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- Title
From Polylingual to Postvernacular: Imagining Yiddish in the Twenty-First Century.
- Authors
Glaser, Amelia
- Abstract
This article reviews several recent books centered on the Yiddish language and targeted at nonnative speakers. Dovid Katz's historically oriented Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish and Michael Wex's humorous Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods are two studies of Yiddish aimed at a general audience. These treatments of the history and significance of the language, along with less scholarly artifacts of popular culture such as Michael Chabon's bestselling novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman's gift books, Yiddish with Dick and Jane and Yiddish with George and Laura, suggest nostalgia among many American Jews for polylingualism. The article concludes with an assessment of Jeffrey Shandler's cultural study, Adventures in Yiddishland, which proposes that since World War II Yiddish has acquired a new set of meanings within mainstream Jewish culture.
- Subjects
YIDDISH language; LANGUAGE &; languages; WORDS on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (Book); BORN to Kvetch: Yiddish Language &; Culture in All of Its Moods (Book); YIDDISH Policemen's Union, The (Book); YIDDISH With Dick &; Jane (Book); ADVENTURES in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language &; Culture (Book); KATZ, Dovid; WEX, Michael; CHABON, Michael, 1963-; WEINER, Ellis; DAVILMAN, Barbara; SHANDLER, Jeffrey
- Publication
Jewish Social Studies, 2008, Vol 14, Issue 3, p150
- ISSN
0021-6704
- Publication type
Article