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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 439.109
EAN num: 9780060837112
ISBN number: 006083711X
Label: William Morrow
Manufacturer: William Morrow
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 336
Printing Date: April 08, 2008
Publishing house: William Morrow
Release Date: April 08, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 171355
Studio: William Morrow
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Product Description:
Yiddish—an oft-considered 'gutter' language—is an unlikely survivor of the ages, much like the Jews themselves. Its survival has been an incredible journey, especially considering how often Jews have tried to kill it themselves. Underlying Neal Karlen's unique, brashly entertaining, yet thoroughly researched telling of the language's story is the notion that Yiddish is a mirror of Jewish history, thought, and practice—for better and worse.
Karlen charts the beginning of Yiddish as a minor dialect in medieval Europe that helped peasant Jews live safely apart from the marauders of the First Crusades. Incorporating a large measure of antique German dialects, Yiddish also included little scraps of French, Italian, ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, the Slavic and Romance languages, and a dozen other tongues native to the places where Jews were briefly given shelter. One may speak a dozen languages, all of them Yiddish.
By 1939, Yiddish flourished as the lingua franca of 13 million Jews. After the Holocaust, whatever remained of Yiddish, its worldview and vibrant culture, was almost stamped out—by Jews themselves. Yiddish was an old-world embarrassment for Americans anxious to assimilate. In Israel, young, proud Zionists suppressed Yiddish as the symbol of the weak and frightened ghetto-bound Jew—and invented modern Hebrew.
Today, a new generation has zealously sought to explore the language and to embrace its soul. This renaissance has spread to millions of non-Jews who now know the subtle difference between a shlemiel and a shlimazel; hundreds of Yiddish words dot the most recent editions of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Story of Yiddish is a delightful tale of a people, their place in the world, and the fascinating language that held them together.
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Rated by buyers 
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The subject of Yiddish never held any interest for me until I read this book. Not that now I'm embarking on a study of it, but at least now I get what the "Jewishness" I've always been aware of but unable to define is, and where it comes from. I can't say whether Yiddish has ever been covered as well or not, but I can say there's no way it's been done the same way, by someone as open about his reasons for doing so and as capable of such elaborate and entertaining excurses as Neal Karlen. It could be that it isn't as heavy on comparative linguistics as it could be, but I see that as a good thing. This is exactly what it promises to be, a storybook with a stunning amount of accurate cultural references, pithy anecdotes, and the devotion of earnest study. In a phrase, dripping with life.
Rated by buyers -
I've read Karlen has been attacked by the Yiddish mafia for his un-Michael Wexian view of the language, but I found The Story of Yiddish funnier, smarter, more progressive, and infinitely less whiny then Wex.
Rated by buyers -
Like Neal Karlen, I grew up in a house where Yiddish was the language used to keep the kids from understanding what the grown-ups wanted to keep away from our thoughts. If my father had spoken Yiddish, rather than merely understanding it; or, if my Bubba had lived longer than my very first year of life, I might have been lucky enough to understand and speak Yiddish. As it is, I understand words, I understand some phrases, I understand the rhythm. But, most importantly, as Neal Karlen has explained to me, I understand Yiddishkeit.
His theses that Yiddish has been the glue that has kept the Yiddish people together, that Yiddish has both fed and reflected the Jewish spirit, form the focus of the book. Around these central ideas, Neal Karlen spins stories and ideas from Jewish history and Jewish popular culture. I loved reading the book.
True, I think the book would have benefited from a further round of editing. As other reviewers have noted, it sometimes reads like a series of articles rather. And this is positive as well as negative: one can pick up the book and read separate chapters without losing the central thread. The negative is that I found too much repetition that could have been condensed. I also noticed some copy-editing errors, as another reviewer spotted, but did not find these egregious. The inconsistencies in transliterating Yiddish words bothered me not one bit. As my mother used to explain to me, different people's Yiddish varies depending on where in Europe they came from. My mother would explain to me that her Yiddish was not the same as her mother-in-law's Yiddish. There were different words and different pronunciations (and maybe some different syntax - my mammele didn't get too technical), but they understood each other, nonetheless.
