Engaging history, multidextrous, sprinting through two thousand years of swirling, unfocused history to achieve its own unfocused swirl. Whenever people reminisce of Yiddish they seem too nostalgic for the `boue` of the impoverished shtetl, or for the anti-Zionist idealism of the Bundt and their insistence on doikayt — though either way, they are forgetting the thousands of Jewish history in Europe that preceded those Fiddler days. Those thousands of years of history is what this book tries to narrate, infused into the wider European and global history.

So much history here, packed into such a small area. Yiddish(ele) is the language of diminutive suffixes, and really only arrives a quarter or a third of the way into the book, with the Cambridge codex from 1382 (found in Cairo, not Ashkenaz.) Kriwaczek deftly explains what Yiddish is: Definitely not a straightforward combination of the most useful parts of German and Hebrew and Slavic, but a mishmash of them, organically formed over the course of centuries.

In the beginning, Kriwaczek seems to conjecture, Jews may have moved deeper and deeper into the woods of sparsely-populated Eastern Europe from the more populated Mediterranean areas. And what about the infamous Khazar theory? Not discussed, perhaps indicating the author's unfitness for historiographic review, which could have made this highly contested topic more interesting. He mentions the influence of Tatar (think the nomadic Turkic-Mongols) on modern-day Hasidic dress (think furry black hats, shtreimels) via Polish nobility. He discusses the impact of the Protest Reformation on the Jews — seemingly a disastrous one, leading to turmoil and expulsions, following the ones from England and Spain. He discusses the Hassidic-Mitnaged split, and the many famous characters and heroes and even antagonists of Yiddish civ and of the Jewish world in general (like the Rama, the false messiah Shabtai Zvi, the Besht, Moses Mendelson...) One of my favorite parts was the story of Glikel of Hameln -- a matriarch who wrote a diary after her husband died, the tale of an ordinary life of a grieving Yiddish-speaking woman.

So much is missing, too! I was looking for some description of the Yiddish theater scene. Perhaps a word or two about Spinoza (did he not speak Yiddish?), and many more words about the exile of Jews from Palesine, and nothing, really, comes after the World War I in the this book. Alas. ( )