How Yiddish lives
What ‘the language of martyrs’ means to us
By Jeremy Dauber
The crimes against Yiddish of “getting it wrong” gain definition, even as they pale beside, the crimes committed against its speakers. In the past half-century the language has taken opposing roads, high and low. On the one hand Yiddish literature after the Holocaust has become – in a pun famous among lovers of the language – not loshn-koydesh, the holy tongue (a phrase often applied to Hebrew), but loshn-kdoyshim, the language of martyrs, the elegiac plaint of a vanished people and of the God-confronting milkman Tevye (who, in the Broadway smash Fiddler on the Roof, 1964, argued in English and not the original Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem’s stories). On the other hand Yiddish-lovers have rejoiced in the vulgar, uproarious Yiddish-to-Yinglish of Lenny Bruce and Mad magazine, Mickey Katz and Leo Rosten. Both roads were trodden by Yiddish literature’s most famous expositor, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91), who in 1978 won its only Nobel prize.