Yiddish Literature
Sholom Aleichem!
Nu, welcome to my Yiddish Literature Site!
Come on in, have a seat, get a little something to nosh on and enjoy the stories, history, or reference library.
These are Ryback's illustrations for the children's stories featured on this page!
Go to Some Children's Stories to see and hear the Yiddish (and English) that goes with them!
Some of you may be wondering....
What is Yiddish?
Yiddish is a langauge spoken by Ashkenazi Jews ( to Jews of Eastern European descent). It is a member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Although it is considered a Germanic language, (and when you hear it on the story pages you'll hear Germanic influences) it is not a typical Germanic language. It includes elements of Romance, Hebrew-Armaic, and Slavic languages, it is written in Hebrew characters which are read from right to left. Before the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, Yiddish was mama loshn to more than 11 million people.. Though it is often mistakenly referred to as a "dead" language, there are still nearly 4 million speakers today. Although not a national language, Yiddish speakers can be found throughout the world in Argentina, Canada, France, Israel, Mexico, Romania, the United States and other countries.
For more detailed history Click here
Why this Site???
This site was conceived as a project for my Multimedia Web Site and Design Class. As a non-speaker fascinated by the cultural and literary wealth of the Yiddish language and Yiddishkeit culture, I wanted to create a site that both stimulated interest in and provided online resources for these topics. This site is by no means comprehensive and is still under construction. The children's stories featured on this page were selected because they were short enough to give a little taste of what the language looks and sounds like, not because they are representative of the Yiddish Literary Canon as a whole. As this is an on-going project, please email me with your comments and suggestions!!!
About me....
I am a graduate student in English at The Univerisity of Texas at Austin. Born and raised in Maryland, I'm still adjusting to the climate and Texas culture. Although I am still deciding what my research focus will be, I'm interested in 19th and 20th century American literature, Modernism, the Holocaust and its literature, and the theory of teaching literature/composition. This semester, I took a course in Yiddish Literature in Translation (taught by Dr. Itzik Gottesman who did the audio for these pages!) which sparked my interest in the field of Yiddish Literature. I hope this site will do the same for you! As it is still under construction, please feel free to email me with comments or suggestions!
under construction!