Exile Language: Fondness for Yiddish
William Pimlott, 23 September 2021
‘Even the stones speak Hebrew,’ the Yiddish poet Yosef Papyernikov complained in 1949. He first visited the Jewish homeland in 1924, then returned briefly to Poland, where he was born, before settling in Jerusalem. Like other supporters of Yiddish, he condemned the Zionist insistence on Hebrew as the official language of the new Jewish state. ‘The authorities in Israel not...
