ABSTRACT
This chapter explores both the use of Yiddish terminology and references to Yiddish in three novels and two short stories by one of post-1945 Germany's most important writers from a Jewish background. Jurek Becker's writings have often been seen in the context of his own biography. His first three novels were published while he still lived there, but in 1977, in the wake of the Biermann Affair, he settled in West Berlin, published four more novels, a collection of short stories and several essays, and also wrote film and television scripts. His uses of Yiddish at times serve to make the non-Jewish German reader feel more 'vertraut', or intimate, with the texts, while in Bronstein's Children Yiddish is used as an alienating device between Jewish generations. Three novels and at least two short stories are clearly identifiable as either being influenced by East European Jewish traditions or explicitly as containing Yiddish subject material or vocabulary or both.
