The Story of Yiddish: How a Mish-Mosh of Languages Saved the Jews

by Neal Karlen

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Language, Judaism, Jewish, Linguistics, Religion

336 pages, Hardcover

First published April 8, 2007

Reviews

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Story of Yiddish is not what I expected it to be.

I picked up this book in the hopes of learning more about Yiddish's history, linguistic background, and usage today. I didn't expect an academic piece but I did expect research and some seriousness.

Instead, this is essentially a book of short anecdotes on Yiddish. Karlen bounces from topic to topic without digging into any one. His writing is fun and addictive but make no mistake, this is not the book to read if you'd like some actual information. However, if you're up for some stories about Yiddish with no order or narrative, this is the book for you. Just be prepared that Karlen is going to repeat every single point and idea several times.

Karlen has a lot of pride in being Jewish, and specifically in being Ashkenazi with all of the classic imagery. He's out to reclaim the Jewish minority in the diaspora energy (you know, the Fiddler of the Roof vibes) and he does it with so much love. In that sense, this book was so cool. Karlen adores Yiddish. His passion for Yiddish flies off the page and it's so interesting to see. It's hard not to get swept up in his energy.

However, even beyond the actual structural mess of this book, I had a few other issues with the content itself.

First of all, this book is wildly ashkenormative. It's odd for me to say this because ashkenormativity is not something I encounter often. However, Karlen is constantly saying Jews when really he means Ashkenazis. Yiddish is a Jewish language, certainly, but it's not the only one. He mentions Ladino once but what about Judeo Arabic? Or any other Jewish language? Seriously, I just learned about Judæo-Marathi, Judeo-Malayalam and Juhuri. In a world where everyone assumes all Jews are Ashkenazi, Karlen's book does not do anything to combat that.

Karlen has an immense dislike of Hebrew (and Ben-Gurion especially) and I think it's misplaced. Hebrew is truly a language for all of the Jews, from India, Libya, Mexico to Poland. Yiddish is not. Yiddish was essentially murdered by Nazis, Stalin, and Zionists but if the price of Hebrew coming to life was the death of Yiddish, I think we made a fair trade.

And I wonder if Karlen knows Hebrew. If so, he'd know that the spirit of Yiddish is definitely alive in Hebrew. We say nudnik, nu and of course, chutzpah, we've taken oy vey and turned it into ah-voy, we still say, "good for the Jews" and "two Jews, three opinions". Heck, if I'm annoyed enough, I totally say gurnisht. Yiddishkeit culture isn't dead just because Yiddish is dying.

In fact, the magic of Hebrew is that we've taken the Arabic yalla and the Yiddish nu to create nu, yalla which is the best way to express your impatience. Hebrew is a mish-mash of all Jewish culture, not just Ashkenazim. It has room for every Jew to bring their own culture into it.

And dammit, there's so much this book didn't discuss. Karlwn spends so much time talking about old American Jewish celbrities when I just really wanted to learn about Yiddish. Like guys, did you know that the Hebrew tachles comes from Yiddish but the Yiddish is actually from the Hebrew word tachlit (essence/purpose)? So you have a word that traveled from Hebrew to Yiddish and then back. That's just so cool. I wish this book dug deeper into what Yiddish is and how it came to be.

Really, this book is just poorly organized and repetitive. I'm positive there are better books on Yiddish out there. I can't wholeheartedly recommend this one.

What I'm Taking With Me
- yes, Ben Gurion shot down a Jewish ship of supplies but he also stopped an actual civil war when he did that so you know, priorities.
- I have a vague dream of living in Germany for a while, becoming fluent in German and then learning Yiddish.
- It's wild to consider that we're living in an age where the number of native Hebrew speakers grows faster than the number of native Yiddish speakers. A Jew from a hundred years ago wouldn't have believed it.
- I wish Karlen would have discussed how to save Yiddish. Some Ultra-Orthodox sects still speak only Yiddish but it's clear that Yiddish will die if more people won't learn it and yet, I don't see any movement really passionately trying to breathe life into Yiddish. How will we encorporate Yiddish into our Jewish world when Hebrew is already here?

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All I want in life is for someone to love me as much as Neal Karlen loves Yiddish and talking about Jewish gangsters. Review to come (eventually, I'm so behind my reviews)!

