SOURCE: Stenberg, Peter. Journey to Oblivision: The End of East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature, pp. 9, 76-78. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Stenberg discusses the ways in which Singer's stories chronicle the dissolution of Eastern European Jewish culture and the Yiddish language in the postwar era.

The statistics of population sizes of minority linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups in Eastern Europe before the establishment of its current national and demographic makeup are somewhat vague and are very much likely to remain so. Political boundaries changed and census figures concerning ethnic background and mother language were in any case unreliable. For example, minority groups interpreted their ancestry flexibly to avoid trouble, and Yiddish was often not included as a language choice. Finally, the complete chaos of the first half of the 1940s for the Yiddish-speaking population and of the second...