Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation

Yiddish culture and civilisation began in the 13th century and ended in the middle of the 20th, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact delivered half of Poland's Jews into the arms of Hitler's mass murderers. It covered a huge area of eastern Europe, from Riga on the Baltic to Odessa on the Black Sea (today's Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia).

The culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling medieval Yiddish society was cut short by the Chmielnitzky Massacres of 1648-56 in which 100,000 Jews were killed. Those that were left were forced to spread out to the small towns (shtetls) and villages. Russian pogroms from the 1880s produced Zionism, emigration and agitation. Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language and names, religion, occupations, art and music, literature and food. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.

Paul Kriwaczek was born in Vienna in 1937. In London he trained as a dentist, and spent a decade working in Iran and Afghanistan. From there he travelled extensively in Asia and Africa before developing a career in broadcasting and journalism. In 1970 he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for 25 years. He is fluent in six languages, including Farsi and Yiddish.