PLURIELLES — If you don’t mind, we’ll talk about what interests you: the Yiddish language and culture, of which you are a specialist. Arte recently broadcast a documentary about Giora Feidman, an Israeli musician born in Argentina; he declared that we are witnessing a rebirth of the Yiddish language and culture. Do you agree with him?
I. N. — Not entirely; it’s a very complex subject, like everything that touches culture nowadays, because the very idea of culture is in crisis throughout society: we live in an age when people wonder what culture consists of, its production, its birth, its death, and so on. As proof I would cite the whole debate about education and what it should transmit, about artistic creation and how to envisage and encourage it. In fact, we don’t really know which way culture passes, so to say that there is a rebirth of culture raises all these questions if one wishes to deal with Yiddish culture.
For my part, I do not believe that we stand before a rebirth of Yiddish culture; we are rather facing a renewed interest in the achievements of Yiddish culture. The problem is the same when, in France for example, one witnesses a renewed interest in events or cultural products of the past, taking the form of festivals, celebrated anniversaries, special editions, retrospectives or exhibitions. All of that is part of a very vast phenomenon that sociologists and philosophers study closely and on which I, for my part, do not have sufficient enlightenment to pronounce. All I can say is that it is not a true cultural rebirth.
A cultural rebirth means, to me, a rebirth of the need for culture and of the production of that culture, two parameters that go together. But even French culture wonders whether it is truly fertile or whether it is living on its handsome remains. So to say that Yiddish culture is undergoing a rebirth because klezmer music festivals are flourishing, or because we are lucky enough to welcome at the Cercle Medem a large number of students in our Yiddish courses, and other phenomena of that sort — no, that is not enough.
Plurielles — Could you sketch for us a picture of Yiddish in today’s world? For we know that the practice of Yiddish was once tied to large urban centers, and that all of this has profoundly changed nowadays; so what remains of it today?
I.N. — I don’t have statistical data, but one must distinguish two aspects. On the one hand, the language itself, where and how it is alive, and on the other hand, the press and publishing.
It must be said that, nowadays, Yiddish is a very living language in the ultra-Orthodox world, thus in the concentrations of Jews at Mea Shearim and at B’nai Brak, but much more still in suburbs of New York such as Borough Park, Williamsburg and others, or again in Antwerp and, in England, in London, in Manchester and in other enclaves. That makes, in all, a population of several hundred thousand people, perhaps even a million, which on the scale of the Jewish people is considerable, who speak Yiddish but without worrying too much about its grammatical rules or its evolution. It is a spontaneous speech; thus there is a continuity in the daily practice of this language, which is enriched or deformed, depending on how one sees things: linguists, as you know, never speak of deformation but of change, of the evolution of the language. So Yiddish evolves by integrating English forms, by inventing other forms too; it is a living language that evolves a great deal.
It is also written within these same ultra-Orthodox communities because it serves the education of girls: their education is conducted entirely in Yiddish. The boys, for their part, hear Yiddish spoken and speak it, but at the yeshiva the language of transmission is Hebrew, or a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish. So, for the girls there is a real production of pedagogical material in Yiddish: books for reading, for edification, for cultural enrichment, and so on. There are some for the very little boys too, but for the girls it goes further. For example, last year a two-volume textbook was published to teach Yiddish to the students of the Beit Yacov schools in Jerusalem, where pious young girls go, and, for the first time, modern Yiddish orthography is used in certain texts. That is to say there has been a symbiosis between what the modern secular Yiddish school produced and what is taught today in the religious schools. This is a very interesting point of convergence.
The fact is that, in these ultra-Orthodox communities, everyone speaks Yiddish, the language is naturally transmitted within families and within the community in daily life, Yiddish is also used in writing for the education of girls and a little for the reading of the very young boys, and there is also a very lively ultra-Orthodox Yiddish press, especially in New York. There they publish, for example, Der Yid (The Jew), a weekly, whereas elsewhere the press that remains barely survives and faces grave economic problems and a certain crisis of readership. Der Yid, for its part, has no problems; it lives on its advertisements, because the makers of hats for Orthodox Jews need to advertise in the newspaper that is read by Orthodox Jews, and the same goes for the sellers of “kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola,” and so on. So this weekly has advertisers who are not giving it charity but who, quite simply, reach their customers by means of the appropriate medium. This newspaper therefore publishes, each week, 70 to 80 pages, 96 on the eve of the holidays; the articles do not exactly fulfill me, as a secular Jew, but they are written by professional journalists who treat various subjects and who espouse the point of view and the sensibility of the public they address. One sees there, moreover, a number of readers’ letters sufficient to be assured that these letters truly emanate from the readers.
