How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish

De: Ilan Stavans - editor, Josh Lambert - editor

Narrado por: Steven Jay Cohen

Duración: 15 h y 41 m

Resumen del Editor

Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert.

It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City's Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck.

©2020 Restless Books (P)2020 Tantor

Excellent content, mediocre narration

This is an excellent representative collection of Yiddish or Yiddish-inspired writings in English translation. I was happy to find that the editors made a point of including selections from Canada and Latin America along with those from the United States.

The narrator does an amazing job of reproducing Yiddish/Jewish accents of characters who are speaking in English. However, he clearly has no clue how to pronounce Yiddish. This is incredibly annoying and seriously detracts from the pleasure of listening to the book. For example, even the simple definite article "di" he pronounces like "die" rather than the correct "dee." This grated on my ears. His pronunciation of Spanish words is equally atrocious. This latter problem is forgivable in a book which focuses on Yiddish, but his complete ignorance of even the most rudimentary rules of pronouncing Yiddish is inexcusable. The producer of this audiobook should have chosen a narrator who either could produce a reasonable facsimile of Yiddish pronunciation, or would take the trouble to learn a bit about the pronunciation of Yiddish before narrating a book chock full of Yiddish words and phrases.