In praise of Yiddish

by Maurice Samuel

Date not stated

283 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Maurice Samuel (February 8, 1895 – May 4, 1972) was a Romanian-born British and American novelist, translator and lecturer.

Born in Măcin, Tulcea County, Romania, to Isaac Samuel and Fanny Acker, Samuel moved to Paris with his family at the age of five and about a year later to England where he studied at the Victoria University. His parents spoke Yiddish at home and he developed strong attachments to the Jewish people and the Yiddish language at early age. This later became the motivation for many of the books he wrote as an adult. Eventually, he left England. Samuel emigrated to the United States and settled in New York in 1917.

A Jewish intellectual and writer, he is best known for his work You Gentiles, published in 1924. Most of his work concerns Judaism or the Jew's role in history and modern society, but he also wrote more conventional fiction, such as The Web of Lucifer, which takes place during the Borgias' rule of Renaissance Italy, and the fantasy science-fiction novel The Devil that Failed. Samuel also wrote the nonfiction King Mob under the pseudonym "Frank K. Notch". He and his work received acclaim within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the 1944 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his non-fiction work, The World of Sholom Aleichem. He received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature posthumously in 1972.

He died in 1972 in New York City.

Reviews

[Perlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Humorous and knowledgeable trip through Yiddish history, language, and weltanschauung. Funny enough in places that I read parts aloud to my family.

[DROPPING OUT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel wrote this book in reaction to the adulation given to Leo Rosen's book The Joys of Yiddish. Without attacking Rosten frontally, his major criticism was that Rosten reduced what was essentially a culture and his language spiritually richer than English, that Rosten reduced Yiddish to a collection of dirty words and Borsht Belt humor. I read this book nearly 34 years ago, when I was just beginning to learn Yiddish, and I found it to be a lovely paean to a culture I only knew second-hand. It is a beautiful book, and I wish it were still in print, for I used to give it as a gift. People who read it came away deeply impressed.