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Dovid Katz

Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish Hardcover – 1 Feb. 2005

by Dovid Katz (Author)

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From one of the world's foremost scholars of Yiddish, a sweeping history of the language, its culture, and its literature-with a provocative argument about its future as a living language. Words on Fire offers a rich, engaging account of the history and evolution of the Yiddish language. Drawing on almost thirty years of scholarship, prominent Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz traces the origins of Yiddish back to the Europe of a thousand years ago, and shows how those origins are themselves an uninterrupted continuation of the previous three millennia of Jewish history and culture in the Near East. Words on Fire narrates the history of the language from medieval times onward, through its development as written literature, particularly for and by Jewish women. In the wake of secularizing and modernizing movements of the nineteenth century, Yiddish rose spectacularly in a few short years from a mass folk idiom to the language of sophisticated modern literature, theater, and journalism. Although a secular Yiddish culture no longer exists, Katz argues that its resurgence among religious Jewish communities ensures that Yiddish will still be a thriving language in the twenty-first century. For

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Basic Books
Publication date

1 Feb. 2005
Dimensions

16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm
ISBN-10

0465037283
ISBN-13

978-0465037285
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Product description

About the Author

Dovid Katz holds a BA from Columbia University and a PhD in linguistics from the University of London. A former Guggenheim recipient, he has taught at Oxford and at Yale. He now heads the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University and divides his time between Lithuania and Wales. He is the author of Grammar of the Yiddish Language.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (1 Feb. 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465037283
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465037285
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,419,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,994 in Historical & Comparative Linguistics
- 4,100 in Jewish History
- 30,278 in Words, Language & Grammar

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15 ratings

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Tahnna

A jewel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 30 December 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is a jewel, a poetry as Jonathan Safran Foer has written. This book tells the story of the ashkenaz people, the history of the language and of the civilisation which disappeared in the Shoah.

Helpful

John Magid

A light in the darkness

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 26 February 2008

This is a scholarly work, however, I found it an easy and fascinating read. By its very nature, as the language of a stateless people, Yiddish presents difficulties to anyone attempting to trace it's roots.
Even some speakers of Yiddish are unaware of the age and history of their "mame loshn". Written off as "Jargon" by the modernists in the late 19th early 20th centuries, Yiddish speakers had to fight to save their beloved, very expressive tounge from extinction. The new language of the Jews was Ivrit (Hebrew). However, Yiddish is now showing signe of recovery. Thanks to people such as Dovid Katz.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

lexo1941

A rich, vivid and fascinating book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 21 September 2008

I am neither Jewish, nor a Christian interested in Jewish customs. I'm an atheist interested in languages and literature. I didn't know what to expect with this book, which I bought largely on spec. It turns out to be a fascinating history not just of the Yiddish language, but of Ashkenazi culture in general. Katz is a professional linguist with a passion for literature, and not the least interesting thing about this book is that it has so much fascinating information about Yiddish literature, which is - let's face it! - not the most widely read canon in the world. The idea that there is an entire literature out there, full of gems that I haven't read yet, is very exciting.

Yiddish itself is a fascinating language, built on the structure of German but using a vocabulary which is drawn from German, Hebrew, Aramaic and other languages, and it's unique in being the only Germanic language which is not normally written in Roman script. It occurs to me, as someone studying Hebrew in his spare time, that some preliminary study of Yiddish should perhaps be recommended to the elementary student of Hebrew, at least if that student knows German. Because Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet, it's a little easier to learn that alphabet in the first place if you know that the word you are trying to decipher is a Germanic one and not a Semitic one. But then Yiddish uses the alphabet slightly differently to Hebrew (especially in the treatment of vowels) so maybe it's just me who finds it useful that way.

Yiddish, along with some other aspects of Judaica, is currently having a bit of a revival. Katz makes out a good case that it is a language with a genuine history, and certainly something worth treasuring and using. Yiddish is added to the long list of languages that I want to learn someday, and I can't wait to read some of the books that Katz talks about. I recommend this book to anyone interested in European history from AD 1000-2000; the Jews are famously a people of the Book, whose relationship with language is essential to their sense of themselves as Jews, and so a history of their spoken vernacular can hardly fail to enrich everyone's sense of the last thousand years.

7 people found this helpful

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Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish Hardcover – 1 Feb. 2005

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About the Author

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Dovid Katz

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