A rich, sweeping memoir by David G. Roskies, Yiddishlands proceeds
from the premise that Yiddish culture is spread out among many
different people and geographic areas and transmitted through
story, song, study, and the family. Roskies leads readers through
Yiddishlands old and new by revisiting his personal and
professional experiences and retelling his remarkable family saga
in a series of lively, irreverent, and interwoven stories.
Beginning with a flashback to his grandmother's storybook wedding
in 1878, Yiddishlands brings to life the major debates, struggles,
and triumphs of the modern Yiddish experience, and provides readers
with memorable portraits of its great writers, cultural leaders,
and educators. Roskies's story centers around Vilna, Lithuania,
where his mother, Masha, was born in 1906 and where her mother,
Fradl Matz, ran the legendary Matz Press, a publishing house that
distributed prayer books, Bibles, and popular Yiddish literature.
After falling in love with Vilna's cabaret culture, an older man,
and finally a fellow student with elbow patches on his jacket,
Masha and her young family are forced to flee Europe for Montreal,
via Lisbon and New York. It is in Montreal that Roskies, Masha's
youngest child, comes of age, entranced by the larger-than-life
stories of his mother and the writers, artists, and performers of
her social circle. Roskies recalls his own intellectual odyssey as
a Yiddish scholar; his life in the original Havurah religious
commune in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the 1970s; his struggle
with the notion of aliyah while studying in Israel; his visit to
Russia at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement; and his
confrontation with his parents' memories in a bittersweet
pilgrimage to Poland. Along the way, readers of Yiddishlands meet
such prominent figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Melekh Ravitch,
Itsik Manger, Avrom Sutzkever, Esther Markish, and Rachel Korn.
With Yiddishlands, readers take a whirlwind tour of modern Yiddish
culture, from its cabarets and literary salons to its fierce
ideological rivalries and colorful personalities. Roskies's memoir
will be essential reading for students of the recent Jewish past
and of the living Yiddish present.
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