All of that therefore exists in the ultra-Orthodox community, which is, as we know, very dynamic demographically; the families are large, and, if one is to believe the sociolinguists who look into the question, it is one of the languages that are doing best in the world, that is to say that, proportionally, the number of Yiddish speakers is growing faster, perhaps, than the number of people who speak Chinese. It is therefore indeed a growing language.
However, as I was telling you a moment ago, in these communities there is no real concern to master the language; it is a pragmatic approach: one speaks, one jabbers, one understands one another, one exchanges, and that is enough. That said, the authorities of these religious communities regularly come to the defense of Yiddish in family life and in the life of the community, and they remind everyone how important it is that women, that mothers, speak this language with their children, that they prevent English from taking the place of the language of communication in the family. So there is really an insistence and a vigilance, and, at the same time, a total vagueness as to grammatical, lexical or semantic rigor. One speaks as best one can, that’s all.
Plurielles — But then, do people sing in Yiddish, do they produce music in these communities?
I.K. — Indeed there is cultural production in this domain. They sing, there are cassettes, books; we don’t have any at the Cercle Medem, because there are very few people interested in this type of material, but it does very much exist.
Plurielles — Is this importance accorded to Yiddish accompanied by a particular educational system?
I.K. — Yes, in England there are very well organized schools for pious girls, and, a few years ago, since these schools received a subsidy, there was even an inspector paid by the State, who was a Yiddish teacher: he had above all to know the Yiddish language and tradition in order to see whether these schools were teaching properly. Thus the English government paid for the Hasidim to transmit Yiddish correctly to their daughters.
Plurielles — In your view, what is the motivation of these people? There is certainly a negative motivation with respect to Hebrew, which cannot be used since it is the sacred language, but why not use English? Is it because of the texts, that Yiddish would have a greater proximity? Why this instrumental preference for Yiddish over another language?
I.K. — I think it is fairly clear. The religious authorities of this rabbinic Hasidic world have grasped an idea that I fully share: the coherence of a cultural edifice is inconceivable without a language specific to it. So, since Hebrew is excluded from the outset, it is Yiddish that participates in the cultural and identity-based coherence of this group.
On the other hand, this group cannot produce great literature, literature as we conceive it, for there is an antinomy; the freedom to imagine and to create according to any canon whatsoever is not conceivable. One can do interesting things, but always inscribed within a rather constraining framework from every point of view, in substance and in form.
Plurielles — It is a rather closed group with respect to the surrounding world. So how do borrowings function? For Yiddish, in part of its vocabulary at least, borrowed a great deal from the surrounding languages.
I.K. — I have never done a linguistic study of this Yiddish; linguistics is not my domain. I can nonetheless give a few rather pragmatic impressions.
I think it is a closed group, certainly, but closed precisely in the way the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were three or four hundred years ago, that is to say closed on one side but very open on the other. For they are engaged in practical life: they trade, they have businesses, factories, they work in computing and, sometimes, they are true masters in this field; they are therefore very open to practical life as people once were. Two hundred years ago one never saw a Jew of Poland at the theater; one saw him at every market, and there he gleaned the vocabulary that he integrated little by little into his everyday language, recooking it; it seems to me that the same thing is happening with the elements of English that come to be joined to this Yiddish in today’s markets: in the business, in the shop, in tele-computing, in those virtual forums where computer people meet.
Plurielles — What, on the other hand, is the evolution of this Yiddish with respect to Hebrew?
I.K. — This evolution with respect to Hebrew must be very different at Mea Shearim and at Williamsburg, for example, so I could say nothing definitive on this subject.
As regards the ultra-Orthodox Yiddish press that I often read, it seems to me that it retains a considerable dose of Hebrew compared to what the secular Yiddish press was in recent decades, but not at all surprising if one thinks of the standards of normal Yiddish literature. It is an everyday Yiddish, fairly rich in elements that come from the traditional Hebrew sphere, transposing them of course.
Plurielles — You spoke a moment ago of the modern orthographic evolution of Yiddish; in what direction is it taking place? Is it comparable, for example, to what happened in the USSR with the complete editions of Sholem Aleykhem, where one sensed an active desire to separate from Hebrew?