[Ozma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m so excited to write this review! I’ve just been writing it in my head over and over for the past few weeks, and it keeps getting better and better. It’d be hard not to write a fantastic review about this book.

I’ve read a lot of books in my life. This might be just about the worst book I’ve ever read. I think there have been 3 books in my life that I just couldn’t finish. The third was this book.

The book starts out by claiming that everyone has ADD, so the author isn’t even going to write a book; he’s going to write snippets so that we can start wherever. If you’re reading this, Mr. Karlen, I would like to give you some great life advice: if you’re not going to write a book, don’t write a book! Not only does this belittle the reader and the youth, it’s also kind of offensive to people who actually have ADD, many of whom can, in fact, read books. But the worst part of it is that he keeps his word. The book seems to have been written a sentence per day. His ideas don’t join together, the writing is choppy, and there’s no clear point to what he’s saying. This allows him to go on a 4-page digression about Barbra Streisand and her mausoleum for no reason at all. It did not have to do with Yiddish. It barely had to do with Judaism. (“Question 3. So what is Barbra Streisand’s thing about shtetls and paying homage to Yiddish culture? Answer. Who really ever knows with Barbra? … Yet when Barbra Streisand’s like-buttah voice is finally stilled…her mortal remains will be placed in a…mausoleum…” I’m sorry, where was the transition? Why ask a question to give a one-sentence non-answer only as a prompt for a separate and utterly irrelevant topic??) On top of this, it means that he repeats himself hundreds of times. I’m not even exaggerating. The sentence “The Jews needed Yiddish”, or “The story of Yiddish is about…” (yes, please do tell me what your book is about), or “What is Yiddishkeit?”, or “this is Yiddishkeit”, or something along these lines probably appears on every page (up to and including, “If Streisand wants her father [buried] near her, it would be an act of Yiddishkeit,” as though honoring one’s parents isn’t a concept in just about every culture that has ever existed. Honestly, he compares Yiddishkeit to anything I could possibly imagine!). Every time he references “Chasidic Rabbi and Yiddish scholar Manis Friedman” he introduces him again, exactly like that, as though we’ve forgotten who this is since the previous page. There are literally two repetitions just of lists of Yiddish words that begin with “sh.” I thought I’d just opened to the wrong page, but no, he repeats the entire paragraph.

The second main problem that I had with this book was that it seemed completely un-researched. His Yiddish was full of errors and inconsistencies, and his “facts” were mostly wrong. Oh, Mr. Karlen, I forgot about the “Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1942” that formed Ladino. Seems like something I would’ve heard about.

