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Fresh GREEN CABBAGE • 1 • 10 oz. pkg. 9 c lb. 35c each GREENFIELD'S NOODLES 3/$ 11 Borden's LOWFAT or 1/2% MILK ... All Specials Good Through September 24, 1986 76 Friday, September 19, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS $ 29 gal. NEWS Nostalgia At Heart Of Yiddish Revival BEN GALLOB Special to The Jewish News N ew York — A profes- sor of Yiddish studies warns that the grow- ing American interest in Yiddish language and culture should not be "misinterpreted as language recovery." David Gold, co-editor of Jewish Language Review, makes his observations in a recent issue of Sh'ma, citing two lengthy articles about Yiddish in the New York Times. He contends that pro- gressively fewer Jews use Yiddish as their everyday language, except for Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews; that less and less cul- ture "is being created in Yid- dish; and ever more of the old (Yiddish) culture is finding a haven only in archive and libraries and on researchers' desks. "Yiddish was once the na- tive, primary and habitual language of all of Ashkenazic Jewry," he writes. But, in the late 18th Century, Yiddish began to be used less by Ashkenazim in central Europe, and, starting in the 19th Century, also less fre- quently in eastern Europe. The Holocaust dealt a- sav- age blow to Yiddish, he ex- plains. Repression in the Soviet Union, "Hebraization" and discouragement in Israel, and a shift to other lan- guages almost everywhere in the 20th century, also "have taken their toll." Gold asserts that the so- called revival of Yiddish — "limited mostly to North America" — is simply "the kindling of a small flame of curiosity about the language and its culture, rather than a significant increase in its use." He suggested that lovers of Yiddish not permit them- selves to be deluded "into thinking that a language can maintain itself in this artifi- cial fashion." If Yiddish were healthy, he contends, it would not be necessary to collect hundreds of thousands of Yiddish books in order to save them from extinction by indifference or ignorance. Gold cites the National Yiddish Book Center at Amherst, Mass., for rescuing about 350,000 Yiddish books "but it has succeeded in sell- ing only about 5,000 and most of these have gone to libraries at colleges and uni- versities rather than into people's homes." He agrees that the Yiddish theater "continues to make itself felt" but the season "grows shorter over the years." Moreover, he declares that this theater "is shunned by ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim — among whom the language has the only chance of survival — and producers must now resort to more and more translations or to Yiddish interspersed with English because they are playing" to audiences "who understand little or nothing of the language." Gold reports that since the early 1950s, nearly every Is- raeli college has introduced Yiddish studies. He directs that program at the Univer- sity of Haifa. But relatively few students take these courses and virtually "no Israeli-born students have become researchers of Yid- dish language, literature or culture, let alone Yiddish speakers." In North America, he de- clares, Yiddish has become a steadily more popular subject of study at colleges, "so much To survive, Yiddish must be withdrawn from the modern world or become the language of a political entity. so that we Israeli teachers, to tell the truth, look enviously on what is happening on American and Canadian campuses today." Why? Gold explains that "most Ashkenazi students in North American are the grandchildren, if not the great-grandchildren of Yiddish-speaking immigrants — hence their interest in Yiddish is largely nostalgic or antiquarian; whereas most Ashkenazi students in Israel today are the children of im- migrants — hence it is too early" in Israel "for nostalgia or antiquarianism." Gold contends that to be sustained now, Yiddish must either be withdrawn from the modern world or "become the official language of a political entity," which Gold called a "chimeric expectation." Copyright 1986, Jewish Tele- graphic Agency Leaflets Pledge Retaliation Paris (JTA) — Leaflets have appeared here following the massacre of 21 Jews in the Is- tanbul synagogue, purporting to be from a Jewish terrorist underground. According to a report in the French daily Le Quotidien de Paris, the fliers, inscribed Terror Neged Terror (Hebrew for "Terror Against Terror"), appeared Sept. 8 fol- lowing the carnage in the Tur- kish capital. The fliers, depicted in the newspaper, read, "Following the attack in Istanbul, one re- sponsible person of the PLO will be executed within the week. Long live the armed fight for the Jews of France!" (