Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish

From Publishers Weekly
Yiddish was the common language of central European Jewry before the Holocaust. The catastrophic loss of millions of Yiddish speakers has led to the impression that Yiddish is a dying, if not dead, language. Not so, claims Katz, head of the Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, and in this ambitious, comprehensive and entertaining history he makes clear not only its past but its future. Most scholars claim that Yiddish began around A.D. 900, but Katz argues that many elements can be found "in a continuous language chain that antedated ancient Hebrew, progressed through Hebrew, and then Jewish Aramaic." Katz clearly explicates not only Yiddish's linguistic history, but how it helped shape, and was shaped by, Jewish culture. Much of the history is fascinating—for instance, 16th-century rabbis, worried that the printing press would allow women access to secular popular European stories, offered sacred writings in popular forms (plays and prose based on biblical themes and midrashic tales) that shaped Yiddish literature for centuries. Katz argues that Yiddish will continue as a spoken language not because of conscious efforts to "save" it (which, he writes, can "border on the downright meshuga") but because of the rapid growth of Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox movements. This scholarly work is quite readable and a strong contribution to the ongoing academic and popular interest in Yiddish. B&w illus, maps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
As fluent in cultural change as he is in etymology, linguist Katz provides a wholly enjoyable and many-faceted history of Yiddish, an essential chapter in the story of Judaism. He chronicles the great Jewish exodus from the Near East north into Europe, where the creators of Yiddish (which simply means Jewish) settled in German-speaking regions, called their new home Ashkenaz (the name of Noah's great-grandson), and forged a vibrant new language by fusing Semitic and Germanic tongues. Ashkenazim became a vibrant trilingual civilization: Yiddish was spoken, and sacred texts were read in Hebrew and Aramaic. But written Yiddish also thrived since women weren't taught to read Hebrew or Aramaic. Katz then follows the Ashkenazi diaspora to Poland and Lithuania, then on to America, tracking the flourishing of Yiddish letters until Yiddish was condemned as too Old World and began to die off. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
From its ancient roots in Hebrew and Aramaic, to its development as the common language of Jews in medieval Europe, and its blossoming as a language of literature, scholarship and a lively press in the nineteenth century, the story of Yiddish mirrors the history of the Jewish people in Europe and beyond. In Words on Fire, leading Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz recounts the sweeping history of this evocative and multifaceted language. Drawing on thirty years of research, Words on Fire traces the steps of a language once derided as "jargon" and identified with women and uneducated men from medieval times onward, and relates how efforts to raise its prestige were often met by opposition from the powers that be. Katz highlights the rise of literary Yiddish in the Renaissance-widely-read translations of knightly epic poems and guides for daily living-particularly by and for Jewish women. In the wake of secularizing and modernizing movements of the nineteenth century, Yiddish rose spectacularly in a few short years from a mass folk idiom to the language of sophisticated modern literature, theater, journalism, and scholarship. From the rise of the Hasidic movement to the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, from its complex relationship with the Zionist movement to its appearance on the Internet, Words on Fire argues that Yiddish represents a high point in Jewish civilization. Six decades after the Holocaust, the once-thriving secular Yiddish culture is in deep crisis, but Katz shows that-far from being a dying language, as many claim-Yiddish is making a resurgence among religious Jewish communities and will still be thriving well into the next century. Words on Fire is a definitive account of this remarkable language and the culture that created and sustained it.

From the Back Cover
"Dovid Katz's book on Yiddish reflects the beauty, the variety, and the warmth of a language that refuses to be extinguished. Its miraculous survival brings joy to its readers." (Elie Wiesel) "Words On Fire is not only a great history, it's a great read. Dovid Katz writes with the precision of a scholar, and the heart of a poet." (Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated) "This is a book whose time has come. Dovid Katz presents the complex and international origins of Yiddish over a thousand years in a delightfully readable narrative that belies the enormous scholarship in many languages that underlies his work." (Ruth Gay, author of The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait and Unfinished People: Eastern European Jews Encounter America) "I love this book. It's a treasure trove of nostalgia and a beacon of hope. It warmed my heart to read how the rich emotional Yiddish jargon became an elegant language of literature; then it broke my heart to read about the near-total destruction of Yiddish civilization, one of the great cultures of the world. This book revives hope that Yiddish will still flourish, even in a small way." (Alan Dershowitz) "In Words on Fire, Professor Dovid Katz reaffirms his role as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of Yiddish Studies. Katz's command of Yiddish linguistics, Yiddish literature and Eastern European Jewish cultural history is unsurpassed. Words on Fire is a bold and timely book that deserves to be read not only by specialists in the field of Jewish Studies but also by anyone concerned about the future of Yiddish and Jewish culture." (Carl J. Rheins, Ph.D., Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) "This amazing book is as provocative as it is profound. Written with verve and passion, it goes far beyond recycling accepted 'truths' about the Yiddish language, European Jewish civilization, and modern Jewish cultural politics. Its bold new conceptualization of the still evolving saga of Yiddish is a product of decades of inspired research, inspiring teaching and penetrating thinking of one of the most brilliant Yiddish scholars of my generation. It will stimulate further debate among scholars and laymen who are concerned with the ethos, history, and significance of Yiddish, the Ashkenazic cultural heritage, and Jewish identity in our contemporary post-modern world." (Dov-Ber Kerler, Professor of Yiddish Studies, Indiana University at Bloomington) "In a field in which ingrained myth is regularly served up as truth, and amateurs pose as experts, this accessible history of Yiddish, written by a native speaker who is also a scholar of historical linguistics, systematically clears the debris in order to set the record straight about the past, the present, and even to offer some reasonable speculations about the future of Yiddish." (Professor Jerold Frakes, University of Southern California)

About the Author
Born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of acclaimed Yiddish poet Menke Katz, Dovid Katz holds a B.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of London. A former Guggenheim recipient, he has taught at Oxford and at Yale, and is currently director of research at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. He divides his time between Lithuania and Wales.


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"Words On Fire is not only a great history, it's a great read. Dovid Katz writes with the precision of a scholar, and the heart of a poet. — (Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated)


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