MAY 28 • 2020 | 83
material from Yiddish culture
and bring it to the attention of
an English-language audience.
We got down from the
shelves 40 years of the mag-
azine. And we started to
highlight pieces we thought
were the most exciting, most
interesting. We built up this
enormous list, which would
have made a book three or four
times as long as the one we
ended up with. Then we started
to shape things into sections.
Stavans: I love how Josh put
it — the best type of chaos. We
started with an abstract vision,
of trying to put in-between
covers some of the most repre-
sentative elements that would,
together, give a vision of what
Yiddish culture has been in
America—as an immigrant
language, and as a language
and culture of assimilation. It’
s
ambitious, because [over] 150
years, particularly with such a
creative, diverse, thought-pro-
voking culture, there is so
much to consider.
You know, we Jews have pro-
duced so many terrific anthol-
ogies. The Talmud is an anthol-
ogy; the Torah is an anthology.
We love printing voices from
different orders and periods.
And in some ways, that’
s what
we were trying to do here, too,
to create a dialogue among
people that didn’
t live together,
or even knew each other. But
in this book, they happen to be
inhabiting the same building
and talking to one another.
JN: How do each of you under-
stand the cultural legacy of
Yiddish, not only today but also
for the future?
Lambert: For me, what’
s most
compelling is how Yiddish
was at the right time and place
at these crucial moments in
the history of America and
so much of world civilization.
There’
s a quotation in the book
which I love, where Alan Alda,
who is not Jewish, says that
his father, who was an actor,
learned Yiddish in the Catskills,
and called it “the unofficial
language of show business.
” It’
s
amazing to think about that—a
non-Jewish actor learned
Yiddish as a way of connecting
to the history of show business!
Yiddish is an invitation to
think in more complex ways
about the past and the experi-
ences of Jewish people. What
I always hope is that Yiddish
allows Jewish people in the
contemporary moment to
think in more expansive ways
about what the possibilities of
Jewishness are.
Stavans: Because I am a Latino
immigrant to the U.S., I see
Yiddish as a very successful
immigration language. There
are other languages that have
disappeared very fast and
have left very little trace in
English. Yiddish has been very
successful because it refuses
to die. And Yiddish has also
gone from being a language to
becoming a way of dreaming
and of thinking, of engaging
the world. And that is very
clearly manifested in the var-
ious generations of American
Jews, from the immigrants to
their successors.
In that sense, Yiddish is
a portal, an entrance. I love
the emotion that Yiddish can
convey, the way it delivers sort
of aggressive sentences with a
kind of humor. And I love the
endurance of Yiddish, the fact
that it resists and goes on by
not wanting to disappear alto-
gether.
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