Imagining Yiddishland: Language, Place and Memory

Among the more surprisingly provocative phenomena of American Yiddish culture in the post-World War II era is a small paperback entitled Say It in Yiddish, a phrase book for travelers. This volume, part of a series issued by Dover Publications (which includes over two dozen languages, among them Hungarian, Indonesian, Modern Hebrew and Swahili), first appeared in 1958 and is still in print. The book was edited by Uriel Weinreich, then Atran Chair of Yiddish Studies at Columbia University, and his wife, folklorist Beatrice Weinreich.

Almost forty years after its first publication, Say It in Yiddish became the subject of some controversy, when author Michael Chabon discussed it in an essay that appeared in 1997, first in Civilization, a periodical published in association with the Library of Congress, and then, in abbreviated form, in Harper's Magazine. ¹ In his essay, originally titled "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts," Chabon both mocks and mourns Say It in Yiddish, which he introduces as "the saddest book that I own" and characterizes as a "tragic joke," an "absurd, poignant artifact of a country that never was." Unaware of a potential audience for this volume, whether in the 1950s or today, he tries in vain to conjure imaginary environments in which a traveler might talk to an auto mechanic, dentist or hair dresser in Yiddish. Similar fantasies are presented in accompanying illustrations by cartoonist Ben Katchor, showing invented urban scenes with a telephone booth, cinema, bus, ferry and factory, all sporting signs in Yiddish. ² "This country of the Weinreichs is in the nature of a wistful fantasyland," Chabon argues, a contrafactual Europe where "the millions of Jews who were never killed produced grandchildren, and great grandchildren." Finding this vision "heartbreakingly implausible," he wonders, "Just what am I supposed to do with this book?" ³

Chabon did not research the history of Say It in Yiddish; had he done so, he would have learned that it was created not at the Weinreichs' own initiative but at the request of Dover Publications' founder and president, Hayward Cirker. Cirker envisioned the phrase book, in part, as being of practical value—Yiddish was widely spoken in Israel in the late 1950s, and there were substantial Yiddish-speaking communities in Paris, Montreal, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and other places where someone who knew only English might find the volume useful. Moreover, Beatrice Weinreich recalls, Cirker regarded Say It in Yiddish as a symbolic gesture of his devotion to a language that he had learned as a child at home and in secular Yiddishist schools run by the Workmen's Circle. ⁴

Say It in Yiddish is, arguably, an exercise in artifice—but then, the same can be said for any such phrase book, which offers travelers the false promise that its contents provide sufficient skills for conversing in a language that they don't know. Even so, this Yiddish phrase book stands out as an example of the powerful and contentious role of the imaginary in Jewish culture, for this book is an implicit exercise in imagining Yiddishland. Chabon's incredulous response to Say It in Yiddish is not that of an ideologist—say, a Hebraist Zionist who cannot accept another vision of Jewish cultural or political nationalism as valid. Indeed, his reaction evinces neither any particular ideological convictions concerning Jewish culture nor any awareness of the range and tenacity of Yiddish in the post-Holocaust era. On the latter issue, Chabon was taken to task by several letters to the editor that appeared subsequently in both Civilization and Harper's. These letters responded to Chabon's article by arguing that the "imaginary state" of Yiddish speakers he bemoans as untenable does, in fact, exist. The author of one such letter, a resident of Brooklyn's Boro Park, explained that "Say It in Yiddish is available in practically every bookstore" there, and that she used Yiddish "to communicate with my neighbors, children on the street, my grocer, the bus driver for the...