Publisher's Synopsis
Yiddish, the everyday language of the Jews of Eastern Europe for 1000 years, was largely destroyed in its heartland by the Holocaust in a cultural extinction that accompanied the extermination of its speakers. However as the articles assembled here by leading Oxford Yiddish scholar and translator, Joseph Sherman demonstrate, it has nevertheless had a fragmented 'afterlife' in Poland, South Africa and Israel as well as amongst ultra-pious Jews in the United States and Canada who have maintained it as a linguistic wall between themselves and the wider world. Also discussed here is the thorny issue of the exact status of the Yiddish taught in universities today, the role of the last generation of Yiddish poets and writers such as Yankev Glatshteyn and Abraham Sutzkever, and the continuing influence of Yiddish on writing and speech in English and French.
