Arts&Life

books

82 | MAY 28 • 2020 

Two Literature 
Professors Share 
‘How Yiddish 
Changed America’

Josh Lambert and Ilan Stavans discuss 
their own love of Yiddish and the 
challenge of putting the book together.

ANDREW FIELD CONTRIBUTING WRITER

H

ow Yiddish Changed 
America and How America 
Changed Yiddish, pub-
lished in January by Restless 
Books, collects 150 
years of writing 
on Yiddish culture 
in America. The 
anthology’
s co-editors 
are Josh Lambert, 
academic director 
of the Yiddish Book 
Center in Amherst, 
Massachusetts, and 
incoming director 
of the Jewish Studies 
program at Wellesley 
College (and a Ph.D. 
alum of the University 
of Michigan), and Ilan 
Stavans, an endowed 
professor at Amherst 
College.

JN: Where and how 
did your own personal 
love affair with Yiddish begin? 
Stavans: I am a Mexican Jew, 
born in Mexico City, [and] went 
to Yiddish school from kinder-
garten to high school. We learned 
of Jewish culture, and Yiddish 
literature, and also of Mexican 
culture and of Mexican literature, 
all in Yiddish. Spanish was the 
language of the street, the public 
language; Yiddish was the private 
language, the language of grand-
parents, parents and schooling.
I have a very close, kind of 
romantic relationship with 
Yiddish. I see it as the entry way 
to a culture. But I’
m also very 
critical of that culture, both in 
constructive and maybe more 
forceful ways.

Lambert: I grew up in Toronto; 
I went to Jewish school, but 
Yiddish wasn’
t ever a part of it. 
And even though my grandfather 
had immigrated from Poland and 
was a native Yiddish speaker, it 

was never part of my family life.
When I got to college, I took 
a course on Yiddish literature 
and discovered all these interest-
ing Yiddish writers. 
Eventually I went 
to graduate school 
to become a literary 
scholar, and I had a 
mentor who said that 
if I wanted to under-
stand the history of 
Jewish writers, and 
of Jewish literature 
in America, I’
d need 
to have access to the 
Yiddish texts. So she 
pushed me: “You have 
to go start studying 
Yiddish!” And I did. 
I went to a summer 
program and started 
to learn the language. 
It was amazing to 
discover how much 
of my own story, my 
own family history, was con-
tained in Yiddish culture.
Years after my grandfather 
died, I went down to my parents’
 
basement and found a Yiddish 
book owned by him. And I could 
understand what he had been 
reading.

JN: This is a fascinating book 
because it’
s an anthology of so 
many different genres, writers 
and backgrounds. What was the 
process like of putting the book 
together? Was it totally chaotic?
Lambert: It was the best kind of 
chaos. We knew we didn’
t have 
an enormous amount of time, 
because part of the intention of 
this project was to celebrate the 
40th anniversary of the Yiddish 
Book Center. So we used as our 
starting point a really wonderful 
magazine that the center has 
published. Pakn Treger tried to do 
over all those decades what this 
book tried to do: Find compelling 

Ilan Stavans

MERYL SCHENKER PHOTOGRAPHY

Josh Lambert

 UMASS.EDU