Yiddish Mailing List, Issue #5 Dec 28, 1988 229 lines ============================== The "how old are you?" joke (David Sherman) Yidish un kinder (Viswanath) Redn tsvei shprakhn tsu a kind (David Sherman) YIVO exhibition (Ari Davidow) ------------------------ Digest-Message: 05/1 From: dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman) Subject: The "how old are you?" joke Date: Tue, 20-Dec-88 09:21:01 EST [reposted from soc.culture.jewish] This version of the joke comes from an Emil Cohen record. Transcribing (this is just part of a much longer story): An old Jewish man was falsely arrested and falsely accused of stealing a chicken. This old Jewish man was arrested, couldn't speak a word of English, had to have an interpreter. An interpreter must interpret word for word what a defendant is saying. The judge told the interpreter to ask the old man his age. The interpreter turned to the old man and asked him, "Vi alt zeit ir?". The old man said "Akhtsik, biz hundert un tsvantsik yor." The interpreter says, "Your Honor, he said eighty to a hundred and twenty years." The judge says, "This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard since I've been sitting on the bench. If he is jesting, I will hold him in contempt of court. Ask him his age." The interpreter turns to the old man and says, "Der judge vil vissn, vi alt zeit ir?", and the old man says "Ikh hob eikh gezogt, akhtsik, biz hundert un tsvantsik yor." And the interpreter said, "Your Honor, he said 'I told you, eighty to a hundred and twenty years!'" The judge was going to hold him in contempt of court when a young Jewish lawyer sitting in court, realizing that the old man was in a bit of a dilemma here, arose and asked the judge permission to ask the old man his age. The judge granted him permission, and the young fellow got up and said, "Vi alt zeit ir, biz hundert un tsvantsik yor?" And the old man said "Akhtsik!" (OK, it's better when you hear it than reading it. The rest of this particular story is priceless too. Includes the interpreter translating "Ikh hob geganvet dem chicken??" as "I stole the chicken." The record's just called "Emil Cohen - America's Foremost Jewish Humorist". You only need a basic Yiddish to follow the Yiddish parts, because he translates most of it.) David Sherman ------------------------ Digest-Message: 05/2 From: uunet!draco.rutgers.edu!VISWANATH Date: Tue, 27 Dec 88 00:18 EST Subject: yidish un kinder ikh hob geleynt ayer briv vegn redn yidish mit ayere kinder mit a sakh interes. tsu mir un tsu mayn vayb iz ersht geboyrn gevorn a meydl un mir trakhtn vegn ire dertsiung. mayn muter-shprakh iz tamil, an indishe loshn, un ikh vil az mayn kind zol kenen redn tamil. ober mir viln az ze sol oykh kenen yidish. hobn mir bashlosn tsu redn beyde tamil (ikh) un yidish (mein vayb) tsu ir. ikh ken zikh shoyn forshteln di kolerlei problemn vos mir geyn hobn, vil ikh visn oyb es zaynen faran andere mishpokhes inem zelbn matsif. ken men gefinen bikher vegn redn tsvey shprakhn tsu kinder, bikher vos hobn entfern tsu togteglekhe frages? ------------------------ Digest-Message: 05/3 From: dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman) To: attcan!uunet!draco.rutgers.edu!VISWANATH Subject: yidish un kinder Date: Wed Dec 28 10:49:45 EST 1988 > ikh hob geleynt ayer briv vegn redn yidish mit ayere kinder mit a sakh interes. > tsu mir un tsu mayn vayb iz ersht geboyrn gevorn a meydl un mir trakhtn vegn > ire dertsiung. mayn muter-shprakh iz tamil, an indishe loshn, un ikh vil az > mayn kind zol kenen redn tamil. ober mir viln az ze sol oykh kenen yidish. > hobn mir bashlosn tsu redn beyde tamil (ikh) un yidish (mein vayb) tsu ir. Mazeltov! Oy vey. Ikh hob gemeint az vus mir tin iz shver. Du darfst bashliesn, oib du vest nor redn {tamil,yidish} tsu dem kind, oder vest oikhet tsvingen dos meidl az zi zol redn tsurik {tamil,yidish} tsu eikh. S'iz do a sakh kinder vos kenen farshteyn a loshn, ober redn kenen zei nisht. In a sviva vi alle mentshn redn english, s'iz shver tsu tun az dos kind zol git kenen redn an ander shprakh. Es ken zein, az tsvingen azoi mit tsvei shprakhn volt geven tsu shver. > ikh ken zikh shoyn forshteln di kolerlei problemn vos mir geyn hobn, vil ikh > visn oyb es zaynen faran andere mishpokhes inem zelbn matsif. ken men > gefinen bikher vegn redn tsvey shprakhn tsu kinder, bikher vos hobn entfern > tsu togteglekhe frages? Mistomeh yoh. Zolst fregn beim newsgroup "sci.lang", un efsher oikhet "misc.kids". David Sherman ------------------------ Digest-Message: 05/4 Date: Tue, 27 Dec 88 09:31:24 PST From: uunet!cogsci.berkeley.edu!well!ari (Ari Davidow) [from "The WELL"] Topic 164: Yiddishland, part 2 By: Ari Davidow (ari) on Tue, Dec 27, '88 1 responses so far Lea Singer, who set up the first online Jewish conference about a decade ago (on EIES, of all places), describes a virtual community called "Yiddishland". After all, she says, there is no country whose national language is Yiddish, yet people all over the world speak it--often as a first language. All of which is to say that this is a continuation of our old "Yiddish Word of the Week" topic, and an invitation to expand the discussion in any direction appropriate to a virtual sovereign entity :-). 