Customer Reviews

Yiddishlands: A Memoir (Non-Series)

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An entertaining and immensely readable presentation of the stories David Roskies heard as he grew up in a home devoted to honoring the treasures of Yiddish language and literature. You feel as if you're right at the dinner table, listening in on the indignant, funny, scandalous, lyrical stories he grew up on. Along the way, you find you're learning a great deal about the Jewish Old World and the cataclysms and displacements of the 20th century.

Yiddishlands is an unusual, unprecedented and unforgettable cultural autobiography written by one of Yiddish's last champions. Roskies converses -- and the emphasis here is on "converse" because the book cleverly uses conversational as well as textual tactics in order to capture the full cultural and linguistic experience of growing up in "Yiddishlands" -- with one of the juiciest characters lately to be seen on the stages of cultural biography: Masha Roskies. Masha is a charming, clever, ever opinionated Jewish-Lithuanian beauty turned Montreal Jewish mother. The stories told by, about and around her speak not only of her life, but of the surprisingly vital world of Yiddish culture which shaped the life and career of her young son Dovid -- lovingly burdening him with the task of preserving and carrying on its memory. Roskies' mercurial style, with its playful transitions between genres and standpoints makes this book into a most pleasurable journey into the lost world of Yiddish culture.

There are two things I look for in a memoir (autobiography), first is chronology which makes it easy to follow a life (not you own), second is tales of both good and bad. Prof. Roskies seems to think that even his mistakes are not truly that bad and could happen to anyone. He would have been better served in trying to tell his mother's story in some reasonable template, so that it would make sense to the rest of us.

What ruined this book for me, which I expected to be about life in the "Pale" before the Shoah, was the constant anecdotes about himself that Roskies keeps throwing in. I could care less about his adolescent sexual adventures or the 'famous' people he met. I was much more interested in his mother and her life in Vilna prior to WW2. With all the other 'dreck' he throws in, he never explained why in Yiddish he calls himself "Roskes" and "Roskies" in English (makes no sense). He seems to have had a great time writing about himself, unfortunately I ended up reading it and found myself asking, "so what".

Zeb Kantrowitz