Yiddish civilisation - Paul Kriwaczek

In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea.
In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels.
Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.

Paul Kriwaczek was born in Vienna in 1937. He grew up in north-west London, where the Yiddish language and culture were still strong among his friends' parents. In London he trained as a dentist, and spent a decade working in Iran and Afghanistan. From there he travelled extensively in Asia and Africa before developing a career in broadcasting and journalism. In 1970, he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for 25 years; he retired in the mid 1990s and lives in north London. Paul is fluent in six languages, including Farsi and Yiddish.

sophisticated... conveys the author's enthusiasm and bears his very individual mark.
JEWISH RENAISSANCE

?Paul Kriwaczek?s essential argument is simple: this is, or rather was, a civilization. Its people were a nation. So his book is essentially descriptive, showing that the culture was indeed broad and deep and widespread enough to justify those terms. The description is well done and makes the point very effectively?.I do not know what Jews will make of YIDDISH CIVILISATION, but for Christians it could not have been published at a more opportune time.?
SPECTATOR

galloping through the centuries at a swift pace, recreating wonderful pictures of lost communities of Jews, going from Roman times through to the 21st century with barely a pause for breath.
IRISH TIMES