1 response total. Topic 164: Yiddishland, part 2 # 1: Ari Davidow (ari) Tue, Dec 27, '88 (08:50) 82 lines One of the most exciting exhibits that I can remember is currently on display at YIVO in New York (1048 Fifth Ave.) Entitled "Revolutions in Print: Jewish Publishing Under the Tsars and the Soviets," the subject matter turned out to be far more significant, and far more touching than one would have suspected from the title. What many of us forget, for instance, is that the birth of Hebrew as a modern language took place in Russia. The flowering of Yiddish literature likewise took place in Russia--and that both were products of an intellectual and social ferment that was never resolved. The word "revolution" in the title of the exhibit is especially important, because the message of the subject is not the dry academic presentation of who published what and where, but a record of how several generations of Jews were defining what being a Jew MEANT in the modern world. This debate was artificially ended by the Nazis, and the shards that remained in the Soviet Union were eliminated by Stalin on August 12, 1952, when he killed twenty-four of the remaining giants of Soviet Yiddish culture. It is tempting to draw a neat line and close the story right there. With the near-elimination of the world's Yiddish-speaking population during the Holocaust, with the elimination of Yiddish literature's most able writers and poets; and with the creation of the state of Israel, and the subsequent identification of Hebrew writing with Zionism (or antique religion), one could easily over-simplify and stop. But the exhibit also indicates that Yiddish is NOT dead in the Soviet Union, nor is it dead for those who left Russia for Israel or the United States. More important than the open future of Jewish publishing in the Soviet Union, however, is the role that Jewish publishing in Russia, and then the Soviet Union, played in the dynamic of how we define ourselves as Jews, today. One of the most fascinating visions was this: "Though individual authors made ideological choices about which language they would publish in, most nineteenth century Russian Jewish writers were bilingual...." "As a rule, Yiddish belles-lettres had a wider, though less sophisticated readership than Hebrew.... Hebrew writers during the 1840s and '50s committed themselves to forging a modern literary language." The emotional impact of the exhibit for me came from the weight of graphic evidence, from the weight of the ephemera on display that made some of the excitement of the century preceding the Holocaust real. It is one thing to read in a popular history of the Bund (the Jewish Socialists) that the main weapons in the Bund's arsenal were not the popularly-imagined round bombs, but the printing press--that the focus of the group was to make the masses LITERATE so that they could understand Marxism and participate in the debate. It is another to see samples of the Yiddish newspapers and books =alongside= Hebrew books, and primers, and to let the imagination enable one to focus on the reality of the "Haskalah"--the Enlightenment movement. I'm not trying to discount religious printing, or the traditional works that were printed during this period, but the initiative was in the hands of those who were trying to work out what being a modern Jew was--the Maskilim, in all of their flavors. There were the Zionists who reclaimed Hebrew and made it modern; who, by writing their soap operas of ancient Hebrew heroes both made the language real, and created the context in which a Jewish State in Palestine was possible (please, let's not debate the merits of that context right here). Then there were the Bundists and the folklorists and the non-socialist secularists who espoused Yiddish--the language in which =all= Jews were facile. And finally, there were those ultimate secularists who insisted on using Russian itself. This latter issue--the use of Russian, brought the context back home to me most forcefully. In the context of the Soviet Union, the idea that Jews should be forced to abandon Hebrew and Yiddish seems absurd. It seems yet another example of self-hating Judaism, or ultra-assimilation, an imposition on our right to cultural autonomy foisted upon us by anti-Semites. Except that here, in the 1980s, in the United States, for the most part, Jews speak only English. ------------------------ END OF ISSUE #5 ------------------------ David Sherman, Toronto Moderator, mail.yiddish { uunet!attcan {AT&T Sites}!att pyramid!utai utzoo } !lsuc!dave dave@lsuc.uucp lsuc!dave@ai.toronto.edu attcan!lsuc!dave@uunet.uu.net