Precisely Mr. Karlen's point: though my mother's Yiddish may have come most recently from Mogilev and Moletai, whereas her mother-in-law's came from Odessa, they could still understand each other. Deeply. That's Yiddishkeit.
What I loved best about reading "The Story of Yiddish" was the way it brought me back to those days when Yiddish was all around me, although I was too young to appreciate it.
Rated by buyers 
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The mish-mosh is Karlen's book. This guy just does not know enough about Yiddish to write a book about it. There are numerous errors throughout, and the thesis is very thin. Why do people who speak a little Yiddish think they can write a book about it? I eat, but I don't write gourmet cookbooks. And shame on William Morrow, a once fine publishing house. They couldn't even edit it enough to make sure words are spelled correctly or consistently throughout (the English words, that is--the Yiddish is beyond help). What a huge disappointment.
Rated by buyers 
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Neal Karlen starts his book by describing what he calls "the bipolar worldview" of Yiddish. I'm not sure Yiddish has any more of a bipolar outlook than any other language, but this book does. There may be a dichotomy between the way "der yidn" and "der goyim" look at the world. And Karlen does make the point that you can have Yiddishkeit and not be Jewish, or be Jewish and not get Yiddish. (Carl Reiner said about The Dick Van Dyke Show that he would "write Jewish, cast Gentile.")
But in order to make the argument that Yiddish is "better" than German, Karlen has to ignore well-known facts about the nature of language.
The book starts out with way too many metaphors and similies about Yiddish. Yiddish is the "Robin Hood" of languages. It's "a linguistic sponge." It's like a Johnny Cash song. It's "Jewry's Silly Putty."
Ultimately, Yiddish "is not just another Jewish language," it's "Judaism's savior." From the standpoint of the late twentieth century, remembering the millions of people who once lived in Yiddish-speaking central and eastern Europe, Yiddish might seem like the most widely spoken Jewish language. But there were times when Aramaic, Spanish, even the sometimes hated German were the everyday languages of Jewish people.
It was probably biblical Hebrew that bound the Jewish people throughout
the centuries, specificially because it was ritually fixed and therefore not a spoken language that changed as quickly as all natural human languages do.
Karlen definitely wants us to know that Yiddish is NOT a dialect of German. Of course that's true. Yiddish isn't a dialect of German any more than German is a dialect of Yiddish. But they are related. They're both West Germanic languages that split off from Old High German (see The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony's book about the development of Indo-European languages and cultures).
"German is guttural, while Yiddish is from the guts." That's just linguistic prejudice. Karlen quotes the evocative Yiddish phrase for "She's good in bed" - - literally, "She can dance the mattress polka." In German, simply, "Sie is gut im Bett." Which is better, the author asks. Well, neither. No natural human language is "better" than any other. Every language has some things it says more humorously or eloqently than another about particular things.
Karlen even quotes Shakespeare from the Yiddish theater that's long gone: "Tsu zayn oder nisht tsu zayn." It would sound the same in the Berliner dialect of German.
The thing I disliked most about this book was a quotation by comedian/actor Richard Belzer. Karlen holds up Belzer as "America's funniest, most extreme improvising "badchen" and "spritzer."
Karlen says Belzer (at a Friars Club roast) "followed a ridiculous dance performed by Sandra Bernhard by saying, 'I wouldn't f*** her with Bea
Arthur's d***.' " That so-called joke doesn't make Belzer the heir to Lenny Bruce. I remember reading Bruce's memoirs and he always seemed to have a humane attitude. If Belzer did say that, he's just a disgusting pig who went for the easy laugh.
If you want to read interesting, funny books about Yiddish, try Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won't Do), Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (P.S.), and Yiddish with Dick and Jane. For a detailed historical look at the language, read Yiddish: A Nation of Words. Something fun to listen to was Yiddish Radio Project, which was in the Hamilton remainder book catalog as of a few weeks ago.
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