Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.032 June 30, 1997 1) Weinreich's phrase book (Ron Robboy) 2) Frayland, A mythic country (Arre Komar) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 11:56:24 -0700 From: rrobboy@cts.com (Ron Robboy) Subject: Weinreich's phrase book It was good to read Michael Chabon eloquent and sincere remarks about his now notorious article [7.029]. I haven't found a copy of the original article yet, but I want to comment on his words appearing in his Mendele post. He makes a big point of the fact that, as a "book which explicitly advertises itself, on the cover, in capital letters, as a PHRASEBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS, [it] naturally, logically, and commercially implies the existence of a country to be travelled to. A country. An entire nation. Not a neighborhood...Not the annual meeting of a Yiddish language society..." My own copy, as it happens, mentions travel, but does not have the banner PHRASEBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS advertisement. What it says on the inside of the front cover, on the other hand, is worth quoting in its entirety: "Written by Dr. Uriel Weinreich (Professor of Yiddish at Columbia University) and Mrs. Beatrice Weinreich, this is a serious work based upon the best modern colloquial and literary usage. It avoids stage or 'Yankee' Yiddish, and confines itself to the Yiddish which is a living primary or secondary language for several million people. Besides being a contribution to linguistics and an important work in Jewish culture, this is, to the publisher's knowledge, the first extensive serious phrase book ever compiled for Yiddish. It is part of Dover's program of providing phrase books for languages of special cultural interest." So Mr. Chabon's leap of logic that a phrasebook "commercially" implies a whole country, "an entire nation," is all but explicitly repudiated by the publisher. Languages of "special cultural interest" are, in light of any useful meaning of that phrase, ones that are not necessarily THE language an entire nation. Mr. Chabon goes on to say, "No one takes a Chinese phrasebook for travellers to Chinatown..." Why on earth not, Mr. Chabon? If by "Chinatown" you mean a block or two of storefronts selling tourist gewgaws -- a kind of municipally-zoned ethnic theme park -- then perhaps not. But if you mean in the real world of 1997 -- "_Now._ Post 1958," in your words -- then it seems like an altogether useful idea to me. Doing business in my neighborhood -- there is a Somali mosque where my cross street meets the boulevard -- it could be valuable to carry phrasebooks not just in the ubiquitous Spanish and Cantonese, but also Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, Russian, Amharic, Arabic -- and Yiddish. (I'm walking distance from a Chabad center as well.) This is, I think, the nub of the matter. Mr. Chabon is quite clear that his central assumption is that it involves a patent absurdity to publish a phrasebook for a language with no nation. This is the "inherent implication...the central pillar of my ruminative essay." As much as I agree with him -- both artistically and emotionally -- of the poignancy and even Kafkaesque dissonance suggested by the phrases for dealing with customs agents and other government officials, I question his basic assumption, his "central pillar." I question it not on an ad hoc basis for purposes of argument here, but on the basis of my deep and abiding ideological commitment to the right of any language's right to existence regardless of the particularities of current political and territorial dominance. "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy," as Max Weinreich's famous formula has it, quoted more than once on Mendele in the recent past (Shikl Fishman [6.077] and Ellen Prince [6.167]). The discussion at hand -- climaxed by Mr. Chabon's stated assumption -- goes straight to the heart of the meaning of diaspora in the human condition. This may have been the larger point addressed by the Weinreichs: not (merely) that it is sad to offer phrases that will never be used, but that they have as much a right to do so as all other peoples. (The other explicitly Yiddishist agenda I suspect the Weinreichs and their sympathizers would have embraced is the demonstration that Yiddish is capable of sustaining discourse in all these nation-like fields of endeavor.) Mr. Chabon has implicitly questioned this right to discourse with his statement about the logic of entire nations. "There is no nation to take the Weinreichs' little phrasebook to; for every other language in the series, such a country exists," he writes. In fact, even that assertion is untrue. My copy lists Esperanto on the back cover along with Yiddish and the various politically enfranchised languages. As I was growing up, my own understanding of the primary