From Polylingual to Postvernacular: Imagining Yiddish in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This article reviews several recent books centered on the Yiddish language and targeted at nonnative speakers. Dovid Katz’s historically oriented Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish and Michael Wex’s humorous Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods are two studies of Yiddish aimed at a general audience. These treatments of the history and significance of the language, along with less scholarly artifacts of popular culture such as Michael Chabon’s bestselling novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union , and Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman’s gift books, Yiddish with Dick and Jane and Yiddish with George and Laura , suggest nostalgia among many American Jews for polylingualism. The article concludes with an assessment of Jeffrey Shandler’s cultural study, Adventures in Yiddishland , which proposes that since World War II Yiddish has acquired a new set of meanings within mainstream Jewish culture.