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Now a new series, Yiddish, a struggle for survival.

Dennis Marks travels to New York to discover what's become of Yiddish.

A language which at its height is estimated to have been spoken by more than 10 million people.

10 years ago, in the remote Ukrainian town of Chernivtsi,

I recorded a sound I hadn't heard since I was a toddler.

And when the BBC asked me to make a program about the Yiddish language,

I thought about returning to the city my Russian grandmother would have called Chernovits.

But if you want to hear Yiddish today, there's no point in going to Chernovits.

Hitler wiped out most of the language and the USSR all but finished the job.

The story of the near death of Yiddish in Europe and its rebirth in the USA

has been a lifetime study for the Yiddish academic Dr. Miriam Hoffman.

It's a language that has no luck at all.

It's a very unlucky language.

But it is so vital and so strong and so full of life and joy to weave and all of that,

it refuses to die.

So to hear Yiddish is a living language, there's only one destination,

not Bukavina but Brooklyn, in what Jewish migrants called the Golden Amidina, New York.

How did a migrant tongue survive for more than a century?

Not in its birthplace of Central and Eastern Europe,

but in the powerhouse of the English-speaking world.

...