THE FATE OF YIDDISH ON THE AMERICAN SCENE HAS seemed something more to lament than to celebrate, a perverse drift into irrelevance if not near-extinction. But there is, as scholars and readers increasingly recognize, another story interwoven with that of decline, a story of extraordinary achievement, of promise prematurely aborted. The two stories of declension and of resurgence belong together, the former proving an essential condition of the latter in the sense that an encroaching ...