I also really hated the author’s attitude towards Jews, which frankly I found offensive and disgusting. He writes as though Yiddish is the pinnacle of human achievement—fine, he’s writing about Yiddish, he should like the topic. But then you get lengthy digressions such as the one in which he asks, Which language came first, German or Yiddish? to which he does not provide an answer, instead offering “the German” way to say “She is good in bed” (which is the literal German translation) and “the Yiddish” way to say it, which is a figurative phrase. He concludes by saying, “So which language is better? Case closed.” Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were comparing languages, or that you had that authority, or that comparing a metaphor and a sentence somehow gives some sort of proof of superiority! Or the author’s completely inexplicable and unfounded hatred of Hebrew. In the middle of his unexplained question/answer section, in which he appears to be asking himself questions for no apparent reason, he writes, “Question 8. I still don’t get the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew,” to which he responds, “Answer. That’s not a question, but Yiddish likes to be repetitive, so let’s try once more.” …Uh, what? What are you repeating? Why did you not ask yourself a question and then complain? The response, however, contains this gorgeous paragraph: “While you could describe today’s weather in Yiddish, holy Hebrew became mummified, entombed in its own antiquity, as inviolable to change as ancient Latin. There was no Hebrew word for ‘popsicle’ or ‘atomic bomb,’ nor could one ever be invented. Yiddish, meantime, lived to adapt to real life.” Um…when was this book written? 2008? And he couldn’t even do a simple Google search to realize that the word for “atomic bomb” in Hebrew is “פצצה אטומית”, while the Yiddish word for “atomic bomb” is simply a transliteration of the words “atomic” and “bomb”? Yeah, Mr. Karlen, your “ever” lasted all of maybe 10 years? (I can’t figure out when the Hebrew word was actually invented.) On top of which, at the time (although what time period is he actually even talking about?) it may have been true that Hebrew was a dead language while Yiddish was not, but that does not make it “inviolable to change”; Hebrew was revitalized by Eliezer ben-Yehuda in the late 19th century, and it probably had a word for “atomic bomb” as soon as Yiddish did, since both of them simply stole it from English! At another point, he says, “So, there was always a heartbeating vitality to Yiddish that immutable Hebrew always lacked.” That’s a lot of “always” for a man stuck (apparently) in the 1600s, especially since he grew up in a time period in which Yiddish was pretty dead and Hebrew was pretty not. So which “lived to adapt to real life”? (Not that Yiddish isn’t fantastic or that hundreds of people aren’t currently learning it; simply that it is not as widely spoken as Hebrew, and therefore his claims are ridiculous.) Worse than his superiority complex of Yiddish, though, was his superiority complex about other Jews, which was weird because he kept talking about his amazing friendship with “Chasidic Rabbi and Yiddish scholar Manis Friedman,” who would, you know, be a “Chasidic Rabbi.” Nevertheless, you get diatribes like “On the other side of the spectrum are the still Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox Chasidim, those of the long beards who are adherents and scholars of the non-Madonna Kabbalah. They are those black-hatted, wild, and ecstatic dancers who cut their rugs on hard cement as part of their prayers in their barebones synagogues, unable to afford most amenities save a few extra tallises (prayer shawls) for the empty-handed.
“Chasidic Bar Mitzvah parties, meantime, usually consist of a schnapps, kichel, (plain cookie), and maybe an extra piece of herring speared with a toothpick.
“These Jews look like they’ve just walked out of an eighteenth-century painting of an Eastern European ghetto still believing in Frankenstein-like Golems and fiendish dybbuks.
“Yiddish will never die, say the Chasidim, because we are simultaneously living in the past, present, and future. So why bother worrying?
“Meshuggas? Craziness from meshuggeners, crazy people?”
I hope that you can see what is wrong with this without my commentary! Suffice it to say, however, that: a) Chasidim, shockingly enough, are not all poor; b) Chasidim, shockingly enough, are not all crazy; c) Frankenstein was not the monster; and d) he is literally spewing anti-Semitic propaganda that was used to justify violent mobs in the Middle Ages (Jews live in the past, and therefore, to take the logic a step further, are simply living an outdated and obsolete version of “Christianity minus Jesus”; this attitude, or, as Peter the Venerable put it, “inveterate obstinacy of the Jews,” justified many bloody mobs). “Neal Karlen, author of Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew”, indeed!

Oh, and then there’s his overwhelming obsession with “Queer Yiddishkeit”/“gay klezmer,” or just gay Jews in general. It seems that he just cannot comprehend gay people. He treats whatever gay event/group/phenomenon (it’s unclear) as a joke he can’t ridicule in public. For example, while discussing this movement (over and over and over), he says, “Any particular group drawn in any significant numbers to the mamme-loshn should be cheered,” as though these are the last people that would be wanted speaking Yiddish, but anybody’s better than nobody—even gay anybodys.

What’s next? The stunning observation that Yiddish has words for “nice non-Jews” as well as “stone-cold anti-Semites”? (That’s literally his entire point. Just that the words exist.) Oh, I know, how about the one sentence that confused me most (other than the Spanish Exile of 1942) of this entire book: “The story of Yiddish also explains to yid and goy who have at least always wondered what makes the Jews so…Jewish. (And that’s a compliment. My father is going to be reading this book!)” …?? What does this mean? I can barely even parse it, let alone understand it! I’ll probably spend the rest of my life wondering, but in all seriousness, if you could explain this to me, will you please leave a comment? What is the connection between this fascinating question, and his father? Why would he claim that Yiddish explains why Jews are Jewish? What’s “so…Jewish”? What’s the compliment??? I probably spent ten minutes just staring at this sentence the first time around, and I’m no less clueless.
I could go on for hours, but I think you get the idea.

