Language in Postwar Jewish Culture

Jewish culture from 1939 to 1973 was marked by profound linguistic shifts. English and Hebrew, and to a lesser degree French and Spanish, became the major languages of the Jewish world. Jewish culture in Arabic, German, and Polish declined, while, toward the end of this period, Russian slowly began to reemerge. The Ladino-speaking heartland of Salonika and the Balkans was decimated.

The great transnational Yiddish-speaking diaspora that had ranged from Warsaw to New York, from Cape Town to Buenos Aires—Yiddishland—lived on after the Holocaust, but on borrowed time and in vastly changed circumstances. The vast demographic reservoir of Jewish Eastern Europe that had replenished and nurtured Yiddishland was gone. Intense prewar debates between diaspora nationalists and Zionists, between Yiddishists and Hebraists, largely disappeared. More Jews had spoken Yiddish for a longer time than any other language in Jewish history. This was now over.

Yet paradoxically these years witnessed a second golden age of Yiddish culture. Powerful poetry, incisive reportage, moving diaries, ghetto songs—all highlight the ongoing vitality of Yiddish culture under Nazi occupation. After the war, Yiddish writers and poets wrote some of their finest works. Yiddish was the language of the displaced persons’ camps and of communal Holocaust memory. Until the 1960s, it was the major language of serious Holocaust scholarship, a fact that remained largely unknown to outsiders. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Mark Turkow launched the series Dos poylishe yidntum, one of the most extraordinary publishing projects in modern Jewish history, a 175-book collection of memoirs, fiction, history, and poetry dedicated to preserving the memory of Polish Jewry. Yiddish schools endured, especially in Canada and Latin America. In Israel, the poet Abraham Sutzkever published the finest Yiddish literary journal in the world, Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain). Yiddish lived on, but few believed that it had a future. From a living Jewish language, it became, to an increasing extent, loshn-hakdoyshim, the language of the martyrs.

The destruction of the Yiddish-speaking heartland of Eastern Europe, at a time when very few Jews spoke Hebrew, meant that much Jewish culture in this period would be created in non-Jewish languages. Indeed, the creation in other languages of a Jewish idiom that is not merely comical ranks among the greatest achievements of this period. Examples of this new Jewish idiom (or to use David Roskies’s term, Jewspeak) range from the stories and novels of Bernard Malamud and Patrick Modiano to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.

Novelist Saul Bellow alluded to this elusive but important Jewish literature in non-Jewish languages in his 1963 anthology Great Jewish Short Stories, when he recalled a lighthearted but significant argument he had had with the Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon. Agnon warned him that only writings in Hebrew were “safe.” But Bellow parried that one could also write in Russian or English and still be a Jewish writer. And what exactly was Jewish anyway, Bellow asked? Neither writer convinced the other. Both would win the Nobel Prize in Literature, a sure sign that Jewish writers were gaining legitimacy and respect.