Warschauer Jiddisch. Von Ewa Geller. Phonai, 46: Texte und Untersuchungen zum gesprochenen Deutsch. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. Pp. xv + 355. EUR 68.

While the mere title of the series in which this book appears might offend some as yet another example of Germanistic's ongoing attempt at the cultural appropriation of Yiddish, the book itself participates in this tendency to a negligible degree at most. The author focusses her attention on the Warsaw dialect of Yiddish, which, in the years before the Nazi murder of all but the few thousand survivors who had managed to escape to Russia or elsewhere at the last minute, was the most populous urban dialect of Yiddish ever to exist. As Geller's historical introduction elaborates, that dialect developed as such only since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when, the prohibition on Jewish habitation in the city was lifted, leading to the resettlement of large numbers of Jews in the city from outlying towns and villages in the relative vicinity of the city as well as from farther away (growing from a few thousand in 1800 to more than 350,000 by 1939). This relative lack of a venerable pedigree, coupled with the fact that a large segment of the Jewish population that resettled in Warsaw in the late nineteenth century consisted of German speakers from the West or speakers of Lithuanian Yiddish dialect from the East, both of which groups viewed themselves and were viewed by Yiddish-speaking Warsaw Jews as in some senses culturally superior to the local Jews, prevented the Warsaw dialect from ever being considered a dialect of high culture even among Jews. At least in part as a result of these factors, no comprehensive linguistic study of this dialect was ever carried out (pp. xiii, 150). As the author explains in some detail, it is now too late. When she began work on her dissertation in the early 1980s in Warsaw, she could identify only two authentic informants who also felt comfortable participating in a study (p. xiv), in then still Communist Poland, involved speaking a Jewish language for a stranger and into a tape recorder. For many Holocaust survivors, this was (and is) particularly traumatic, because Yiddish is a language many have not used since the Holocaust. Their attempts to speak it after a hiatus of several decades compelled them again to face the horror of the loss of home, family, and culture, for speaking Yiddish meant speaking about that life, not their present life. The author thus found that she had little choice but to give up the study as a possible dissertation topic. More than a decade later, when she came back to the material because despite the relative paucity of the material collected, that material remained practically the only extant corpus—she won fellowships that enabled her to travel both to Israel, where she located and recorded three further informants (p. xv), and Trier, where she had access to a broader range of research literature. Despite the fact that the size of the recorded corpus had not been and can no longer be significantly increased in scope, the author deemed this partial study nonetheless valuable as the only study still possible of this significant dialect.

Jerold C. Frakes
University of Southern California