Sunday 30 November 2008 21:30-22:15, Radio 3 (Sunday Feature)
192/44; 60 MB; sound quality excellent
Yiddish was the language of diaspora - the language of a people on the move across Europe - a mixture of Hebrew and Middle German, spiced with Aramaic, Greek, Latin, old French and old Italian. At its height, it is estimated to have been spoken or understood by more than 10 million people - nearly two thirds of the world's entire Jewish population - and was known as the "mame loshn" or mother tongue. But Yiddish has suffered a dramatic decline over the last century. Assimilation dealt the first blow, as many Jews migrated to the USA and adopted English, then came the Holocaust, in which millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews were annihilated. The third blow came when Israel decided to adopt Hebrew, rather than Yiddish, as its official language.
In Yiddish: A Struggle For Survival, Dennis Marks travels to New York to discover what has become of the Yiddish and how much of the language survives. He begins on the Lower East Side, where many Jewish migrants first came to live, and explores the musical and theatrical traditions which once supported a dozen Yiddish theatres on Second Avenue. He hears from the publisher of "The Forward", once the world's most popular Yiddish newspaper, now in seemingly terminal decline. And he explores the enormous influence of Yiddish culture on American life, its literature and its comedic tradition. The programme has contributions from the cast of the Folksbiene Theatre in New York, novelists Dara Horn and Cynthia Ozick, comedian Freddie Roman and Klezmer musician Alicia Svigals.
Producer: Mark Savage
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Replies
Rick -
Thanks for a wonderful offering. According to my late mother her father could speak Yiddish. I learned to speak some of it in the neighborhood I grew up in during the 1950s in Washington, DC.
Bob