I.K. — Not at all. The desire to reduce the place of Hebrew in Yiddish was something specific to the Soviet Union, at a particular period, under the influence of dogmas and lines that we know perfectly well. The rest of the Yiddish world always wanted to keep the traditional orthography of words of Hebrew origin; and yet the rest of the Yiddish world was 90% secular until a few decades ago, which people forget.
Plurielles — Quite so. Now, for most people, Yiddish = Lubavitch.
I.K. — Absolutely, but it is the fault of secular Jews, I must tell you. If secular Jews were a little more visible on the Yiddish front, this error would not be made.
Plurielles — We are aware of it. For example, Haïm Jitlovski was a great ideologue of secularism; he wrote very contemporary texts on the secularization of culture. But for people who are completely ignorant of Yiddish, this language represents the Lubavitch.
I.K. — Let us say that in France or in America, the secular Jews who concern themselves with Yiddish have beaten a retreat; they are no longer visible. In Israel, it is the secular State that reduced, almost by force, the role of Yiddish in the daily life of the secular community. Yiddish was persecuted in Israel; in the 1930s there were even a few “mini-pogroms” carried out by the muscular defenders of the Hebrew language who came to disrupt demonstrations or smash the windows of the kiosks where Yiddish newspapers were sold.
Plurielles — But, in their defense, it must be said that this also corresponded to the end of the campaign for Hebrew to establish itself. Could you remind us of this struggle between Hebrew and Yiddish that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century?
I.K. — There was indeed a moment of politicization in which one had artificially played up, on one side, Yiddish as the cultural banner of the left-wing movements that were not Zionist, and on the other side, Hebrew as the banner of the Zionist movements. It is artificial because, in fact, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the two languages belonged to the same cultural community; they were written and read by the same people. All the Yiddish writers were the very same physical persons as the Hebrew writers; they all wrote sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in Yiddish. And the literary milieu, the critics, the readers corresponded exactly to the same human milieu, whether for Hebrew or for Yiddish. This artificial division was therefore imposed for partisan calculations, to give oneself a more homogeneous appearance, to have a well-made ideology, with all its parts well welded together. It did, in fact, lead to a rather violent and unjust confrontation on both sides.
It must be said that the bureaucrats of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, during the small decade in which they had a certain power, that is to say roughly the years 1925–35, exerted terrible harassments against Hebrew. And the fact is that in Palestine first, and in Israel afterward, there was a far more relentless struggle against Yiddish. As proof one can cite the following fact: when, in 1926–27, a year after the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a wealthy man of culture, the director of the New York Yiddish daily Der Tog, offered a very handsome sum in dollars to create a chair of Yiddish at the University of Jerusalem, and when the rector of the time, Yehuda Magnes, who had a vast cultural horizon and no prejudices (he was one of the first to have taken the side of a human understanding with the Arabs of Palestine), accepted this proposal, it raised such a protest in the Hebrew literary and journalistic milieus of the Yishuv that he had to beat a retreat. One had to wait until 1952 for a chair of Yiddish to exist in Jerusalem; one had to wait for the Yiddish world to be annihilated in blood for Jerusalem to consent to teach Yiddish at the university.
One must also recall these anti-Yiddish acts of violence by an ad hoc organization, “Gedud meginei hasafa,” the “battalion of the defenders of the language,” which came to break the windows of shops and to disrupt the public meetings held in Yiddish, even though the speakers in question were Zionists who had come to settle in Israel, thus halutsim like the others, but who were attached to Yiddish. They were not Bundists who had come from Poland for three days to hold meetings in Tel Aviv, but pioneers settled in Israel like the others.
And, even after the war, for years it was impossible to publish a Yiddish daily because it was considered to belong to the category of foreign-language newspapers, and this until 1952–53. There was nonetheless a press in Yiddish, but it was not authorized: one had to do a little as in Poland under censorship, invent other names, find administrative quibbles, change the title of the newspaper every month, and so on. On top of that, paper was rationed at that time, so the allocation of paper was a means of pressure.
But much more important still was the permanent campaign to blacken the image of Yiddish in the eyes of Israeli youth. To that I can testify personally: in all the Israeli schools, for fifty years children were told that Yiddish was the expression of the Jew of the Gola, of the Galut (the exile), that is to say a fellow with a bent back, incapable of defending himself, without any dignity and, if need be, a bit of a usurer, and so on — unless he was a Zionist. So an image of the Jew of the past, but a false image, for that Jew of the past was nonetheless different. This propaganda perfectly attained its goal, and for any Israeli of the last three generations, Yiddish represents abomination.
