Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
As languages have lives of their own, with arcs that dwarf the lifespans of their speakers, it feels fitting for Rutgers professor
Jeffrey Shandler to give Yiddish the biographer’s treatment.
In truth,
“Yiddish: Biography of a Language” does not trace the course of its subject in the linear manner we expect in a biography. But it anthropomorphizes the language just enough to allow for a richly illustrated profile, with chapters such as “Residence,” “Gender,” “Appearance,” “Personality” and “Life Expectancy.”
With Yiddish, none of these dimensions are simple. Indeed, the very first chapter gives voice to conflicting and confusing origin stories. While linguists have conventionally traced the language’s emergence to the movement of Jews from France and Italy to the Rhineland, where they encountered the German language, others see it as a development indigenous to Ge