Book description
In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from
the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia,
then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the
Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In
its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically
successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish
society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black
Sea. In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the
Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out
into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of
Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the
late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian
anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when
Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels. Paul
Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish
language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and
literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life
became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of
world, culture. Paul Kriwaczek, an Austrian Jew, was born in 1937 in
Vienna. He grew up in north-west London, where the Yiddish language and
culture were still strong among his friends' parents. After a career
with the BBC External Services and as a successful programme-maker for
BBC television, he retired in the mid 1990s and lives in north London.
