"People ask me often, 'Why do you write in a dying language?' [...] I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive is the ghost. Ghosts love Yiddish and as far as I know, they all speak it. Secondly, not only do I believe in ghosts, but also in resurrection. I am sure that millions of Yiddish speaking corpses will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be: "Is there any new Yiddish book to read?" For them Yiddish will not be dead. [...] Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Isaac Bashevis Singer, speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1978 external link
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yiddish
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Yiddish
20 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Yiddish →
Related Quotes
"Attempting to meet European standards, Jewish writers exerted tremendous efforts to develop and enrich the Jews' inte…"
"Hebrew was generally considered the province of men and became associated with the male scholarly elite, in contrast …"
"already by 1918, the Communists had created the Evsektsiia within its own structure to carry out party policy among t…"
"Ironically, in view of later events, the relationships between Germans and Jews in these borderlands were sometimes c…"
"[Yiddish is] a treasure trove for the study of language and culture in general: cultural interaction, semiotics of cu…"
"YIVO’s founding emboldened a highbrow Yiddish intellectual life that flourished between the world wars and soon used …"
"Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had the limitations of its orig…"
"The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an…"
"The survival of Yiddish and its culture does not rest on our ability to find the right term for "corn flakes" or "jet…"
"Emphasizing the seemingly more pious stories of Sholem Aleykhem and Peretz, stressing Jewish passivity over action, o…"