How Yiddish Changed America and How A..., Ilan Stavans
How Yiddish Changed America and How A..., Ilan Stavans
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish

Author: Ilan Stavans, Josh Lambert

Narrator: Steven Jay Cohen

Unabridged: 15 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/25/2020


Synopsis

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.

It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City's Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck.

About Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic's Journey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Susan on February 13, 2020

Isn't this a great title? Unfortunately, the book doesn't fulfill the promise it seems to make. This is an anthology of seemingly random pieces translated from Yiddish into English, or sometimes written in English by people who are/were Yiddish speakers or had an interest in Yiddish. Thus, we have a......more

Goodreads review by Beck on December 16, 2020

How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish is a compilation of yiddish literature that influenced not only the Jewish community but an entire country. It includes interviews, poems, short stories, recipes, histories, as well as excerpts from plays and novels from a wide range of wri......more

Goodreads review by Betty on February 27, 2020

Interesting, variable anthology of Yiddish American writing-- fiction in translation, criticism of said fiction, interviews, writings by Yiddish speakers that were originally written in English, and pieces which don't fall under any of those categories. It's a very elastically-defined focus for an a......more

Goodreads review by Eric on April 08, 2022

Read as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s 2022 book club.......more

Goodreads review by Ben on March 28, 2020

How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish is an anthology of over a hundred and twenty-five essays, fiction, drama, memoir, poetry, cartoons, and interviews collected and edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. This collection is a wide-ranging, eclectic anthology of work by Yiddi......more