Yod (Dec 2009)
La littérature yiddish en Israël
Abstract
Shortly after World War I, when Yiddish literature began to be written and published in Palestine, an author writing in Yiddish was not very different from the average Palestinian Jew, since most of the Jewish population of the land were relatively young, recent immigrants and, at least by their origins, Yiddish-speaking. Those who chose to write in Yiddish generally endorsed Zionist ideas and thought, legitimately, that their choice would in no way exclude or marginalize them, because among the Jews in Palestine at that time there was no other majority language. It was the ideological pressure exerted by Zionist (and later by Israeli) authorities that forced the Yiddish language and literature into a ghetto of “immigrant culture”. This was done out of a desire to establish the myth of a monolithic nation based on modern Hebrew, which eventually became the dominant language. Nevertheless, Yiddish literature, even in its decline, has far more to say to Israeli society than the impoverished creation of a mere cultural minority.
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