91Èȱ¬

'I may think in English, but I feel in Yiddish'.

It's been said that no other language in history has done as much borrowing, shifting, shaping, adapting or giving as Yiddish. It's a rich, colourful, expressive language, full of humour, but with a bite. A reflection of the history of the people who spoke it for over a thousand years. On the eve of WW2 there were close to 12 million people speaking Yiddish but, after the Holocaust, this was vastly diminished. A few years ago Yiddish was placed on the UNESCO list of endangered languages.

In this personal story, Naomi Bloomstein looks at this extraordinary 1000 year-old language to try and understand what it means to a people and whether that meaning is inherently passed on through the generations of one family, and asks the question - is it disappearing?

She also speaks to historians and experts in Yiddish to discover more about its unique history and significance. Switching between the roles of daughter, mother and narrator, we are taken on a journey into the past asking her own family if she has done enough to preserve this marginalised language. The answer isn’t what she expected.

New Storytellers presents the work of new radio and audio producers, and this series features the winners of the Charles Parker Prize 2024 for the Best Student Radio Feature. Naomi Bloomstein is studying for an MA in Audio Storytelling for Radio and Podcast at University College London and the judges described her prize-winning feature as ‘very, very accomplished with such a creative use of the medium, where the music really drove it. A beautifully made programme and definitely in the top bracket on so many levels’.

Producer: Naomi Bloomstein
A Soundscape production for 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4