Yiddish today, like a century ago, is a sharply divided language. On one hand, it is still the language spoken in countless ultra-Orthodox homes in Brooklyn, Israel and Europe, and on the other, it's the phantom limb of Ashkenazic Jews, rooted in an Eastern European culture that barely survived immigration and the Holocaust.
It has served many purposes, from marking the line between the Torah and the tavern to becoming the vehicle for Jewish global citizenship. It is a language that is no longer spoken by the vast majority of today's Jews, but it helped create their identities anyway.
Marc Miller's new book, “Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America," is an evocative and deft examination of one poet who unknotted his Yiddish tongue in America and became what can be described only as a pop star.
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