SOURCE: Roskies, David G. “Yiddish in the Twentieth Century: A Literature of Anger and Homecoming.”¹ In Yiddish Language and Culture: Then and Now, edited by Leonard Jay Greenspoon, pp. 1-16. Omaha, Neb.: Creighton University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Roskies explores the themes of anger and rebelliousness that he sees as defining the Yiddish literary canon.

Back home in New York I am a member of a khevra kadisha, a Jewish burial society. It has taught me to distinguish between the living and the dead. No amount of verbiage or hype can bring a dead man back to life. When the oxygen stops flowing to the brain and the blood stops pumping from the heart, a person ceases to be among the living. Rumors of a renaissance do not a resurrection make.

As a member of a khevra kadisha, I have also learned to recite the entire book...