I generally prefer not to explain my work, but rather to leave it open to interpretation. What I will say is that any consideration of the Jewish experience in the United States has to take into account the passage through the “language barrier” of Yiddish. Wittgenstein said, “A language is a way of life,” and Yiddish is the lost way of life that was “The World of Our Fathers.” It is an outsider’s language, a communal code developed to cope with a foreign and often hostile reality. As such it developed an ironic and picaresque view of human nature and its foibles. While capable of expressing the deepest of sentiments, it is also a language of intense self-criticism and moral invective; direct, unrefined, and indifferent to polite taste. My intention in “The Joys of Yiddish” is to foreground this complexity and to celebrate the language in all its humor and humanity.

Mel Bochner, 2006