BOB ABERNETHY: Finally, a story of rebirth. Many American Jews of a certain age remember Yiddish as a mystifying tongue spoken by parents or grandparents when they didn't want the children to understand what they were saying. But you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Yiddish. Think of Mel Brooks's "2,000-Year-Old Man." His accent is Yiddish. Yiddish was funny, nostalgic, exotic, and it was almost extinct -- almost. But thanks to a young scholar named Aaron Lansky, this near-dead language is coming alive again.Mr. AARON LANSKY (Founder, Yiddish Book Center): Yiddish was the language spoken by Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. It becomes a fusion or a chronicle of all the places where Jews have been. Yiddish didn't exactly die a natural death. In 1939, there were 11 million Yiddish-speaking Jews in the world. By 1945, fully one out of every two Yiddish speakers had been murdered. And therefore, the books are hugely important. People describe it as our portable homeland.
ABERNETHY: Since June, that homeland has had a permanent address at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. The spectacular 37,000-square-foot Yiddish Book Center is the brainchild and life work of Aaron Lansky, who, 18 years ago, feared the death of Yiddish language and literature.
Mr. LANSKY: People think that somehow Yiddish was, you know, this quaint language spoken by their grandparents that they left behind, and now, there's just a few jokes left over in the borscht belt and a few funny words we use in Yiddish, and that's kind of the extent of it. Just the opposite. It was a profound, challenging, really deeply reflected intellectual tradition that found expression in Yiddish. (Footage of a man teaching a boy Yiddish is shown.) It's a great statement of Jews meeting the modern world.ABERNETHY: Yiddish can mean many things in today's diverse Jewish life. For ultra-Orthodox Jews, such as the Hasidim, Yiddish is protection from the modern world, an insulation from outside influences.
Ms. ZIPPORAH DUNSKY SHNAY (Jewish Public Library, Montreal): The ultra-Orthodox community speaks Yiddish as their lingua franca. Their daily lives are conducted in Yiddish, because Hebrew is a sacred language and not to be profaned on a daily basis.
ABERNETHY: To these students, outside the ultra-Orthodox community, Yiddish language and literature bind cultures and generations.
Mr. EUGENE ORENSTEIN (Chairman, Jewish Students, McGill University): Many, particularly young people in North America identify with what they think are counterculture aspects of Yiddish. They are fascinated and proud of the history of the Jewish labor and socialist and revolutionary movement, which was conducted to the greatest degree in the Yiddish language. All of these things I think go into the revival.
Mr. LANSKY: Increasing numbers of Jews are coming to terms with the culture. So there's now a destination in the world where people can come encounter Yiddish culture not as the past, not as a kind of lachrymose connection to all that was destroyed, but rather as a realistic and positive engagement with a very serious culture that evolved over a thousand years. You always thought there had to be an end to this, how long can this go on already? I'm still collecting books 18 years later. We've now used these vast stocks of duplicate books to establish collections of Yiddish literature I think in 430 major libraries all over the world.
