World and I, February 1st, 2002
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only author to win a Nobel Prize in literature for stories written in Yiddish, was often asked why he wrote in a dying language. His reply: "Yiddish has been dying for a thousand years, and I'm sure it will go on dying for another thousand."
In fact, Israel is in the midst of a Yiddish revival. This is powered by nostalgia for the Yiddish milieu of Eastern Europe destroyed by the Holocaust, as well as by the arrival of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union. These people account for about 20 percent of those who speak the language in Israel.
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