Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 234 April 30, 1992 1) Review of Harshav's THE MEANING OF YIDDISH (Arnold J. Band) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 29 Apr 92 11:16 PDT From: "Arnold J. Band" Subject: review The following review of THE MEANING OF YIDDISH by Benjamin Harshav (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1990) was invited by MODERN PHILOLOGY where it should appear in the near future. As such, the present document should be considered a private, pre-publication draft, not for citation as long as it has not been published by the journal which commissioned it. I am sending it to MENDELE readers to solicit discussion since I have found that the book has elicited very little serious comment (Yerushalmi in TLS, Taub in AJS REVIEW, and Halkin in JERUSALEM REPORT) and I am a bit tired of reading recipes in MENDELE. by Arnold J. Band, UCLA The title of Benjamin Harshav's semi-popular volume on the nature and semiotics of Yiddish is designed to alert the reader to the specific preoccupations of the presentation, its desire to clarify the peculiar ways in which the Yiddish language signifies and, beyond that, what endows modern Yiddish poetry with its tremendous expressive strength. The title might also suggest a critique of such sentimental popularizations as Leo Rosten's THE JOY OF YIDDISH , wistful nostalgia trips that offer the intelligent reader little more than cute phrases, touching anecdotes, or clever jokes. Harshav takes his reader on a different trip, or rather, provides him with a different "travel report":" ...an essay attempting to rethink and present to the intelligent reader some of the basic aspects of the culture of Yiddish, the historical and social conditions that combined to mold the peculiar nature of its language, literature, and life" (p.xii). Now, for the first time, we have a book that can introduce the curious student of language or literature to the fascinating problematics of Yiddish. Up to now, we have had only the sentimental journeys or Max Weinreich's magisterial, but detailed and highly specialized History of the Yiddish Language (1980) translated from the four volume Yiddish original. Harshav writes in full awareness that with the annihilation of much of Yiddish-speaking Jewry in the Holocaust and the attrition of Yiddish culture in America and the former Soviet Union, the future of Yiddish as a viable language or culture is dim. He can thus fully identify with the poet Yankev Glatshteyn, in speaking of "the end of a language," the name of the final, lyrical chapter of this book. The Yiddish poet writing of the murder of the bearers of Yiddish culture envisages the death of the language they spoke and he writes. And yet, Harshav does not indulge in a lament for the loss of the culture, but rather attempts to understand how it worked, how its language functioned both diachronically and synchronically. Similarly, he avoids the tired ideological tirades of the Yiddishists and the Hebraists who often fought between 1890 and 1939 over the linguistic birthright to Jewish culture -- an often bitter sibling rivalry in which the Hebraists claimed historical privilege and the Yiddishists pointed to popular allegiance and usage. For Harshav who writes in and studies both languages, this old sibling rivalry is meaningless; in fact, the full import of THE MEANING OF YIDDISH will be clear only when his essay on the meaning of Hebrew shall be translated from Hebrew. (It has appeared in the second volume of the Israeli journal, ALPAYIM,in 1990.) Complementing Harshav's personal "internal polylinguilism" is his own "external-polylingualism," his intimate familiarity with Russian literature and Western culture, in general. The theoretical movements which inform the entire essay are essentially Russian formalism with its emphasis on linguistics and, those semioticians whose inspiration derives from the Russian Formalists or the Prague Linguists. He acknowledges his debt to Max and Uriel Weinreich, Itamar Even Zohar, and Khone Shmeruk and refers, to be sure, to several of his own articles. This essay is thus the culmination of several decades of work and reflects in many intimate senses the personal autobiography of its author -- however he might strive for scientific objectivity. Harshav, for example, is a secularist and a literary historian and thus excludes from his consideration the masses of pious Yiddish speaking Jews, perhaps the bulk of European, Yiddish speaking Jewry who certainly did not participate in the "modern Jewish revolution" to which he devotes chapter five. It is increasingly clear as one progresses in the essay that the material on which he bases his world view is literature rather than social documentation, poetry rather than prose, and American Yiddish poetry rather than European Yiddish poetry. In fact, the book actually dovetails with the introduction to the superb anthology, AMERICAN YIDDISH POETRY, which he edited together with Barbara Harshav ( University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986). One assumes that THE MEANING OF YIDDISH was inspired in part by the realization that the anthology needed a broader explanatory preface. Much of the sophistication of the poetry in the anthology is lost without this prefatory essay. The essay, nevertheless, stands by itself and constitutes a fine introduction to a variety of topics which the literate reader would want to understand. More interesting, perhaps, than the genesis of this essay is its deeper structure, an example of the relationship between theory and text. Harshav's theoretical exposition leading from Weinreichian "fusionism" to the semiotics of Yiddish communication and the historical contextualization of literary works finds its application specifically in the Introspectivist Yiddish poets of New York in the 1920's and 1930's. These theories fit these texts. One wonders what modifactions in theory Harshav would be constrained to make if he were to use a different set of prooftexts. Arnold J.Band (Continued in Vol 1.235) ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.234 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.