Letter from Lhasa, number 155. (Shandler 2006): Adventures in Yiddishland
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Shandler, J., Adventures in Yiddishland. Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, 2006&2008.
(Shandler 2006).
Jeffrey Shandler
States are, basically, criminal and insane entities frequently built from criminals and insane people. I have not yet fully understood whether the insistence to call the Germanic massacre of Jews “holocaust” means that it was the holocaust for the creation of Israel. It was possible to create Israel also without the massacre of East European Jewry. However... There will be, one day, historical research focused on that, on that “mystery”. Did somebody, inside Jewry, promote the WWII so-called holocaust?
Anyway, the book is not about that. It is about Yiddish, the Germanic language which was the most commonly spoken language within Jewry. (Shandler 2006) tells us that, perhaps not casually, it was not very popular in the militant phase of the creation of Israel. Popular and spoken from common people, it was not promoted, it was on the contrary opposed, from the early Israeli State. During WWII, in concentration and extermination camps, Jews not speaking Yiddish were not really considered Jews from other Jews. For instance, Primo Levi wrote something about that.
“Official policy in Israel has consistently denied the value of Yiddish as a Jewish vernacular within its borders (although Ashkenazim have spoken Yiddish in the region for centuries).” (Shandler 2006, p. 10)
“The great majority of Jews murdered during World War II spoke Yiddish; within less than a decade the number of Yiddish speakers in the world had been cut in half. Along with the extensive loss of life came the widespread destruction of Jewish communal infrastructure in Eastern Europe, compounded by its regulation or liquidation at the hands of various postwar communist-bloc governments. Yiddish proved to be newly problematic for East European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.” (Shandler 2006, p. 14-15)
Obviously, there are, in this book, different considerations about this word, postvernacular and its association with Yiddish. “Postvernacular engagements with language inevitably engender different kinds of cultural practices from those of the native speaker or even the schooled vernacular speaker. In this regard, postvernacularity can be a liberating concept, prompting possibilities of language use other than the vernacular model of fully fluency in an indigenous mother tongue. Thus, postvernacularity has important implications for the interrelation of language, culture, and identity – indeed, for the notion of what might constitute a “speech community” – especially for a language such as Yiddish, which has been so extensively and exclusively associated with Ashkenazic folkhood.”
“To understand postvernacularity it is therefore essential not to regard it as any less valid than vernacular engagement with language. In particular, postvernacular Yiddish is distinguished from its vernacular use, as well as from the use of other languages of daily life employed by Jews today, by virtue of its being motivated so prominently by desire.”
(Shandler 2006, p. 23-24)
Yiddish and Hebrew are two different worlds: “The notion of Yiddish and Hebrew having, in effect, traded places within the constellation of modern Jewish multilingualism, at least within the State of Israel, has particularly important implications for conceptualizing Yiddishland in the postwar era. At the beginning of the twentieth century Yiddish was rooted in an actual place – Eastern Europe, home to million of Jews, the great majority of whom spoke and declared Yiddish as their mother tongue – while Hebrew belonged to the realms of Jewish imagination – both the Jewish state of the future promoted by political Zionists and the virtual realm of cultural Zionism. At the end of the century Hebrew had become the official language of an actual place – the State of Israel – while Yiddish had become the language of several imaginary worlds: the imagined milieu of East Europe Jewry before World War II (which is not entirely coterminous with the actual Eastern Europe, past or present); the diaspora of hasidim and other Ashkenazic khareydim; and secular Yiddishland, both transcontinental and localized.” (Shandler 2006, p. 49)
Yiddish was a natural and spontaneous expressive and communication code: “Its primary association with orality notwithstanding, Jews have been reading and writing Yiddish for centuries. A popular Yiddish readership developed following the advent of the printed Yiddish book in the sixteenth century, which engendered a sizeable vernacular literature with its own genres, audiences, and notions of literacy. However, there was no institutionalized instruction of reading Yiddish in traditional Ashkenaz. This was simply a by-product of Hebrew literacy, given the cultural imperative of learning Hebrew as an instrument of divine service and the fact that the two languages use the same alphabet (though employing letters in different ways).” (Shandler 2006, p. 62-63)
At the same time, for a multiplicity of reasons, central- and east-European Yiddish escaped to whatever formalization and institutionalisation.
“A major factor contributing to the destabilization of East European Jewry at the turn of the twentieth century was the departure of about one-third of its population – some two million men, women, and children – from the early 1880s until the start of World War I, most of them bound for the United States. Immigration was an ongoing option for Yiddish speakers over the span of a generation. Whether or not they chose to leave their homes, all members of this community were affected by the knowledge that it was possible, and there were few East European Jews without a close relative or acquaintance who had decided to immigrate.
[...]
“Upon their arrival in the United States, Yiddish speakers swiftly created a distinctive immigrant culture. Thanks to new political and economic circumstances, American Yiddish culture often flourished in ways that were not feasible in Eastern Europe.”
(Shandler 2006, p. 73)
“While Jewish self-consciousness regarding Yiddish speech dates back to the Haskalah, its significance today is shaped most powerfully by the Holocaust. The implications of this catastrophe for Yiddish are but a part of the Holocaust’s manifold repercussions in Jewish life during the past six decades. Besides posing compelling theological, political, and aesthetic challenges, the Holocaust has disturbed widely held assumptions about how to enact Jewishness.” (Shandler 2006, p. 127)
“Given the primacy of orality in the meta-meaning of Yiddish, the postwar attrition of Yiddish vernacularity is manifest most acutely in speech. What has been in decline is not merely the number of speakers or the extent of Yiddish discourse, but the unselfconscious, seemingly inevitable use of Yiddish as a full language (as opposed to isolated Yiddishisms embedded in another language) for routine conversation among Jews. (...) The decline in the routine use of Yiddish and of other diasporic Jewish languages, especially in spoken form, are both consequences and symbols of other losses: ruptures in intergenerational continuity and the erosion of Jewish sociocultural distinctiveness.” (Shandler 2006, p. 128-129)
In the conclusions, (Shandler 2006) seems to present Yiddish as a language of desire and will. Anyway, this book is an interesting journey, whatever its conclusions or absence of decisive conclusions.
Shandler, J., Adventures in Yiddishland. Postvernacular Language and Culture, University of California Press, 2006&2008.
