The Meaning of Yiddish (review)

136 SHOFAR The Meaning of Yiddish, by Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 205 pp. $25.00. Since the meaning of sociocultural events, products, and processes is inherently perspectival, this slim, provocative, and well written volume inevitably presents us with a sketch of what Yiddish "means" to its· author. Harshavattends in the first part of the book to the seamlessly fused nature of Yiddish (a matter which is somehow needlessly surprising in the case of Yiddish but generally not considered worth commenting upon in connection with English), to the linguistic and sociolinguistic similarities between Yiddish and other diaspora Jewish languages (overlooking, by and large, the functional exceptionality of Yiddish even in pre-modern times), and to the influence of traditional Hebrew texts, and the ways in which these texts were endlessly studied and argued, upon the "semiotics of Yiddish communica- . tion" (overlooking the feedback of these very influences upon modern Hebrew linguistic and Israeli semiotic characteristics) and, briefly (much too briefly) to some sociological aspects of Yiddish as well. The entire second part of the book (40 percent of the total) is then devoted to the modern secular-Yiddishist revolution of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and to the exemplary literature (particularly the poetry) that it inspired. The latter duo (secular Yiddishism and its poetry) is essentially what Yiddish "means" to Harshav. He presents this "meaning" in a stimulating and well informed fashion, as we would expect from various of his previous publications, but it places certain cognitive blinders upon him from which the book ultimately suffers, both in scope and in accuracy, particularly ifwe are to take the implications of its encompassing title seriously. Overlooked, from my perspective, is the fact that, prior to World War II, the bulk of the Yiddish-speaking world never became caught up in the revolution with which Harshav identifies so wholeheartedly, but, instead, remained substantially within a more traditional framework of Yiddish in daily life (including the use of Yiddish as the constant accompaniment of worship and the vehicle of study) which involved, nevertheless, a rather low level of Yiddish consciousness and positive valuation. Neither pro-Yiddish nor antiYiddish movements had much impact on the bulk of the language's speakers and relatively infrequent readers. This majority simply served as the insulating heartland which protected those few who fully crossed the revolutionary bridge to modernity, providing even them with a safe haven on which they could always rely in order to compensate for the frequent inability of all secularisms (particularly those of minorities) to maintain sociocultural boundaries vis-a-vis one another. Volume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 137 By overlooking the intergenerationally continuous Orthodox, quasiOrthodox , and traditional majority which always and everywhere constituted the bulk of the Yiddish speech community, Harshav necessarily arrives at totally unwarranted conclusions as to the purported demise of Yiddish. Even the secular Yiddishist sector is far from being as dead as Harshav would have us believe, diminished though it obviously is. Few newspapers in any language anywhere can match the survival capacity of the (now weekly) F01werts, soon to celebrate its hundredth anniversary and financially still strong and venturesome enough to have its own radio station and to spin off an English edition (Forward), which will require a great deal ofsatye d'shmaye to match the longevity of its progenitor. More secular Yiddish journals are edited by and written for young Yiddish speakers today than was the case a quarter-century ago, and more such speakers head up academic programs of Yiddish than anyone would have assumed would be the case at that time (or would conclude to be the case on the basis of Harshav's book). However, quite typically for Harshav and those who wear the same spectacles that he wears, it is the ultra-Orthodox Yiddish world of today, in the USA and in Israel, that goes unnoticed and unanalyzed. The amazing demographic growth of this sector, and its predicted continued demographic growth far beyond the end of this century, its growing and constantly querulous press, its ongoing tide of Yiddish yeshivas for boys and (separately, of course) for girls, its growing political clout not...