usefulness of Yiddish was that, like Esperanto, it could serve as an invaluable lingua franca nearly anywhere in the world -- a kind of visa in and of itself -- albeit for a limited constituency. Wherever one went, there were always going to be Yiddish speakers. Even if there were only one or two such speakers -- perhaps especially if there were only one or two -- invoking a Yiddish phrase was a guaranteed assurance of, not just certain recognition and probable friendliness, but quite possibly of refuge. Mr. Chabon poses the question: Where, in 1997, could you go that it would behoove you to know how to say, in Yiddish, "Which way to the casino?" I can't speak to current conditions at Native American gaming establishments in, say, Connecticut, but out here in the Western U.S., if your car broke down in the Mojave Desert and you had two dollars in your wallet, if you hitchhiked into Las Vegas I'll bet you double or nothing Mr. Chabon's question would buy you dinner and use of a phone if you chose your interlocutor astutely. Looking through the phrasebook, I came upon the section on applying for a job. Adopting Mr. Chabon's skepticism, I thought, "Who would ever use this?" Almost immediately, I was struck by the arrogance of my viewpoint. How many hundreds, even thousands, of laborers must be employed by Yiddish-speaking Hasidim in the New York area in service industries, retail and domestic work, or any number of other sectors of an often-underground Hasidic economy (such as the cash-only construction trades)? One has only to think of the accounts (perhaps apocryphal) that General Colin Powell, working for Jewish employers in some fairly menial capacity, learned basic Yiddish skills as a youth . How many such workers -- and one thinks especially of shabes goyim -- might benefit immensely, might draw tremendous advantage, from learning those basic Yiddish skills that would allow them to significantly alter the emotional and psychological footing on which they must interact with their Yiddish-speaking employers? Lastly (I promise), I note that the publisher claimed "Say It in Yiddish" is the first such phrasebook ever published. I confess to a certain pride in recalling for Mendelistn my post [6.203] commenting on the distinguished musician and lexicographer Nicholas Slonimsky's claim that his uncle Josef Slonimsky, of Warsaw, had written a Norwegian-Yiddish travelers' phrasebook, presumably around the last turn of the century. Ron Robboy San Diego, California 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:21:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Arthur Komar Subject: Frayland, A mythic country I have owned the the Weinreich little traveler's guide for decades and loved it. However I never sensed the bittersweet dimension of it until the very moving note you just published by the author of the Smithsonian article. I found that he articulated a subconscious message that had been ruminating in my soul for years and I am very grateful for him to have done so. Far from denigrating Yiddish, he mourned a land that never came into being. Most people don't seem to recall one sad piece of Holocaust history. In 1945 as the survivors were being liberated, an organization was founded called The Frayland League whose goal was to establish a Yiddish speaking state, to be called Frayland. They negotiated with the Dutch government to obtain Surinam as a haven for the Yiddish speaking survivors who were being brutally detained by the British in new camps, to prevent them from entering Palestine. The Zionist, who were exceedingly hostile to Yiddish, were desparate to prevent the Dutch government from ceding the land, since they felt that the pressure would then have abated for the establishment of a Hebrew speaking state in Israel. Informal poles taken in the camps seem to indicate that the majority of the newly liberated preferred having a Yiddish state, since Yiddish was their native language. On the eve of the Dutch vote, in 1946, Golda Mayerson, among others, rushed to Holland to politic forcefully against Frayland, using her Second International connections in the Dutch Social Democratic Party. When the vote was finally taken Frayland lost by one vote. The Hebrew state that ultimately resulted, maintained a vendetta against Yiddish for these many generations. Yes, there almost was a Yiddish nation where the little traveler's guide would have been a useful and valuable accessory. But a miss is as good as a mile. And as long as Israel no longer feels threatened by Yiddish and lets it live its precarious existance we gladly transfer our affections to it. To quote an old Yiddish song "Ver mir zaynen zaynen mir, Ober Yidn zaynen mir." Arre Komar ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.032 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. 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