The harm was therefore already done when a belated recognition arrived, 25 or 30 years ago. Now there is an official reversal, but it no longer reaches the population, even if the changes are spectacular: in Israel, for the past 10 years, Yiddish has been taught in a certain number of high schools, for example. But all of that is no longer capable of changing the vision of Yiddish on the part of Israeli society — or else it will take another 50 years for that to really change.
For the moment, Israelis consider that Yiddish is the language of the ultra-religious of Mea Shearim and the language of the galut past that goes hand in hand with passivity, humiliation and all the rest, and they are wholly ignorant of the existence of a literature, even though translations of Yiddish writers have always been, since the 1930s, part of the curriculum of the Israeli school: Sholem, Asch and Peretz are there, but it is never said that this is translated from Yiddish; the children do not know it, the texts are presented to them in Hebrew.
Plurielles — What of the Israeli university? Are there reviews in Yiddish?
I.K. — There are, of course. The Histadrut itself, which was not particularly Yiddish-loving, financed for 50 years, from 1948 to our day, a good literary review in Yiddish; that shows that the positions were not one-sided.
Occasionally, depending on the good feelings of a given personality or a given small circle, quite a lot of things have been done in favor of Yiddish culture. But whatever could have a hold on Israeli society as a whole was done, systematically, against Yiddish. That is why, for Israelis, Yiddish = Lubavitch, whereas, over the last 100 years, the entire Yiddish cultural world worked against religious domination, or, at the very least, against fanaticism.
Plurielles — That is the paradox. Whereas for 100 years Yiddish was a kind of vehicle of the Jew’s liberation, of the secularization of culture, of openness to the outside world, the current practice of Yiddish, which falls to the ultra-Orthodox world, is in a sense the instrument of re-enclosure. But what of the secular Jews?
I.K. — It is indeed very paradoxical and it gives rise to much reflection.
So on the other side, among the secular Jews, there are nonetheless a certain number of people who speak Yiddish every day, because they still belong to the generations born before the war, or because they love it, because it gives them pleasure. I, for example, have done so all my life, but here, in Paris, I don’t know a great number of people who have the same practice; on the other hand, I know a certain number in the United States, a few in Jerusalem, but it is far from being a mass phenomenon.
The secular Yiddish press has melted away like snow in the sun; 30 years ago there were something like 200 periodical titles in the world, including 15 or 18 daily newspapers, and political weeklies, monthly or quarterly literary reviews, and so on, but now we are reduced to very little, a tiny remnant.
One finds, for example, in New York the weekly Forverts (The Vanguard, in German) which is of good quality and enjoys a certain economic ease, since it is the heir of the daily of the same name. In Tel Aviv, there are two other weeklies, of lesser importance.
In France there is no longer any weekly, nor any daily. But bulletins and literary reviews continue to be published. In Paris there exists the review Yiddishe Heftn, published by the Cercle Bernard Lazare; the Medem Library, in conjunction with the association for the diffusion of Yiddish, publishes a small sheet for students, very well done, Der yiddisher tam-tam.
And in Argentina, which was nonetheless the great country for Yiddish, there is no longer any periodical press at all.
But there are still a few good literary reviews. For example, in Tel Aviv, Naye Vegn (The New Way) is published each year, now in its sixth issue, and one finds there texts by relatively young authors, born after the Second World War. In New York appears the journal of the Yiddishist League, Afn Shvel (On the Threshold), as well as the journal of the Youth Movement for Yiddish, Yugntruf. There is also published a political and literary review, Di Tsukunft (The Future), which has a century of existence, and the Bund publishes every two months the review Undzer Tsayt (Our Time). There is also a review in Haifa, another in Los Angeles, yet another in Oxford. In Moscow a review was still published until recently, but I don’t know whether it still exists.
You see, then, that something remains, but if one compares this remnant to what existed just a generation ago — several hundred dailies, several hundred reviews — the decline has been very perceptible.
Plurielles — What, then, are the causes of this decline? One can think of two causes: the Shoah, of course, with the disappearance of the mass of Yiddish speakers, but also the need for cultural and social integration in the host country. In the United States, for example, one may think that the Shoah is a secondary factor in the disappearance of Yiddish and that it is, in fact, a crisis of polyglossia; it is, indeed, very difficult to find societies tolerant enough to accept that their nationals should durably speak two languages at once.
I.K. — That is absolutely certain. Let us not forget, either, the psychological factors and the problems of prestige that also come into play when one is an immigrant: when one has to raise children in a country, one is inclined to move away from one’s own language and to privilege that of the host society.
