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Home > Non-Fiction / Essay > Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (paperback) by Paul Kriwaczek
Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (paperback) by Paul Kriwaczek
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From the author of In Search of Zarathustra, an illuminating chronicle of Yiddish civilization from its roots in the Diaspora to the present. Providing a rich portrait of Yiddish civilization, Paul Kriwaczek reflects upon the development of Yiddish language, occupations, social life, art, music, and literature, and introduces us to notable diplomats, artists, and thinkers: from the "Court Jews" of seventeenth-century Europe to Glikl bas Judah Leib, who wrote the first great Yiddish autobiography, to Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century philosopher and musician, to the great writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sholom Aleichem and I. B. Singer among them. He chronicles the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, beginning in the seventeenth century with the Khmielnitsky massacres in Ukraine and culminating in the Holocaust, but looks further to fresh offshoots in the New World. Combining intimate family anecdotes, travelogue, historical research, and interviews with scholars, Kriwaczek retraces the history of this nearly extinguished civilization to give us a celebration of what remains of Yiddish culture in our own time.
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