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Article: Falling in Love with Yiddish.
- Article from:
- American Scholar
- Article date:
- June 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Phi Beta Kappa Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I fell in love with Yiddish in 1994, which is to say, too late. I was thirty-two years old at the time and felt that the most interesting and meaningful parts of life--marriage, family, career--were still out there ahead of me. For Yiddish, at the close of an unimaginably cruel century, the situation was precisely the opposite. In recent decades Yiddish had endured a series of crippling blows: not just the Holocaust but also Stalin's purges, the Zionist Hebrew-language campaigns, and Jewish assimilation in the West, a process slower and far gentler but no less damaging. By the time I discovered Yiddish, it was clear that all of the important events that would ever happen ...