Isidor Borchardt

Born in Jastrow, Prussia (today Jastrowie, Poland) to a traditional Orthodox family, Isidor Borchardt was a German-language author of what were called “ghetto tales,” literature about a recently vanished traditional Jewish life in the German lands written for modern or modernizing Jews who were already consuming German-language culture primarily or exclusively. Interestingly, Borchardt’s stories of provincial life, based on his own youthful experience, often present Judeo-German (a mix of Western Yiddish and German generally assumed to have been used exclusively by German Jews) as having been the shared vernacular of Jews and their gentile neighbors.