A Taytsh Manifesto
Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

Saul Noam Zaritt (Author)

9781531509170

Paperback / softback, published 1 October 2024

240 pages, 1 b/w illustration
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.398 kg

A Taytsh Manifesto calls for a translational paradigm for Yiddish studies and for the study of modern Jewish culture. Saul Noam Zaritt calls for a shift in vocabulary, from Yiddish to taytsh, in order to promote reading strategies that account for the ways texts named as Jewish move between languages and cultures.
Yiddish, a moniker that became dominant only in the early twentieth century, means "Jewish" and thus marks the language with a single identity: of and for a Jewish collective. In contrast, this book calls attention to an earlier and, at one time, more common name for the language: taytsh, which initially means "German." By using the term taytsh, speakers indicated that they were indeed speaking a Germanic language, a language that was not entirely their own. In time, when the word shifted to a verb, taytshn, it came to mean the act of translation. To write or speak in Yiddish is thus to render into taytsh and inhabit the gap between languages.
A Taytsh Manifesto highlights the cultural porousness that inheres in taytsh and deploys the term as a paradigm that can be applied to a host of modern Jewish cultural formations. The book reads three corpora in modern Yiddish culture through the lens of translation: Yiddish pulp fiction, also known as shund (trash); the genre of the Yiddish monologue as authored by Sholem Aleichem and other prominent Yiddish writers; and the persistence of Yiddish as a language of vulgarity in contemporary U.S. culture. Together these examples help revise current histories of Yiddish while demonstrating the need for new vocabularies to account for the multidirectionality of Jewish culture. A Taytsh Manifesto develops a model for identifying, in Yiddish and beyond, how cultures intertwine, how they become implicated in world systems and empire, and how they might escape such limiting and oppressive structures.

Note on Transliteration vii
A taytsh Manifesto— טײַטש, אַ מאַניפֿעסט viii
Introduction: A Taytsh Paradigm 1
1 Yiddish Trash: Shund and the Politics of Translation 31
2 Yiddish Ghosts: The Monologue and the Story of Yiddish Literature 76
3 Yiddish Vulgarity: Translational Afterlives and Vernacular Discomfort 116
Epilogue: From Taytsh to Jew Theory 145
Acknowledgments 161
Notes 165
Works Cited 207
Index 227