David Cesarani
A Language For the People
Words On Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish
By Dovid Katz
Basic Books 464pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation
By Paul Kriwaczek
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 320pp £25 order from our bookshop
When I was growing up in London in the 1960s I used to hear my mother talking on the phone in Yiddish. I figured out that she was saying something she didn’t want me to understand, probably about a poor school report or a surprise birthday present. It never occurred to me that what I was hearing represented one terminal point of a great ‘language chain’ stretching back to Hebrew and Aramaic in ancient times. Even when I learned Yiddish formally so that I could use Jewish newspapers for research, I believed that it had been gestated in medieval Europe. But thanks to a remarkable coterie of experts, eccentrics and enthusiasts, Yiddish is undergoing a revolution.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings