An Old Yiddish Nayen Yohr

To the slightly more than casual Jewish reader, Yiddish looks alot like Hebrew. The alphabet is the same while the vocabulary and grammar are all but completely different. Some expressions make the jump, like mazel tov, which Jews use to express congratulations. The Hebrew literally means “good luck,” which in Yiddish would translate to gut glick. But the former expression sticks nevertheless.

Between Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question and the Zionist establishment of a Hebrew-speaking Jewish state in Israel, the Yiddish language has since hung on by threads of nostalgia and a deliberate sense of urgency to preserve a vibrant and centuries-old diaspora culture. Institutions and individual efforts have been established for the preservation of the language’s arts, literature and conversational use.

Postcard correspondence exploded at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century with the advancement of postal and shipping services and increased mobility in industrialized societies, particularly in the years of 1895–1920:

About 200–300 billion of them are thought to have circulated worldwide during this period, and postcard production became a big international business that appealed to entrepreneurs everywhere, employing huge numbers of people.

Jews from the New World back across the sea to the Old Countries and even the (pardon the expression) Holy Land also embraced the new hybrid form of written and printed correspondence.