Yiddish, the adventurous charm of language

Extremely elegant and moving, with his old spectacles and crumpled papers in his hands, Isaac Baschevis Singer thanked the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for his “powerful narrative art which is intimately linked to the Jewish-Polish cultural tradition, and brings the universal human condition to life.” He prepared two words: the first, defensive and promotional, was in English; Then, with a dramatic gesture, he continued in Yiddish, a language spoken and written by Sephardic Jews for centuries, “Ashkenazi,” and even then considered by literary critics to be little more than a dialect. The singer stated that the Nobel was above all an acknowledgment of that language of exile, the language of peace and tolerance, without borders and often without canon.
In her spirit, Singer said, one can find genuine joy, an enthusiasm for life, a longing for Christ, a patience for waiting, and a deep appreciation for human individuality. It is the language of martyrs and saints, dreamers and Kabbalists, full of humor and memories that humanity cannot forget. Figuratively speaking, Yiddish is the wise and humble discourse to all of us, the talk of fearful humanity and hope.

to this language, with Germanic roots but written in Hebrew letters, and which has accompanied the Israelites for more than a millennium in the most diverse experiences–from Hasidic religiosity to the revolutionary fermentation of the Bund, from the social and personal projections of women to a variety of literary productions–Anna Linda Kahlo, is dedicated to an exciting journey. Featured in his book by Garzanti, Borderless language. Yiddish Magic and Adventures (Ps. Sympathy, they made it known.
As a guide in this survey between faraway places (Yiddish has spread from northern Italy, to central Eastern Europe, to many immigration landings) and different lives, the author chose to rely on some figures who illuminate the Jewish diaspora in Central Europe. Europe: they are adventurers of knowledge, poets, seers of holiness or assimilation, emancipated women (even in a mild way), Hasidism with their myths, intellectuals and cosmopolitan writers. Or even great authors capable of influencing the American and Israeli narrative (and sometimes culture): from Sholem Aleichem to The Singer, to Chaim Grid and Avrum Sutzkefer. Among them, even the Jewish intellectuals wondering about the future in other languages ​​whom Anna Linda Kallow met in her travels through the galaxy of the Israelites.

A slightly isolated Jewish (and not only Jewish) history appears in the background which influenced the spread of the Yiddish language and its meaning over the centuries. It is, first of all, the need to keep religious traditions alive in dispersed societies, among the less educated believers and, above all, among women; The ancient challenges of the vernacular wanting to become literary were in the sixteenth century. Or, after centuries, the struggle with the Enlightenment that he wanted, especially in Germany, to erase in the name of adherence to “modern” thought as well as, in the “periphery” of Europe, the great religious epic of Hasidism, whose roots in Yiddish found its deep roots, or the roots of revolutionary and anti-Zionist Bundism.

in the twentieth century, suffering tragically from the Holocaust, with the doom of those who spoke and wrote in that language, and the difficult testimony of surviving. There is the creation of Israel and the choice of Ivrit as the official language of a sovereign state and, on the other hand, the Hasidic roots in the orthodox ghettos of New York or in Jerusalem with Yiddish perhaps a little ungrammatical, but still very lively.
The author also talks about herself, her discoveries and her passions, inviting the sharing of a far from over story that, among the 400,000 speakers today, can boast of always-new literary endeavors and an enormous legacy of nostalgia, characters, and stories. .