I read Naomi Brenner's illuminating and beautifully written study of Jewish bilingualism in the last dark month of 2016, in a global atmosphere of increasing nationalism and xenophobia. Within this context, Brenner's study of Jewish bilingualism felt like a hopeful message about what might persist within and beneath apparently all-encompassing political and cultural shifts.

Lingering Bilingualism aims to correct the established narrative about the changing relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish, the two Jewish languages of Ashkenaz. They long formed a single symbiotic and hierarchical language culture, with Hebrew the more esteemed and Yiddish the vernacular tongue; this hierarchical relationship persisted even after secularization, with Haskalah writers continuing to view Hebrew as a high-status language and denigrating Yiddish, despite many of them continuing to publish in both. With the rise of Jewish nationalist movements like Zionism and the Bund, this relationship was “democratized,” and Yiddishists began to claim equal status alongside Hebrew or even argue for it as the sole “Jewish national tongue.” An ideologically charged “language war” was fought on numerous fronts, but one battle took place in the aftermath of a 1927 dinner held for visiting Yiddish writers in Mandate Palestine; zealous Hebraists objected to the honor with which the Yiddish writers had been treated by the Hebrew literary establishment. It was this marker that is sometimes taken as the “stormy divorce” of Hebrew and Yiddish, the point at which writers had to choose between the languages.

Brenner's revision of this now-familiar narrative begins, as it were, at this ostensible ending (or a little earlier), demonstrating the fascinating and rich contexts in which Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism “lingered” despite its supposed demise. Bilingualism and language contact can take numerous forms, and among the contributions of Brenner's work is to expand our understanding of how contiguous languages might interact. Borrowing the term “translingual” from Lydia He Liu (Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995]), Brenner demonstrates the multiple ways that Hebrew and Yiddish continued to work with and through each other in numerous contexts after they had apparently gone their separate ways. In Berlin of the early 1920s, for instance, a lavishly produced periodical on Jewish literature and art appeared for six issues in roughly parallel Hebrew and Yiddish editions titled Milgroym and Rimon (Pomegranate). The difficult postwar economy actually aided this bilingual project, with foreign currency and idle presses making such publication possible. And Hebrew and Yiddish, Brenner argues, may have coexisted more peacefully in Berlin than elsewhere because they were both minority languages in the larger culture.

Another chapter discovers bilingualism not at the periphery of Hebrew and Yiddish cultural production but at one of its centers, in the very milieu in which monolingualism ostensibly triumphed. Brenner shows that, despite their vociferous polemics against Yiddish, Hebrew writers like Eliezer Shteinman were financing their Hebrew literary careers and experimenting with modernism in Yiddish publications outside Palestine. Moreover, Yiddish left its traces even in the Hebrew poetry of such younger radical Hebraists as Avraham Shlonsky, who titled one collection Le-ʾaba-ʾima (To Papa-Mama [Tel Aviv: Ketuvim, 1927]), a calque of the Yiddish term for parents, tate-mame.

A final chapter contrasts a number of Hebrew-Yiddish or Yiddish-Hebrew translation projects in Palestine and New York in the 1940s. Brenner argues that while the Yiddish-Hebrew translation project undertaken by the Yiddish-turned-Hebrew writer and journalist Rachel Feygenberg helped readers “transition to their new Hebrew reality in Palestine,” the New York–based Achisefer project of producing a Hebrew anthology of Yiddish literature and a Yiddish anthology of Hebrew literature “saw Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism as its goal” (207). The second, Hebrew-Yiddish volume of the Achisefer anthology was never produced. Instead, the editorial team released in 1948 a Yiddish-language Holocaust anthology. As Brenner writes, “A replacement of sorts for the never-realized Yiddish Achisefer, this anthology registers less the desire to preserve evident in Achisefer’s Hebrew translations than the need to testify, to protest, and to mourn in Yiddish. Thus, within just a few years, the American attempt to promote Jewish cultural bilingualism in Achisefer was replaced by efforts to craft a collective response to catastrophe in Yiddish” (207).

Despite this abandonment of bilingualism, the story is not yet over. A postscript notes the faint echoes of a once-robust Jewish bilingualism in contemporary Hebrew literature, most notably in the poetry of Avot Yeshurun (1904–92), who at once “resisted Zionism's break with the past, the obliviousness to the Arab presence, and the rejection of bilingualism and Yiddish” (217). Here and elsewhere Brenner makes it clear that bilingualism is not only a sociolinguistic phenomenon, but also a political one. Nevertheless, the connection between Avot Yeshurun's multilingualism and his critique of Zionism cannot be mapped onto other instances of bilingualism, which express a range of ideological positions. So perhaps Brenner is right to hold back from making broad claims about the political or cultural significance of the dissolution of Askhenazic bilingualism, or about the persistence of such bilingualism despite the forces arrayed against it. Nevertheless, I had hoped for more. Beyond the obvious importance of getting history right, does it matter that bilingualism persisted after its apparent demise? In a fascinating meditation on his own central European Jewish multilingualism, George Steiner makes an impressive case for its virtues: “To the many-centered, the very notion of a ‘milieu,’ of a singular or privileged rootedness, is suspect. No men inhabit a ‘middle kingdom,’ all are each other's guests” (After Babel: Aspects of Literature and Translation, 3rd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 121–22). From this perspective, Jewish bilingualism emerges as part of a large “unhoused” literary sensibility, open to ethical as well as linguistic encounters. At this moment, the memory and persistence of such a culture seem to matter greatly indeed.