Plurielles — This poses a more general problem: How is a cultural identity to be preserved insofar as it is conveyed by the language? And, moreover, can a living minority culture be safeguarded when one is dispersed in the great metropolises, as is currently the case, for the secular Jews in particular?
I.K. — That is precisely where the shoe pinches. Sociolinguists of every horizon have studied this phenomenon, and it is not surprising that it should be people of Yiddish background who have the most to say on this subject nowadays. Thus, Yoshua Fishman, who is now 70, who was for decades one of the principal figures of sociolinguistics, who taught on both coasts of the United States, and has written dozens of works on all the problems of this science, conducts a very interesting reflection on what is happening with Yiddish. He observes very closely this evolution of the ultra-Orthodox world, of which he is not a part but which he knows very well and studies systematically.
His conclusions are as follows. Experience shows that there are only two conditions that truly serve the safeguarding and vitality of minority cultures and languages: a minimum of territorial concentration, on the one hand — there must therefore be at least a good dozen families on the same street, or in the same neighborhood, for there to be regular contact — and, on the other hand, the presence of the language in the sphere of daily life, even if this presence is not exclusive and its role is limited to certain sectors. All the rest is worth nothing.
Yoshua Fishman shows, for example, what happens with Irish, which has infinitely greater resources than Yiddish insofar as its partisans are territorially concentrated. Everyone knows the nationalism of the Irish partisans; well, their language went down with all hands before English; there is no longer any spoken Irish, and all their efforts are almost without result. Only a few experiments have succeeded, when groups have decided to organize themselves to speak it every day at home, all the time. It is obvious that if one wants to talk about computing, for example, and one does not have the vocabulary for it, one uses the surrounding language; but, in any case, one can talk about cooking, small trade and other subjects of that sort in the minority language — the whole thing is to decide to, and that bears fruit.
Otherwise, the festivals, the theater, the evenings of literary readings — all of that is marvelous, wonderful, it is culture, but it is not enough to revitalize a culture that is losing ground. Yoshua Fishman has made in-depth studies of all the efforts undertaken to revitalize languages, and it is certain that there is only one means that yields results: it is to want to live a little in this language.
Plurielles — But that is very complicated in modern life, where people tend to be very dispersed and very mobile geographically. It makes one a bit pessimistic for the future, what do you think?
I.K. — If you like, but at the same time it is something really easy, because, as one says in Yiddish, “God sends the remedy before the affliction.” So this same evolution of modern life has also put within our reach the means of finding again what we are looking for everywhere, and very quickly. For if I look for a Yiddish point of contact in London, it is very easy today; with the Internet, everyone is at home everywhere in the world.
Plurielles — Besides, for the tcholent1 alone, there are 200 sites on the Internet!
I.K. — That is quite true; on the Internet these recipes are written in English or in Yiddish using the Latin letters, and there are also discussion forums, bulletins, and so on. But even without that, the means of communication have been such, for several decades already, that one can transmit Yiddish. As far as I am concerned, before teaching Yiddish I had other occupations, and that did not prevent me from living in Yiddish all my life. I am an example of someone who had to leave his country for professional reasons, who did not have great economic ease, and that did not prevent me from transmitting to my three children a fairly complete knowledge of Yiddish, of its literature and its culture, with the limitations deriving from the fact that I am their only interlocutor, or nearly so. But for that I am no longer responsible.
I have no idea what the future holds for us, but the pressure of the surrounding society no longer goes in the direction of stifling any cultural specificity. Of course, one would find it rather negative — and so would I — if my children had not learned French correctly, but no one finds it strange that in the elevator we speak Yiddish among ourselves. Admittedly, it is a language so little widespread that people do not realize it is a language of Jews; they think it is Swedish, which is very respectable! But, essentially, it is possible to adopt this stance, to speak Yiddish in the family, and if more of us did so there would be far fewer limitations. I don’t know what my children will do with their own children — they are autonomous beings; but there too, it will be the after-effect of the fact that we do not reach the minimum threshold to reproduce a certain cultural configuration.
Plurielles — How, under these conditions, can one envisage the future of Yiddish in three domains? You have just evoked one aspect of the future of the everyday language, but is there a future for literary creation in Yiddish? And what is happening with research?