Originally I was perfectly content to laugh it off as a bad and uninformed author. Clearly, the 1942 slip was just a typo that serves to prove how poorly his book was edited. However, I became curious and researched him, and that’s when I got angry. Because not only should this man be prevented from ever writing, let alone writing nonfiction, let alone writing about a subject he clearly doesn’t know a lot about, but the fact that someone lets him teach this to college students?! This is quite easily the worst nonfiction book I’ve ever read, given that I haven’t read much nonfiction—it doesn’t have a point; it doesn’t answer any questions; it doesn’t stay on topic; it doesn’t go in order; it’s probably half repetition; it’s poorly sourced; it’s wrong—and this man teaches nonfiction to people who don’t know better? It upsets me that he’s handing out lies (I mean, who knows how he could even teach this stuff; he clearly has no idea what he’s doing), but that someone appointed him to do that? Are all of his students going to turn out drek like this?
He is poisoning their minds and I want him kicked out.

That was fun. Thanks for reading.

(If you want to read a book about Yiddish, please don’t read this one, but the book Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods, by Michael Wex, is amazing on its own and so, so much better than this one.)

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yiddish is fascinating... this book is lame. It starts off okay, but after a chapter or two, it gets very lazy. He repeats the same anecdotes--one shows up THREE times; important people are discussed ad nauseum in one chapter and then "introduced" in later chapters, and that's just some of the seemingly unintentional repetition--there's on-purpose repetition, too, introduced by "As mentioned..." And there is no glossary, so many of the Yiddish words that go undefined in the text simply stay undefined. And finally, he repeatedly says it's important to know the difference between a schmuck and a putz, between a schlemeil and a schlamazel, and yet never once explains what those differences are. So frustrating.

[Alvin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oy! This book contains a few interesting anecdotes, but it's appallingly repetitious, poorly organized, and overfull of obnoxious "hooray for the Jews" cheerleading. Yiddish is a fascinating subject and deserves better.

[Sarah]

Kind of rambly at times but overall a very interesting read.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

My own relationship with Judaism and the Jewish culture have long been deeply ambivalent and complicated.  Belonging from birth to an religious tradition that has a high degree of respect for Jewish law, I was circumcised on the eighth day in accordance with the Torah.  A couple of lines within my mother's family can be traced to "Jewish" ancestry (one of which is a priestly line), and yet the Jewish parts of my own background acculturated a long time ago, with one line becoming filled with reform-minded Unitarian ministers and the other seemingly nonreligious.  In my own personal life my engagement with Jewish matters has been similarly halting and ambivalent, for my knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish is not particularly profound but I have traveled to Israel and prayed at the Western Wall and have an immense fondness for books relating to Jewish history and culture and mindset [1], of which this is one.  Moreover, it can be said that my own highly anxious temperament and tendency towards self-effacing humor and an existential struggle against despair are themselves at least in part a heritage of my background and family upbringing.  I say this at the outset because the author himself appears to be a cultural but not particularly religious Jew who has a similarly ambivalent but ultimately fond view of the culture and language about which he writes, and the ground from which I come is distinct but not unrelated.

The contents of this book, which take up about three hundred pages of material, are divided into fifteen chapters.  The author begins with encouragement to Gentile readers that one does not have to be Jewish to get Yiddish, just have the right mindset, a certain degree of compassion on other people and a sense of melancholy or self-loathing, of which this book is full.  The author then talks about Yiddishkeit, a concept that is repeated often, or the acceptable cultural way of Jewish thinking.  The author spends a few chapters discussing the soul of Yiddish, the complicated history of Yiddish and how it acquired words someone promiscuously from other languages, as well as the sounds and secrets of Yiddish.  The author spends time talking about the incessant tendency for Jews to ask questions, the relationship between Jews and celebrities, the hostility within the Yiddish-speaking community concerning the Chasidim (Hasidic movement), the envious nature of much Yiddish discourse concerning famous Yids like nobel-prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, the way that old world shetl culture became imported into the Jewish ghettos of the United States, and what coming to America was like for both Jewish elites as well as common folk.  The author closes the book with a look at the institutions of Yiddish daily newspapers as well as the state of Yiddish and Yiddishkeit in America today.

