J Tolle writes:
...but I tend to slink away from any Yiddish Literature, it just does not interest me I'm sad to say.
What fascinates me about Yiddish literature is that it never had a country of its own, but that it was originally a
European literature par excellence. Having no country means that Yiddish literature is always shoved in somewhere as an afterthought when people write books about European literature. So it becomes a corner of Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, American, and anybody else's literature.
The American bit came about for two reasons: many of the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe were so poor that the ones with more and initiative got out of the misery and thought America would fulfil their dreams. The other reason is, of course, that the Nazis and, let us not forget, various Slav peoples, started persecuting Jews, so once again, those with more initiative got out while they still could. So, partly poverty, partly persecution. Either way, always a people on the run.
Yiddish literature therefore either describes the poverty of the Jewish communities of Eastern & Central Europe, or what it felt like to be a refugee in various countries. It's not very Israel-focused, because of its partly secular and socialist background. Unfortunately, certain Jews such as Leo Rosten, have turned the whole language & literature into a kind of music hall comedy. So you would never think that some of the books that J Tolle lists were actually serious novels, poems, stories and plays.
Despite the largely secular nature of the people who read Yiddish, it is still very much a Jewish literature. So to read most of it you have to have some interest in, and knowledge of, Jewish rituals and religious practices.
As I have mentioned in previous postings, the Dutch, whose Jewry is largely assimilated nowadays, still have a few publishing houses that make Dutch translations of Yiddish literature. But translations into English seem much more fragmented, spread over a large number of publishing houses. This makes an overview much more difficult.
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I agree with Pesahson about the
Tam Tam. It's best publication, also available online, for anyone taking a
serious interest in the Yiddish language. Because all the articles at aimed at learners. You can download old issues from the internet. But you have to be prepared to learn the alphabet - the Hebrew alphabet is the real alphabet of Yiddish. You will find texts
transliterated into German, Polish and English, but these are only to help learners, or people who want to get a glimpse.
The survival of Yiddish as a living language depends on how many people from younger generations learn it up to a high level. But there are still alive today people who have it as their mother tongue. And the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Antwerp and elsewhere, who do not want to dirty the Hebrew language with everyday concerns because it is holy and used for religion, still speak Yiddish to one another to this day.
