Episode 2

Available for over a year

Dennis Marks travels to New York to discover what has become of Yiddish and how much of the language survives. Yiddish - a mixture of Hebrew and Middle German, spiced with Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Old French and Old Italian, was once spoken by more than ten million people - that is nearly two thirds of the world's entire Jewish population. However, it has suffered a dramatic decline over the last century. In the second part of this series, Dennis Marks continues his investigation in New York. He meets Aaron Lansky, founder of the National Yiddish Book Centre, a library dedicated to rescuing and saving Yiddish books - as he describes - from the dustbin of history. The Centre has saved and preserved thousands of books, many of which now reside in libraries in Oxford, in an attempt to keep this joyful, exuberant language alive.