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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