Ultimately, this book has a melancholy feel to it.  Yiddish as a language is always said to be dying, and there are many more scholars of the language than those who live it and breathe it.  Yet at the same time the author writes about aspects of Yiddish culture that are vibrant and growing.  In grounding his book on Yiddish in history, the author uncovers a great deal of humor, but the humor has a dark edge to it.  Those who forsake Judaism retain some aspect of their culture about them, there are concerns about assimilation, about what it means to be a Jew, and about the relationship between Jews and themselves, each other, outsiders, and even to God.  Obviously, a book like this is most of interest to those who have a fondness for or a connection to the world of American Jewry, but at the same time those who read this book deeply are likely to have the sort of nagging feeling after laughter where one returns to reality a bit sadder and wiser despite having found much to laugh about here.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

[Louise Chambers · Rating 1 out of 5]

Filled with typographical errors, and very badly edited. One paragraph had the same sentence twice, once included in the body of the paragraph, and then again in parenthesis at the end.
I could barely get through it. I felt as if he threw a pile of half-finished articles at a junior assistant, said, "Finish these!". After they were "done" he took the proofreader out to a liquid lunch, and no one involved in the project checked their work from then on. Feh!

[Jadie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is by far one of the worst books I've ever read. Yiddish deserves so much better than the incoherent ramblings of this self-loathing Jew.

Karlen flexes his literary shortcomings big time in these 300 pages. I walked away learning nothing about Yiddish. About 1/2-2/3 of the book is quotes from other people, and when Karlen does deign to put his own pen to paper, what comes out is absolute garbage. There is no sense of flow whatsoever. Karlen says himself that he wrote the book intentionally so you could open it up and start reading at any page, but what he achieved was quite literally a book of completely unconnected sentences. This work is basically one of those joke-a-day desk calendars, only the content is instead meaningless tidbits about Yiddish or famous yidn, passed off as history.

If that wasn't bad enough, Karlen writes like a 15 year old trying to hit a word/page quota for an assignment. Half of his writing is utter nonsense because he can't or won't use a period to save his life. I'm not exaggerating when I say that many pages could easily be comprised of 3-5 sentences of his writing based on his inability to break up sentences.

Karlen peppers the book with various Yiddish phrases and words, transliterated into English. His overuse and repetitive explanations could be excused, but the horrendous inconsistencies in his method of transliteration can't. He mentions in his "Acknowledgements" that he references several sources for transliteration, but this is precisely the problem (stick to one method!). It would be one thing if I simply disagreed with a particular transliteration that he uses consistently throughout the book, but to watch him waffle back and forth between 'kh' and 'ch' to make the back of the throat khof sound, or "ay" and "ei" to sometimes make the sound standardly transliterated as "ey" and sometimes make the sound standardly transliterated as "ay" (two different sounds) is infuriating.

If this isn't enough to make you want to rip your hair out, Karlen seems to take a pass on being respectful and sensible about Jews, Judaism, and Yiddish because he himself is Jewish and born of a Yiddish and immigrant family. The result is Karlen making sweeping and, at times, offensive generalizations about the sentiments of Jews (or sects of Jews) toward Judaism and aspects of Yiddish language/culture.

To save you the pain of reading it yourself, the entirety of this book can be whittled down to three well-known facts that Karlen tries (and fails) to anecdotally expand upon:

1. Yiddish is old as dirt and has played a vital role in the lives of Diasporic Jews.
2. Yiddish is simultaneously an amalgamation of many languages and its own unique language, and there is never-ending contention on its evolution and standardization.
3. Yiddish is as much a culture as it is a language, and both culture and language have been a source of pride and shame among Diasporic Jews for decades.

If you want to learn about Yiddish, you can pick up any other book and you'd be better off. I would recommend the Wikipedia page on Yiddish as a piece of well-written literature before I'd give anyone this book's title.

[Carissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I strongly caution anyone reading this book to do their own fact-checking; potential problems range from typographical errors (1942 for what I assume must be 1492) to what seems to be misattribution and mistranslation of a quote. In addition, I found the book in general rambling, repetitive, and uninformative, though, given that Karlen states in the introduction that "The book can be read out of order, by pages, paragraphs, or sentences... in a world of A.D.D. and short attention spans..." (pg. 3 of my edition), this may an unfair censure.

