Friday, December 6, 1963—THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS-3$ Mapping a Culture in Yiddish Eidtors Note: This is an excerpt from an article in Columbia Uni- versity Forum by Dr. Weinreich,. Atran Professor of Yiddish Lan- guage, Literature and Culture and chairman of the department of linguists at Columbia University. Prof. Weinreich is one of the prominent leaders in YIVO. * * is regrettable that the re- cent upsurge of foreign study in this country has so far tended to bypass a language and a cul- ture from which millions of Americans are but a generation removed. The United States Of- fice of Education has until now It HAPPY HANUKAH MIMCO STEEL & SUPPLY 24200 Telegraph Rd. 353-2100 /NI 1. HANUKAH GREETINGS Oakman Hardware Company D. KATZ, Prop. Wholesale - Retail Plumbing-Electrical Supplies, etc. DI 1-3724 2561 Puritan HAPPY HANUKAH BEDROOMS Inc. Detroit's Only Exclusive Bedroom Store 5802 E. 8 Mile TW 1 - 1710 Next to Sofas, Inc. HOLIDAY GREETINGS SKY DIRT SOIL for Every Need 15450 Schaefer N. of Fenkell VE 7-9380 HAPPY HANUKAH NATIONAL COAL & OIL CO. Max Handler 9141 Monica - WE 3 4444 HANUKAH GREETINGS Oakland Waste Material Co. Buyers of 'Waste Paper. Scrap Metal, Rags 1 534 Gillett TR 3-2575 Hanukah Greetings W. H. BELTER Distributors of • U. S. Tires and Batteries 1931 East Jefferson LO 8-3055 rejected the suggestion that the study of European Jewish soc- iety, its language, and its litera- ture, is in the national interest and deserves support under the National Defense Education Act. Show us the country in which Yiddish is an official language, say the strategists in Washing- ton, and we will gladly include it in the list of critical tongues along with Gujerati, Khalkha, Twi, and the like. But merely because an exclusive Yiddish area does not appear on any administrative map, is the hu- manistic relevance of this cul- ture to be denied? Fortunately, in other quarters more enlighten- ed counsels have prevailed, mak- ing it possible for the facilities of a major graduate school to be used in the advancement of Yid- dish scholarship; one urgent re- search project now under way at Columbia University is the preparation of an atlas of Euro- pean Jewish Culture. Just before World War II, it is estimated, there were over seven million Jews in Eastern and Central Europe. They made up the bulk of the so-called Ash- kenazic, Yiddish - s p e a k i n g, branch of Jewry. Today, after Germany's war . against the Jews, which took six million civilian lives, and after a decade and a half of Soviet cultural repres- sion virtually unrelieved by de- Stalinization, the surviving off- shoots of this society are grow- ing increasingly apart. The desire to know and under- stand this society for its own sake would be reason enough for the development of Yiddish studies on the University level. Central and East European Jew- ry by and large determined the face of the vigorous "colonial" Jewry, notable in America and Israel, and this alone commends the mother society to the atten- tion of the scholar. But that society also has facets that make its study engrossing on other, more general grounds. The his- torian cannot fail to note that the economic and cultural tone of a substantial part of Europe would have been different dur- ing many centuries if the Chris- tian rural society had not lived symbiotically with Jewish mar- ket towns (shtetlekh) in the thousands. They provided the growing cities in Poland, Lith- uania, Rumania, and western Russia with entrepreneurship and labor forces. They gave us a diversified literature of consid- erable proportions; a literature rooted in tradition, yet conscious- ly universal and modernistic; a literature rich in folklore and famous for its humor.' 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