A bit more than thirty years ago Leo Rosten published The Joys of Yiddish, a warm-hearted book that walked its readers through a wide variety of Yiddish jokes, salty aphorisms, and comic types. One learned, for example, how to distinguish between the schlemiel and his ever-present cousin the schlimazel, and the lengths that a schnorrer (“shameless beggar”) would go to wangle a meal. Rosten, best known for his humorous New Yorker sketches, was well aware that humor depends, above all else, on three things: timing, timing, and timing. But even Rosten must have been amazed when The Joys of Yiddish took off. Here is a case where the Zeitgeist worked decidedly in his favor—not only in terms of how fashionable ethnic Jewishness had become, but also how the 1967 War in Israel had greatly heightened the consciousness of many otherwise assimilated Jewish Americans. Yiddishists, by contrast, were not impressed. For decades, Jewish-American novelists, stand-up comics, Broadway producers, and Hollywood filmmakers had used Yiddish words as an easy seasoning. They had, in a word, chutzpah and sprinkled Yiddishisms into their concoctions without so much as a passing nod to Jewish history or culture. Rosten’s book was hardly the worst example, but as a serious Yiddish writer was quick to tell me, “He knows the ‘joys’ of Yiddish. But what about its sorrows? These, he doesn’t know.”

Miriam Weinstein’s Yiddish: A Nation of Words is meant to be a popular, rather than scholarly, history of Yiddish, and, as such, it succeeds admirably. It is not only engaging and clearly written, but it is also eminently accessible to anyone with curiosity and a functioning heart. Her book, Weinstein explains at the outset,  

will use the language as a way to mark the meandering path of Jewish history. Then it will be time for a rest, maybe a glazel tey, a shtikl broit, a shnapps—a little glass of tea, a piece of bread, a drink of whisky—in the shtetl, the archetypal Jewish town. We will track the language through the industrial and intellectual revolution that swept Yiddish into the modern world … . Then we’re going to talk some geopolitical specifics—what happened in Eastern Europe, Russia, Israel, and the United States. The Holocaust will shut the curtain on much of the world we have come to know. We will pause to mourn and to pay our respects. Then, like the Yiddish language and the people who speak it, we will gather our strength and our memories, pick ourselves up, and stride on.

Weinstein makes no bones about the fact that she is not a linguist, not a historian, not a scholar of any sort. But she is clearly an engaging amateur, one who knows what she is talking about and, better yet, who talks about it with a cheerleader’s passion. There are times, however, when her enthusiasm wears a bit thin, and nowhere is this truer than when she dodges what strikes me as the central burden of her “history.” As Aristotle rightly pointed out long, long ago, a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end—and the same is true for a history of Yiddish.

Weinstein does a first-rate job in the earlier sections of her book, showing how Yiddish developed by adapting the words of Old French and, later, German to the needs of a people thrown into exile and consigned to generations of wandering. “Yiddishland,” in Weinstein’s formulation, is what you get when a people do not have a land of their own, but fashion a sense of who they are from the words they speak and later write. Based on the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish is the language of the secular world. It is the medium through which Jews poured out their hearts—to each other, and to God. Hebrew, by contrast, was formal and wedded to conventional piety. To put the matter as simply as a reviewer can: in Hebrew, Jews read that they are a Chosen People, a kingdom of priests, and a holy tribe. They had been given the Torah, and their covenant with God requires them to obey 613 commandments. In Yiddish these same Jews could reply “Yo, got, mir zinen dayn oysdervaylt folk, ober farvos hostu undz geartf oyshaln?” (“Yes, God, we are your chosen people. But why did you have to choose us?”). The Jews developed a complicated system of internal bilingualism that allowed them to navigate the distance between the sacred world of the Torah and the secular world surrounding them.

The middle of this long story is filled with the treasures of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers such as Mendele the Bookseller, Y. L. Peretz, and the incomparable Sholem Aleichem. Add to these towering figures dozens of poets, playwrights, essayists, and intellectuals who fiercely debated every ism of their time and the result is the triumph of a language once regarded as lowly. Weinstein gives human faces to what, in dry-as-dust tomes, would have been much heavy slogging. Yiddish, in a word, isn’t.

That said, however, what must now be faced—and faced squarely—is that the Holocaust utterly destroyed this vibrant world. Yes, there are places where college students can learn first-year Yiddish as they might French or Spanish, and, yes, we are in the midst of a revival of interest in klezmer music with its wailing minor keys and Yiddish lyrics, but none of this, alas, will make Yiddish the rich cultural language it once was—and this includes an obligatory mention of the rapidly growing number of Yiddish speakers among the ultra-Orthodox around the world. Weinstein knows this, and, while I can understand why she prefers to say that Yiddish is now on “life-support,” to be truthful, the end of the history she has so admirably written is that “Yiddishland,” in any meaningful sense, is gone. Cheerleaders for Yiddish don’t, indeed, can’t, write such a sentence. For better or worse, historians do.