In interest of correction, either of the book or of myself, the quote which caused me concern was "Alle menschen muss zu machen, jeden tug a gentzen kachen?" which Karlen attributes to You Nazty Spy, a film by the Three Stooges, and translates "who do you have to fuck in this town to get somebody to help?" (pg. 45 of my edition). If anyone can find support for this, I will retract my statement, but I can find it attributed only to The Producers, and can't translate it. Fans of The Producers seem also to believe that it's gibberish (the first clause has meaning, but the second does not), and none of tug, gentzen, or kachen appear in Yiddish dictionaries I searched. I find this quite concerning for someone who claims to speak the language!

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Neal Karlen, I really do, otherwise I wouldn't have given him four stars instead of the three stars I thought more appropriate at first. My thoughts midway through the book were that this is a rambling essay, a "mish mash" (I use the English here, not the Yiddish "mish mosh," check it out in a dictionary) kind of a stream of consciousness expose. Well, I finished the book at it became clearer what he was trying to convey in his subtitle "...Languages Saved the Jews." I really did enjoy this book and would recommend it with the qualification, it helps to be acquainted with Jewish history, particularly Jewish history in America, not particularly Judaism (which is not what this book is about) but Jewishness in America.

[Peter Holz · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a mess. There is no "story", just a mish-mosh of anecdotes and aphorisms attempting to be clever and witty. Presumably the book never made it past an editor as it lacks cohesion and structure and the author repeats himself on numerous occasions making for a tiresome and repetitive read that really could have been repackaged as a much shorter Yiddish joke book. There are very few facts about the language itself, so if you are expecting a well reasoned and researched treatise about the origins and evolution of Yiddish look elsewhere. However, if you are after a mildly amusing Yiddish joke (possibly repeated several times throughout the book) and an idea of what it means to be Yiddish, then you may get more out of it than I did.

[Flora · Rating 3 out of 5]

did not finish the full book (read about 200pp). i found the writing style grating and repetitive and it didn't seem like he was ever making a point. he was just circling around here and there with lots of anecdotes and dinner party tidbits. early on he said something like the story of yiddish lends itself to books full of funny anecdotes, but in this book he's going to make an actual argument. i never got there, but perhaps it was in the final 100pp.
a couple times it was just kind of offensive, such as one crack about how being a male figure skater is the same as being gay or something like that. in general the stuff about gay yiddishkeit came off as homophobic or something

[Ralphz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not so sure that Yiddish saved the Jews, and I'm not sure that the author proves that point. But this book is an interesting discourse on what Yiddish means to Jews.

And, as such, it's filled more with emotions than with facts, which, to me, is a weakness.

In an early chapter on the history of Yiddish, the author cites as authoritative sources a scholar mentor and the late comedian Lenny Bruce (!). And then he introduces his scholar mentor again and again, as though he forgot he already introduced him. This kind of repetition is all over the book and becomes tiresome.

He presents theories about Yiddish, but then, again and again, fails to back them up, choosing instead to go to a funny Yiddish saying. In the end, the most interesting part is the use of those sayings, such as "People are just people—and sometimes not even that."

The rest of it, it's OK for what it's worth.

[Opal Bellamy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the cultural insights this book provided, and the additions to my pa. Take note for any prospective readers that this is not an overly analytic book, so no in-depth grammatical explanations or analyses of data are provided. I would have liked a little bit more of a look into how Yiddish vocabulary has stemmed from a great many different roots, rather than simply allusions to this in the greater discussion of Yiddishkeit. All-in-all, a decent read, but I do think towards the end the quest to define 'Yiddishkeit' got a bit long-winded.

[Ruth Collier · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'd think after reading a book about an interesting language I'd find a few more words to describe it but I'm feeling a little stumped on this one today. I enjoyed it.
It's informative and easy to dip into - it mentions early on that it's designed so you can just read a paragraph or two at a time. The only downside of this is that I sometimes found it hard to follow how one paragraph connected to the next, or if they connected at all.
There are lots of references in here for further reading too (as if I needed more!) so it's a good starting point for research into all things Jewish.

