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  • Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture
  • Miriam Isaacs
Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture, by Jeffrey Shandler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 263 pp. $39.95.

Despite the word "adventure" in the title, Jeffrey Shandler's volume is not a comic book, though humor is threaded throughout. By contrast, "postvernacular" in the title signals a serious work with a contemporary bent, the "post" referring to after the Holocaust and after the annihilation of most of the speakers of Yiddish in Europe. This left America as the Yiddish center. Yet English has taken over as the dominant language of Jews. Pockets of Yiddish remain in scattered places around the globe, but rarely as a vernacular language. Shandler claims that this does not signal the end of Yiddish but that Yiddish, in refusing to die, has instead metamorphosed and taken on a variety of symbolic uses. Shandler traces the diversity of uses for Yiddish and provides the reader with a work that is different in kind from any other books about Yiddish.

"Adventures in Yiddishland" is a sort of travelogue that takes the reader through the world of Yiddish, a language without territory. In six chapters we encounter an assortment of communities for whom Yiddish remains important. For most Jews, Yiddish is no longer a daily spoken language but is [End Page 139] preserved in translations and anthologies, through klezmer music, and in festivals and classrooms. In contrast, those who long struggled to sustain Yiddish through high culture, focusing on the classic authors of the late 19th early 20th centuries, have given way. Many once romanticized the shtetl, the folk element, proverbs, folktales and songs, but the lens has shifted and the scope has broadened for those who preserve and expand Yiddish. Yiddish lovers have created new Yiddish board games, expanded Yiddish on the internet and created new children's literature. New klezmer music is being performed to new audiences that would never in the past have listened to Jewish music.

Yiddishland is a place that encompasses many sorts of communities, Hasidic and secular, Jews and non-Jews, straight and queer. Yiddishland, an imagined place, is the homeland, and "postvernacularity" is the central concept, the theoretical core, a tool with which to reexamine the relationships between language and culture. Shandler challenges the notion that a language can survive only in the context of total cultural transmission, a model which depends on geography and where language and culture are integrally passed from one generation to the next. This model changed in the face of globalization, the hegemony of English, societal mobility, and technology. These new forces created a world in which an ethnic language can have a continued, albeit altered, fragmented and diminished existence. This has bearing for those concerned with the many hundreds of dying languages around the globe.

Shandler's introduction sets a historical and socio-linguistic setting. The first chapter, "Imagining Yiddishland," posits a "Kingdom of the Word" for a language that never had a land of its own. Yiddish once flourished amid nationalisms. The reader is introduced to the Eastern European Yiddishists who sought social parity. They imagined a land for themselves in far away places and contexts, including Zionism, Soviet Biribidzhan, in assorted agrarian settlements, urban centers, and summer camps. After World War II, Yiddish became the "national language of nowhere" and began to occupy virtual space, in clubs, on postage stamps, and on the internet.

The second chapter traces the historical change that Yiddish underwent from a jargon to a language of culture. It touches on the teaching of Yiddish as a formal language. After mass emigration from Europe from the 1880s, Yiddish became a language of heritage. Now Yiddish, spoken and written, remains alive mainly in Hasidic communities and in university classrooms. The third chapter is about translation, about the gendered history of Yiddish and its association with revolutionary movements. Shandler considers the translation of children's literature, like "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Little Prince" into Yiddish, observing that in these cases the reader is assumed to have known the original first and that the originals are transformed in translation. [End Page 140]

The fourth chapter, "Yiddish as Performance Art...

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