Yiddishlands

This lively and irreverent memoir explores the settings where Yiddish—a language of song, rebellion, and eternal longing—has thrived: in the cabaret and café, the kitchen and classroom, the literary salon and mystical commune, the partisan brigade and on pilgrimage to Poland. Inspired by his mother’s recitations of their family saga in his youth, author David Roskies uncovers a tale of survival, intrigue, sacrifice, and divided loyalties that began over 4,000 miles away and two generations ago. A careful reconstruction of the details of his parents’ escape from Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War is juxtaposed with his personal odyssey in the postwar center of Yiddish culture that was Montreal. Roskies embarks on a search for other speakers of his mother tongue with very different stories to tell, which takes him on a journey through the upheavals of 1960s America, the struggle for Soviet Jewry, the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the revival of Jewish life here, there, and everywhere. Along the way, he encounters great Yiddish poets and their widows, survivors of the Holocaust, artists, actors, scholars, and teachers. Yiddishlands is essential reading for students of the recent Jewish past and the living Yiddish present.