The Idiom of Humanity
Manya Wilkinson on literature inspired by the cadence and humour of Yiddish
Is Yiddish literature having a moment?
Well, hardly. The wonderful shtetl-set writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Babel and Sholem Aleichem for example, has been sadly overlooked of late; and the shtetl neglected as a setting for new writing. In our determination to document, in both fiction and non-fiction, the Holocaust, we may have misplaced exactly what was lost in the Holocaust — the rich culture, humour, and landscape of the Jewish shtetl where Yiddish was spoken.
The shtetl was a crucible, a container in which characters were compelled to interact, isolated from mainstream society. It was a place people seldom left, left only to journey from shtetl to shtetl, or left at their peril. Many shtetls were also timeless place, or rather they existed out of time, unaware of world events, new inventions or ideas.
In my novel, Lublin, set in the town of Mezritsh, east of Warsaw in 1907, I tried to recreate, rejoice in and lament the loss of this world in voice-driven prose, so that not only what I wrote, but how I wrote it, was inspired by Yiddish. (I also included a lot of Yiddish words in the hopes that non-Yiddish speakers would find a few they liked, pick them up and use them in their everyday life.)
While there may not be much contemporary fiction set in the Pale of Settlement — that territory within the borders of tsarist Russia where Jews were legally allowed to live — I think that the Yiddish language has actually influenced and inspired the tone, style and syntax of much prose today. The voicey cadence of Yiddish has found expression in the endless questioning, argumentativeness, self-deprecation, contradictions, and anxious debate we come across in contemporary fiction, fiction owing a debt to the Yiddish language and the Yiddish mind — to the very mouthy verbal-ness of Yiddish, and the constant tension between the speaker and the world, the idea that kvetching is not simply complaining but a way of life.
A Jewish man in hospital tells his doctor he wants a transfer.
‘What’s wrong with this hospital? the doctor asks. ‘Is it the food?’
‘Nah,’ says the man. ‘About the food I can’t kvetch.’
‘Is it the room?’
‘The room’s fine. I can’t kvetch about the room.’
‘Is it the staff?’
‘What’s to kvetch about the staff?’
‘Then why do you want a transfer?’
‘Because I can’t kvetch.’
Yiddish started out as a vernacular language spoken at home, in the street, and in domestic situations — as opposed to Hebrew (God’s language) spoken only in prayer or in shul. Yiddish, the language Jews used to understand and describe the highs and lows of ordinary shtetl life is, earthy, slangy, reproachful, nagging and passionate.
In the Yiddish I remember nothing was too small to get upset about, make a big deal about, or view as a moral dilemma. Every sensation of existence could be examined. (Gotenyu!) What might be difficult for the ordinary Jew however is great training for the Jewish writer. Perhaps all writers.
Read Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel for the language, the imagery, the carefully crafted sentences, the subtext. Often called a poet’s writer, Babel spoke of (or is spoken of) as not writing the story, but writing the process, not writing character but writing an account of how he writes character. In Babel’s short stories the reader becomes part of the text, co-creator as it were as she wakes up to the imaginative leaps and possibilities explored in his prose. And his sentences! Of Babel, the American writer George Saunders once said: ‘When I read him it recalibrates my ear. It reminds me of the difference between an okay sentence and a perfect sentence.’ And the paragraphs! According to Babel you can end a paragraph anywhere other than its logical conclusion. ‘A new paragraph is a wonderful thing,’ he said, ‘it lets you quietly change the rhythm, it can be like a flash of lightening that shows the same landscape from a different perspective.’ Although written in Russian, Babel’s stories are informed, I believe, by the Yiddish he spoke from his youth.
Read Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978, for its martyrs, dreamers, penitents, dybbuks, demons and imps. Singer vividly describes not only shtetl life but the interior struggles of his characters. This tension in Singer’s stories and novels between superstition and ironic modern consciousness is delicious, between a life lead and a life examined.
Researching Singer, I recently found mention of a book that inspired him in his youth: Max Shpitskopf der Kenig fun di Detektiys (Max Shpitskopf the King of Detectives) by Jonas Kreppel. Where is this Yiddish pulp fiction today? I want to read about a gun-toting sleuth from Galicia, using his extraordinary powers to fight anti-Semitism as well as other crimes. Der Viener Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Fuchs? The mind boggles.
Singer and Babel are never schmaltzy, often brutal in their recreations of shtetl life. For a bit of schmaltz, you could try the great Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) Best known as the author of ‘Tevye the Dairyman’, from which the hit musical, Fiddler on the Roof, was derived. There’s a naturalness of speech and descriptions in his stories and while appearing cheerful, hidden tragedy. Personally, I feel close to this great Jewish writer as once while visiting the Bronx Zoo as a child with my parents, we passed the apartment building on Kelly Avenue where he lived and died. ‘You were conceived in that building,’ said my mother, which was both thrilling and really upsetting to hear.
Special mention must be made of the Yiddish joke and the Yiddish curse. The joke is funny, but also harsh, catching the listener out every time with a punch line from gehenna (Jewish hell).
A Christian girl is found murdered near the town of Mezritsh. Oy Vey. Fearing a pogrom Jews gathered in the synagogue trying to decide what to do. Suddenly der rebbe runs in with wonderful news. ‘The murdered girl was Jewish!’
A boy comes home from school and tells his mother he’s got a part in the school play. ‘What part?’ asks his mother. ‘The part of the Jewish husband,’ replies the boy. The mother frowns. ‘Go back,’ she says, ‘and tell them you want a speaking role.’
The shtetl-honed Yiddish curse sets the victim up with a promise of good fortune luring him into a false sense of security, then pulls the rug out from under him. This is the power of reversal, timing and delay, all the elements of successful prose. (Playwrights also take note.)
May you have twelve healthy children then may someone give one of them a whistle.
You should find a gold piece on the sidewalk and be so arthritic you can’t pick it up.
Read more contemporary Jewish writers too whose language, vocabulary, sentence structure and voice has been influenced by Yiddish: writers like Grace Paley or Vivian Gornick — whose memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, has just been published in Britain for the first time.
‘I was talking to Bella this morning,’ my mother says, shaking her head from side to side. ‘People are so cruel. Her son the doctor? What would it hurt him to invite his own mother for a Sunday in the country?’
‘The country? I thought Bella’s son was in Manhattan.’
‘He works in Manhattan. He lives in Long Island.’
‘Is that the country?’
‘Well it’s not West End Avenue. Bella hasn’t been invited for months.’
‘Ma, how that son managed to survive having Bella for a mother, much less made it through medical school is something for Ripley and you know it.’
‘She’s his mother.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Don’t Oh God me.’
From Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
You don’t have to be a Jewish writer to be influenced by the inflections of voice so characteristic of the Yiddish language. Elizabeth Strout comes to mind, Lydia Davis, Sigrid Nunez. When we read their work, we seem to hear it too. The energy of the spoken voice harnessed not merely in dialogue but also in narration. Need I say more?
Let’s give the last word to Isaac Bashevis Singer. At his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1978, Singer said, ‘In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all. The idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.’
I won’t question, argue with, or anxiously contradict that.
Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker who lives in the North of England. She’s a retired senior lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University. Her radio dramas have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Her novel Lublin, winner of the 2025 Wingate prize, was published by And Other Stories