In Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture
Jeffrey Shandler
University of California Press, 2005
In Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture, Jeffrey Shandler traces Yiddish’s shift from a mame-loshn (mother tongue) of millions in Europe to what he terms a postvernacular language. Yiddish, Shandler argues is used less as a vehicle for communicating vital information, opinions, and feelings (vernacular) and increasingly to communicate new and varied symbolic meanings. Today, he asserts, every utterance of the language helps create the virtual place called Yiddishland.
The book is full of anecdotes, facts, and analysis, many of which led me to reflect on my own heavily Jewish education, upbringing, and identity. A compelling example is the dreydl, which, I was always told, is inscribed with four Hebrew characters that stand for a Hebrew phrase (Nes gadol haya sham – a great miracle happened there). Breaking apart this common myth, Shandler explains that the letters originally stood for Yiddish words (the letter giml indicated the word “gants” meaning “all,” hey the word “halb” meaning “half,” and so on). This shift in language moves the focus away from the dreydl’s assumed religious symbolism to a far more fun one; gambling. By reasserting the dreydl’s Yiddish roots, Shandler resists the steamrolling effects of mainstream American Judaism (religious and Zionist, in this case) that have oft replaced Yiddish culture.
In its illumination of forgotten histories, Adventures in Yiddishland should be included in the growing body of work by academics and activists — feminists, queers, non-Zionists and others — who, in the words of scholar Lawrence Silberstein, in his essay, “Toward a Postzionist Discourse,” “seek to formulate an alternative, nonessentializing discourse of identity and community, one that attends to the conflicts in and discontinuities of communities and cultures.” Through the lens of postvernacularity, this project creates space for Jews and Judaisms that do not fit into conceptions of normative Jewish communities.
Shandler wraps up his project with a final chapter that posits a comprehensive theory of the current state of Yiddish, which he calls “Queer Yiddishkeit.” His new, queer model argues that the language is vibrant precisely because it exists outside the mainstream, within disconnected subcultures, and is used in partial, symbolic, and varied ways. No longer a language of everyday use for most Jews, Yiddish, Shandler demonstrates — and Yiddishland — is a vibrant tool in the creation of dynamic Jewish cultures and communities.
