, it is very unlikely that immigrant languages, including Yiddish, will make a comeback. Morrie Feller Phoenix 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 14:32:27 -0700 (MST) From: feller@indirect.com Subject: New life form for Yiddish We apply the term "living" to a variety of things such as: a living person, a living animal, a living plant,the living sea, the living forest and a living language. Within each category there can be subtypes, e.g., warm and cold blooded animals, perennial and seasonal plants, etc. We also refer to degrees of life: dead (no life), barely alive, half alive, fully alive. Thus "life" can have many forms and stages. If we consider a language to be a "living thing", it is possible to ask: is it fully alive, is it somewhat alive, is it dying, etc? For whatever reason, as the number of speakers of a given language approaches zero, the language approaches death. However, even a language like Latin, which is usually considered to be a dead language, is not totally dead because it still exists in written form and is recited at religious services. There actually could be a basis for reviving Latin as a living language, assuming that the motivation to do so was great enough on the part of a group sufficiently large to sustain it after its revival. This actually is what happened in the case of Hebrew. It was more like a dormant language than like a dead language. However the motivation and drive of Eliezer ben Yehudah, along with the need for a common language in Palestine, succeeded in making Hebrew once again a living, spoken language. (This was not "spontaneous" as maintained by Ruth Wisse.) The article by Ruth Wisse in The New Republic (May 27,1996) on the prospects of a revival of Yiddish makes the central point that Jews would have to "de-assimilate" in order for the revival to succeed. She uses examples of groups which have, for the most part, not assimilated, and therefore Yiddish is a living language within that community. Ellen Prince in a post to Mendele has contended that a language is kept alive only when children learn it from their parents and family, and then continue to use it at home. Both of these views assume a specific local area in which the language is spoken. This corresponds to the statement by Abe Luski, whom I have quoted earlier on Mendele: " a loshn muz hobn a gas." At that time I also suggested that the Internet might become a "gas" for Yiddish. So let us look at what conceivably might be accomplished given the wide range of modern technological advances in the field of communications, and in still evolving computer technology. Today there are interactive computer programs which make it possible to learn a foreign language at home. They teach reading comprehension, oral comprehension, grammar, etc. There is give and take between the student and the program in which the program functions as a vitual teacher. One reason that children seem to absorb their native tongue so readily is that they hear given words and phrases over and over again. The virtue of the computer program is that it, also, can be endlessly repetitive. This means that anyone can learn Yiddish no matter how remote he/she is from a Yiddish class. Now, after one learns Yiddish this way, what can he/she do with it? First, it opens up to them the "vast and varied accumulated heritage" of Yiddish (Wisse). Second, using the capabilities of the Internet, he/she can communicate with any other Yiddishist anywhere in the world, not only with the written word, but also with the spoken word. This can be virtually a global village, and a "gas" for Yiddish. I agree that it is unlikely that we can recreate the conditions of the early 20th Century when Yiddish was the mother tongue of millions of Jews. The Holocaust definitely ended that hope. But, given the modern advances in language learning systems in conjunction with the newer communication capabilities, Yiddish may yet assume a new life form which will be self-propagating. Morrie Feller Phoenix 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 17:15:48 -0400 From: rsaltzman@nypl.org Subject: More Bashevis Noyekh Miller was kind enough to mention [6.009] an article in the New York Times that spoke of the untranslated fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer that I've "discovered" (!) in the Forward. Here is a some background on the story. A couple of weeks ago, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux called to ask whether I knew anything about an I.B. Singer novella called "The way home". (Apparently FSG had been given my name by someone at YIVO who knew that I've been working on a bibliography of Singer's work in the Forward). I knew of a work called "Der veg aheym"--it was serialized over a period of about 16 months, so it was a full-length novel, not a novella. I also mentioned to this editor that there were other untranslated novels and stories by Singer in the Forward (and a few in "Goldene keyt" and "Tsukunft"). This was a surprise to FSG, who had no idea that Singer was such a frequent contributor to the Forward. They told me that when Singer submitted work for translation, he gave them not his manuscripts, but "tear sheets"--that is, typeset pages torn from the Forward. For whatever reason, Singer never submitted many of his works of fiction to FSG. But they're there--I looked through more than 30 years' worth of the Forward on microfilm, and I found 13 serialized novels or novellas and about 55 short stories that have not been translated into English. (Some of them even have the word "roman" or "novele" or "dertseylung" after the title, so the Forward at any rate considered them to be works of fiction and not memoirs). What I find slightly amusing about the article in the Times is that they make it sound as if I've uncovered some secret, long-hidden manuscripts--when in fact all I've done is make a list of articles by Singer published in a well-known (but unindexed) newspaper. For that matter, in Prof. David Neal Miller's "Bibliography of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1924-1949", there are several works of fiction that have not been translated--among them "Der zindiker meshiekh" (which Singer is said to have been dissatisfied with) and "Der feter fun Amerike". (Not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of non-fiction articles that Singer contributed to newspapers and journals over the decades). Farrar, Straus & Giroux seemed very interested in having at least some of these Yiddish texts translated. But first they'll have to make photocopies of the texts from microfilm--not a pleasant task. (I understand that Singer did not save the manuscripts for a lot of his work. Perhaps a Singer scholar out there can give more information as to the state of Singer's manuscripts. I seem to remember hearing that some of his manuscripts are at the University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin). I should mention that I am by no means a scholar and I did not read through these texts; I only read the beginnings so that I could try to identify which ones had been translated. (I'm well acquainted with all of the works in English). So I'm not qualified to make any judgments about this "new" fiction, but I would be fascinated to see some of it in English. Roberta Saltzman New York, NY ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.010