I.K. — I am not very optimistic as regards the secular milieus, but be careful, my pessimism bears on people and not on the language, for it is the people who are growing poorer; the language is indifferent. I am pessimistic about the richness and fecundity of secular Jewish culture because we live without a language of our own. Without disdaining the French language and culture that belong to us, just as do, as persons formed in the Western world, English culture for example, or the great culture of the world, the fact of not having a language of our own severely limits our possibility of being fertile on the cultural plane.
And when I say this for Yiddish, I think it for the whole of the Jewish languages, for the whole of the elements that can help us weave something more concrete, richer, than the sole permanent reflection on Judaism that we have conducted since the most remote eras. I really think that if we, secular Jews, want to arrive at something, we must pass through the revitalization of our languages, all of them for all of us, and not only Yiddish for the Ashkenazim and Judeo-Spanish for the Sephardim. This whole of cultural riches is ours, and if we lose it, we lose an essential element of our cultural creativity.
Plurielles — You do not believe in the possibility, for us secular Jews, of using the language of the country in which we live to express our culture and to advance it?
I.K. — Yes, but in a process of permanent loss of momentum: one expresses a culture, but always in relation to a more specific past that is therefore behind us.
Plurielles — That is the great question: all cultures need their past, but none can survive if it does nothing but anchor itself in the past. For a culture to live, it needs a permanent creativity; do you not believe that this creativity can be exercised in the language of the country?
I.K. — Perhaps so, I don’t know what to answer you. I, for one, do not feel it that way, but it is true that I have a rather strong bias. So, in my view, to revitalize our possibilities of cultural creation we must reappropriate this linguistic element. That said, I exclude nothing; I could not say whether the writers who, today, write a Jewish literature of French expression have a future. For my sensibility, my tastes, and so on, it is rather the other path that is the better one.
In any case, literary creation in Yiddish exists. Several dozen people in the world, who are between 25 and 60 years old, write fiction, poetry, sometimes theater, and certainly articles and essays in Yiddish. That does not make us a literature, with all that a literature worthy of the name must have: a readership very present in communication with the world of writers, a set of concerns that touches the community, an interaction at the level of the language. That exists only in part for Yiddish.
However, we are also affected by the problems that all contemporary writers pose for themselves when they wonder whether they exist by virtue of a real need of the readership or whether they are part of the machine for distributing products — in this case the book-product like any product whatsoever. We are therefore concerned by the great general problems of literature: Does the writer still have a real role? Does he truly represent the sensibility and the conscience of a community? Or is he merely one merchant among all the merchants of the fair? And we have, moreover, the specific problems that I evoked a moment ago. Nevertheless the desire to create continues to be present, which means that there is still life.
As for the domain of research, the one that is furthest from life, it is the one that is doing best: Yiddish is the object of studies, of research, of congresses, of publications in the four corners of the planet. It is taught in universities, there are research centers, numerous publications in English, but also two scholarly publications in Yiddish that thus express the achievements of research in the language; there are enough people capable of writing essays and papers in Yiddish, and many more in English, German, and so on. For this domain, as long as the present university system in general exists, Yiddish research will have fine days ahead of it. The day humanity says to itself: enough money wasted on these matters of linguistics, archaeology, sociocultural phenomena, and so on — let us leave that to the pleasure of private individuals and concern ourselves with concrete things — then the problem will arise. But for the moment, all is well, and the Council of Europe has even made a declaration according to which Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish are accepted as minority languages without territoriality.
Plurielles — You spoke of a living literary creation; could you name for us some authors who write in Yiddish?
I.K. — In France we are three: Berl Vaisbrot and Pinye Fogel, who have written short stories, and myself, who have written a little book of poems — for which, moreover, I have forbidden any translation into another language, which did not prevent me from receiving some twenty requests from the United States, Mexico, Israel and two or three European countries.
As I told you, there are literary reviews in New York and Oxford that publish texts by authors. Hirshe-Dovid Katz, who is in his forties and is also a researcher, has already published in England three handsome volumes of short stories. In Israel there are authors too: Lev Berinski, for example, who came from Russia, is a great poet, very inspired, and he expresses himself in Yiddish even though he has other languages at his disposal, such as Russian or Tibetan, as a linguist. In all, several dozen authors create in Yiddish, throughout the world.
There is therefore, under certain aspects, a future for Yiddish. But I insist, the real question to be posed is the following: for secular Jews, what future is there outside the Jewish linguistic and cultural heritage?
Notes
The tcholent (or cholent) is a traditional Yiddish dish, made from potatoes, beans and meat, which was left to simmer for 10 to 20 hours…↩︎