Paul Kriwaczek

Yiddish Civilisation (eBook, ePUB)

The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A portrait of a civilisation which flourished within living memory and left an indelible mark on history

In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea.

In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels.

Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Orion
• Erscheinungstermin: 25. August 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781780221410
• Artikelnr.: 39228261

Autorenporträt

Paul Kriwaczek was born in Vienna in 1937 and, with his parents, narrowly escaped the Nazis in 1939, fleeing first to Switzerland and then to England. He grew up in London and graduated from London Hospital Medical College. After several years spent working and traveling in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, he joined the BBC, where he spent the next quarter of a century as a program producer and filmmaker. Since leaving television in the 1990s, he has devoted himself to writing full-time, catching up on the unfinished business of a life spent exploring places, times, and ideas. He is married and lives in London.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction
1 Bist a Yid?
Roots schmoots!
Nostalgie de la boue
2 The Jews of Rome
A basket and a truss of hay
3 From the Mediterranean to the Baltic
As strange as a circumcised unicorn
Sennan and zippan
4 The Remaking of Western Europe
Charles’s elephant
New borders, new allegiances
Drang nach osten
5 At the Crossroads
In every castle a king
A blessing upon mieszko, king of poland
6 The New Yiddish World
The language
The literature
The religion
The scholarly tradition
7 Political Consolidation
Landowners, merchants, artisans, servants
At the jewish inn
8 The Reformation
Hussites
Luther
Now a miracle happened
9 The Yiddish Renaissance
Cracow
Prague
Dovid gans
10 Wide Horizons
Wealth and honour
The great divide
11 The Deluge
The cossacks
Poverty and disgrace
12 Decline . . .
Who permits the forbidden
The holy creed of edom
The famous ba’al shem tov,
May his light long shine
Oppose them strongly
13 . . . and Fall
The “jewish problem”
Words that fall on us like lashes
Shakespearean tragedy
14 A Winter Flowering
Notes
Bibliography
Index