Stateless

Daniel Heller-Roazen

  • Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750 edited by Jerold Frakes
    Oxford, 889 pp, £100.00, December 2004, ISBN 0 19 926614 X
  • Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature by Jean Baumgarten, edited and translated by Jerold Frakes
    Oxford, 459 pp, £75.00, June 2005, ISBN 0 19 927633 1
  • The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture by David Fishman
    Pittsburgh, 190 pp, £23.50, November 2005, ISBN 0 8229 4272 0
  • Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture by Jeffrey Shandler
    California, 263 pp, £26.95, November 2005, ISBN 0 520 24416 8

Like many others of his time, Kafka called Yiddish ‘jargon’. This was one of various names for the language, and Kafka, who knew several, could have used another had he so wished. But ‘jargon’ was an exact name for the unsettled and unsettling thing he took the language of the Eastern European Jews to be. ‘Jargon,’ he wrote, ‘is the youngest European language – barely four hundred years old and actually even younger. It has not yet developed forms of speech of such clarity as the ones we use. It is expressed curtly and rapidly . . . It has no grammars. Those who love it try to write grammars, but jargon is still spoken. It does not come to rest.’

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Vol. 28 No. 21 · 2 November 2006 » Daniel Heller-Roazen » Stateless (print version)
Pages 32-34 | 2955 words