Word: yiddishe
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...said," she says. "What I had been exposed to at home was a first-class literature [that] was in no way reflected in the higher education that I had received or in the general [Canadian] culture." Wisse says it was this realization that inspired her to study Yiddish literature as a graduate student at Columbia...
This marginalization occurred despite the fact that Yiddish, whose linguistic roots date back more than 800 years to northern Italy and southern Germany, was spoken by 11 million Jews at its peak, particularly in eastern Europe. The "lingua franca" among Jews on five continents, its most extensive literature was produced during its brief flowering from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century...
Wisse's current course focuses on the changes that have occurred in Jewish literature over the last century, as the number of Jews able to speak Yiddish and Hebrew has declined drastically...
...20th century, Jews are born into a variety of languages," Wisse says. "Many of them no longer have access to Yiddish or Hebrew, that is, to a Jewish language, and if they want to write at all, they have to write in the language that [has become] theirs...
Calling the history of Yiddish literature "compressed," and the loss of the Yiddish language a "cultural lobotomy," Wisse says that Yiddish is "a literaturewithout heirs" and that American Jews are "orphanswithout an inheritance...