it has come to my attention, conveyed to me by a friend , that i have just completed a tour of the most notoriously anti-semitic countries of all time. spain, germany, lithuania. my tour actually retraced almost the exact path of jewish european migrations between the 14th and 20th centuries (without the 3 stopovers in charles de gaulle).
i had first wanted to document where i was and somehow draw parallel paths between me and some ancestral crew back 500 years, but thats not gonna work. tonight is sociolinguistics essay night, so buckle up, ese.
yiddish is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that documents the movement of a people throughout a very foreign land mass. jews were in europe by the 5th century, and by the 12th century had developed languages which mixed their own alphabets with the local vernacular. pockets of culturally semi-autonomous languages began to form including ladino (spanish) and zarphatic (french).
around the 12th century, a critical mass occurred somewhere in the rhine valley, and by the 15th century, a well defined (non-pidgin) language was forming throughout germanic central europe.
like a passport stamped during a long journey, yiddish has been marked by its stopovers. slavic, semitic, and romantic inflections dot a landscape written in hebrew. as crews of jews moved eastward, they picked up pieces of the local languages, and various dialects could be found in northern europe, the balkans, poland , the baltics, russia and ukraine, germany, and elsewhere.
in the early 1930s attempts were made to standardize the language based on committee efforts in vilnius. at that time roughly 10 million people spoke the language, most of them based in europe. hundreds of daily newspapers existed throughout europe and the americas. schools, transactions, fights, debates, and plays were conducted in the langauge.
efforts to standardize was made irrelevant by an attack from central europe that was almost entirely fatal. what was started in germany was finished by an attack from a frigid east -- stalinism froze whatever corpse of a language was left.
today you can still see yiddish in kovno (kaunus) and vilna (vilnius). it marks gravestones, mass murder sites, destroyed (and ocassionally rebuilt) synagogues. consider this a cultural endpoint, or maybe the final stop in the world's shittiest bus ride. consider yiddish the bloodline of a culture constantly on the move, pushing further east as the heat from the west became hotter and hotter. consider the final one-two punch, fire and ice, squeezing the life out of sentence and song.
consider this:
(here rest the bones from the kovno ghetto (1941 - 1944) , which were burnt in 1944. they were buried in 1979)
people like to say that yiddish is not a dead language, but they are wrong. yiddish was murdered, my friends, and that makes it dead as dead can be.
