Maria Brzezina, Polszczyzna Źydów by A. de Vincenz

Summary

From the 13th century until 1943 Yiddish was the first language of the Polish Jews. Some, at least, must have known Polish as their second language. Since the end of the 18th century, assimilation led to the appearance of Jewish groups which used Polish in the home. The term 'Polszczyzna Żydów’ [Jewish Polish] refers to the Polish language as used by Jews. It can, thus, mean:

their first language ('mother tongue’) not differing at all from the language of Christians.

their first language differing from the language of Christians in, for example, its phonetics, syntax, vocabulary (in a similar way as Yiddish differs from German).

their second language used in particular circumstances, for example within public institutions, schools, literature, etc.

their second language used only in communication with Poles.

The book offers no proof that the author is conscious of these various possibilities. It concerns itself with everything that distinguishes the (written) variety of Polish attributed by Poles to Jews from the written and spoken Polish of non-Jewish Poles (which excludes only the first of the above categories).

The book's aim is to describe systematically the Jewish variant of the Polish language (p. 11): ‘continuing the studies of Moshe Altbauer’ the author ‘has tried to enrich [them] with new linguistic, sociolinguistic and stylistic aspects’ (p. 569). Let us say at once that these aims have not been achieved. As far as linguistic aspects are concerned, these are dealt with only in the first chapter ('Linguistic prolegomena’), which is a compilation based on the work of Altbauer, S.A. Birnbaum and M. and U. Weinreich, and, in the second part (Jewish-Slavonic bilingualism), on that of Roman Jakobson. It is not clear what function this chapter is meant to perform: the author hardly refers to it throughout the book's remaining 550 pages.

Uriel Weinreich, whose now classic work (1953) is quoted with approval in the foreword, formulated thirty five years ago a descriptive model of language contacts on the basis of two phonological systems.