Ilan Stavans on Yiddish

“The language's fate would be entangled with one of the world's most brutal tragedies—millions of those Yiddish speakers were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust during the Second World War—but it also flowered almost everywhere that Jews settled, before and after the war: Yiddish newspapers and books were published in Montreal and Montevideo, Cairo and Melbourne, Paris and Cape Town (not to mention Warsaw and New York)”

“Celebrated and marginalized, lionized and trivialized, Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today...... At the height of the language's American popularity in the 1920s, a handful of different Yiddish newspapers circulated hundreds of thousands of copies every day, and Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, in Manhattan, seated thousands of spectators every night. Also, as the primary language of a vast immigrant community of poor laborers and their upwardly mobile children, Yiddish became a crucial part of American politics—at a moment when socialism, anarchism, and communism competed for Americans' votes with more familiar political orientations—and of American business, entertainment, cuisine, and speech. In short, America, famously a nation of immigrants, was the site of many of Yiddish's greatest triumphs—a Nobel prize, bestsellers, and theatrical smashes, as well as political movements that changed the way people everywhere work.”