[Jake Berlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

i would give this book one star but as someone who generally likes reading about the jews there were enough morsels to keep me at least peripherally interested. but beyond that? drech. the author admits this isn't a history of yiddish, but then what is it? it wanders, it confuses, and it leaves you wanting something so much better. and good lord the writing itself tries way too hard. there are so many good books about jews; don't waste your time with this one.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ozma wrote a great detailed review of this book. While some of it was quite interesting, it was just all over the place. There was way too much Lenny Bruce. There was repetition of certain things, and just too much about other marginally related things. Just not one of my favorite books or style. And this writer teaches journalism?

[george w. shorago m.d. · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those of us who are landsmen and grew up with Yiddish speaking parents, this is a delightful book. Humorously well written, with a delicious tasting “ forspice!” Congratulations on helping me to reclaim my roots.

[Sue Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Language as history

Almost as old as time, Yiddish has been a curse and a blessing to Jews world wide. Trampled on by those that thought themselves to good for the language that saved so many lives.

[Nathan Budd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting anecdotes of Jewish history and lots of fun Yiddish nuggets, but if not for the vague and flowery filler, this could have been a neat 100 pages instead of a 300 page slog

[Debby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was unevenly interesting and boring. Most interesting was Jewish immigration history to NYC and anecdotes about well known people. Most boring was anecdotes about people I hadn't heard of; i.e. the author didn't make me care about them - except for the gangsters!

[Davida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had this sitting on my shelf for a while. Once I got into it,though, I didn't want to put it down. There is some overlap with Karlen's other book: Shanda, but that's OK. My main complaint was that the editing could have been better. Isn't it appropriate to complain about something in a book on Yiddish and Judaism? :) Karlen explains early on that he wants you to be able to read his book in bits and pieces, that it's not necessary to read it all the way through. For this reason, he repeats himself incessantly, figuring that you may not have read what he wrote in a previous chapter. Annoying. Almost made me stop reading. But I'm glad I persevered. So much interesting information in this book, lots of sad stuff about persecution and shtetl life that we were never taught in Sunday School, lots about Yiddish newspapers and authors that were new to me. All of that world is gone now. Lots about the wave of immigration to NYC that started in the 1880s from Eastern Europe, and which would have included my ancestors, so I found that particularly interesting, the way they lived, how they made a living, their adjustment to life in America.

Karlen has a lot he wants to say but he has problems tying it all together. The book is weird because he inserts some pop culture stuff that seems inappropriate and it seems like he wants to have enough actual Yiddish quotes in the book but sometimes they seem just thrown in too.

He's at his best when he's revealing obscure facts (to me, at least) like the controversy surrounding Isaac Bashevis Singer or NY Jews' involvement in boxing. He talks about Lenny Bruce a lot, someone I really know nothing about, so he's on my list to check out.

[Adrian Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting account of the development of Yiddish and its use by Jews over the centuries, however the book is let down by its incredible repetitiveness (anecdotes are recycled and revisited over different chapters, as if the author intended for them to be stand-alone) and its journalistic, non-linear tone. Still a good-enough read for general background and for its bibliography.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karlen's tale of Jewish persecution through the last millenium has been told before, but his spin is to credit the Yiddish language with preserving Jewish faith and culture. Although he's planned neither a glossary (in the style of Leo Rosten) nor a joke book, readers will find some jokes and some new phrases in his history.

[Alexa Hamilton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think the essays in this book would be fine as essays. As a book, they are repetitive and the writing style is not particularly engaging. Which is too bad because I really did want to find out more about how Yiddish saved the Jews. I'll have to find a better book!

[Salim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is terribly presented, despite an large amount of apparently personal research. The writing is repetitive, dismissive towards the reader's intelligence, and confused about its audience. It achieves neither historical not intellectual coherence.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely, I learned all my Yiddish from my German Catholic mother, not my Jewish dad. That is why I love Karlen for discussing the Yiddishkeit and the Yiddish Kopf. Such a good book.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

So in need of an editor that it was laughable. There was some good content in there somewhere.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many other reviewers have noted, it's impressively researched but incredibly rambling, disorganized, and repetitive. Ready to throw in the towel 1/3 way through. Oy!

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poorly written.