Yiddish: A Nation of Words. (Books: life in Yiddishland).

Miriam Weinstein Yiddish: A Nation of Words. Steerforth Press; 301 pages, $26

A bit more than thirty years ago Leo Rosten published The Joys of Yiddish, a warmhearted book that walked its readers through a wide variety of Yiddish jokes, salty aphorisms, and comic types. One learned, for example, how to distinguish between the schlemiel and his ever-present cousin the schlimazel, and the lengths that a schnorrer ("shameless beggar") would go to wangle a meal. Rosten, best known for his humorous New Yorker sketches, was well aware that humor depends, above all else, on three things: timing, timing, and timing. But even Rosten must have been amazed when The Joys of Yiddish took off. Here is a case where the Zeitgeist worked decidedly in his favor--not only in terms of how fashionable ethnic Jewishness had become, but also how the 1967 War in Israel had greatly heightened the consciousness of many otherwise assimilated Jewish Americans. Yiddishists, by contrast, were not impressed. For decades, Jewish-American novelists, stand-up comics, Broadway producers, and Hollywood filmmakers had used Yiddish words as an easy seasoning. They had, in a word, chutzpah and sprinkled Yiddishisms into their concoctions without so much as a passing nod to Jewish history or culture. Rosten's book was hardly the worst example, but as a serious Yiddish writer was quick to tell me, "He knows the 'joys' of Yiddish. But what about its sorrows? These, he doesn't know."

Miriam Weinstein's Yiddish: A Nation of Words is meant to be a popular, rather than scholarly, history of Yiddish, and, as such, it succeeds admirably. It is not only engaging and clearly written, but it is also eminently accessible to anyone with curiosity and a functioning heart. Her book, Weinstein explains at the outset,

 
   will use the language as a way to mark the meandering path of Jewish 
   history. Then it will be time for a rest, maybe a glazel tey, a shtikl 
   broit, a shnapps--a little glass of tea, a piece of bread, a drink of 
   whisky--in the shtetl, the archetypal Jewish town. We will track the 
   language through the industrial and intellectual evolution that swept 
   Yiddish into the modern world.... Then we're going to talk some 
   geopolitical specifics--what happened in Eastern Europe, Russia, Israel, 
   and the United States. The Holocaust will shut the curtain on much of the 
   world we have come to know. We will pause to mourn and to pay our respects. 
   Then, like the Yiddish language and the people who speak it, we will gather 
   our strength and our memories, pick ourselves up, and stride on. 

Weinstein makes no bones about the fact that she is not a linguist, not a historian, not a scholar of any sort. But she is clearly an engaging amateur, one who knows what she is talking about and, better yet, who talks about it with a cheerleader's passion. There are times, however, when her enthusiasm wears a bit thin, and nowhere is this truer than when she dodges what ...