Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 07.137 January 21, 1998 1) Shteynbargs lidl (Mordkhe Schaechter) 2) Zalmen Shneyer (Gilles Rozier) 3) mayne mentshn (Gilles Rozier) 4) mekayem-psak zayn (Alexis Manaster Ramer) 5) Literature on pragmatic functions in Yiddish? (Julia Buechler) 6) Tseleger? (Michael Shimshoni) 7) Mendele: a gourmand's perspective (Iosif Vaisman) The double naming of a dish (Russell Harris) 8) Vilner lasunes--lyokum bembe! (Diane Rabson) 9) "yidish in di oygn fun di yunge" (Sholem Berger) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 06:19:54 EST From: MSchaecht Subject: Shteynbargs lidl Inem tsitirtn lid nitst Roze Oyslender [07.131] ous in yeyder strofe a shire fin Elyezer Shteynbargs a kinderlidl. Ot iz der tekst fin Shteynbargs lidl: Af a shteyn zitst a reytekh mit a khreyn. Zugt der reytekh: Etekh - betekh! S'iz der himl azoy reyn, lomir beyde tantsn geyn! Bald gevorn iz a freyd in gelofn kind-in-keyt - s'tantst a reytekh mit a khreyn! Vi zhe loyft men dus nit zeyn? Meshiyekhs tsat hot men gemeynt in me hot far freyd geveynt. Ekh bin oykhet dort geveyn, tsigeshtipt hob ekh zekh shver in kh'hob oykh gelozt a trer. (Gedrukt iz es in Elyezer Shteynbargs Alef-beys, Tshernevits, l921, zatl 124) Ayer Mordkhe Schaechter / Motkhe Shekhter / "Reb Motale Tshernevitser" 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 16:11:08 +0100 From: Bibliotheque Medem Subject: Zalmen Shneyer A farleger, vos vil aroysgebn di iberzetsung oyf frantseyzish fun "Shklover yidn" fun Zalmen Shneyer (Shklov 1886 - New York 1959) vil visn tsi der shrayber hot legale yorshim un zeyer adres. Gilles Rozier 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 20:04:20 +0100 From: Bibliotheque Medem Subject: mayne mentshn A student vos forsht vegn der yidisher prese zukh a dertseylung in hemsheykhim vos iz aroys in a vokhn-tsaytung in Varshe tsvishn tsvey velt-milkhomes. er ken dem titl fun der dertseylung. Es heyst "Mayne mentshn" ober dem nomen fun mekhaber ken er nisht. tsi emetser ken zogn ven un in vos far a vokhn-tsaytung es iz dershinen. Gilles Rozier 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 15:36:16 -0500 (EST) From: manaster@umich.edu Subject: mekayem-psak zayn Does anybody know anything about this verb being used in the sense of 'beat up'? Alexis Manaster Ramer 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 15:40:16 +1100 From: "BueCHLER JULIA" Subject: Literature on pragmatic functions in Yiddish?? Dear mendelyaners, does anyone of You know if there exists some material on how Yiddish expresses pragmatic functions (Topic-Coding, Switch-Reference, Focussing...)? Although I doubt there has been done some work on it at all... Anyway, it would be nice if someone of You knew something on this matter. Thanks - a hartsign dank, Julia Buechler 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 98 18:29:18 +0200 From: Michael Shimshoni Subject: Tseleger? Recently one of our ultra Orthodox Kneset Members (Ravitz) referred ironically to his party and its "strength" as a "groyser tseleger" (or so it sounded to me). It seems to be something like a big shot. Is that so and what is the origin of that term? Michael Shimshoni, Rehovot. 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 12:32:01 -0800 From: Iosif Vaisman Subject: Mendele: a gourmand's perspective Few months ago Russell Harris, a scholar of Islam, Near Eastern politics, and food history from London asked about the word fisnoge [07.066]. Following the ensuing discussion in Mendele he wrote an article and published it in the world's leading journal on food history Petits Propos Culinaires (Issue 57, December 1997). The article reproduced below with Russell Harris' permission. Iosif Vaisman *************************** The double naming of a dish Judges 12:6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. It is not important to talk about the meaning of the word shibboleth, (1) rather the fact that we have documentation that a tribe of the Children of Israel had a problem distinguishing between the sound "s" and "sh," with dire consequences for forty and two thousand of them at the passages of Jordan. What is intriguing here, is that a couple of thousand years later, the same problem among Lithuanian Jews gave rise at least one pleonastic construction in Yiddish for the name of the great feast dish of calf's foot jelly. (2) It was while helping Alan Davidson slew huge chunks of data around a hard disk in order to bring some slight comfort to an editor who was going to have to deal with a million words, that I remembered fisnoge and noted that there was no entry for it in the Oxford Companion to Food. I could distinctly hear my tutor at university deconstructing the word with glee. Alan asked if I could write something on the matter, however in trying to write an entry for this dish for potential inclusion in the Companion, my library proved too limited, and I turned to the internet. The usual search engines yielded no trove for fisnoge or variant spellings, but I did alight upon the home page of Mendele (3), wrote an e-mail to the contact name stating the nature of my problem ("help on the derivation of the name fisnoge"), and by the next morning messages were flowing. One kind correspondent obviously misread my original question and replied telling me that fisnogel [sic] in his dictionary meant 'toe-nail'. Others wrote to me recalling the finger-licking deliciousness of jellied calf's foot with hard-boiled eggs. However, as I had hoped, some serious etymological replies were sent, and I have compiled them below, while at the same time, hoping to make an appropriate reference to the verse quoted above. In one of Yiddish dialects, the name for this dish (calves' feet cooked with much garlic and onion, deboned and left to set in their own jelly, generally with the addition of hard-boiled eggs) is fisnoge.(4) I quote Ron Robboy (a member of the Mendele mailing list) who states that "the word fisnoge occurs only in so-called Lithuanian Yiddish, or Litvish, which was spoken in the Baltic lands, the present Belarus, and the extreme northeast of Poland. The Litvish speaker would characteristically pronounce the sounds 's' and 'sh' as 's'." Thus we had the beginning of a problem. When a Litvish speaker asked for what sounded like "fis", the listener did not know if he was requesting (calf's) foot (fis in Yiddish) or fish (fish in Yiddish). The shibboleth issue! "To distinguish between the two," continues Mr Robboy, "the Litvish speaker attached a second Slavic component - noge, meaning foot" - thus we have the word fisnoge, literally "foot-foot."(5) My own contribution to this short discussion of fisnoge, has been to try trawl my memory for food items apostrophised in Yiddish songs. Mentioned were Mameliga, various soups, succulent stuffed carp, raisons and almonds, Rumanian wine, even herrings and black bread, but calf's foot jelly remains unsung. Moreover, there is not even much danger these days of being slaughtered at the Jordan for a wrong pronounciation of fis! The Litvish term fisnoge has generally been superceded by the name petchah, derived from the Ottoman word for foot.(6) 1. Dr Georg. Benedict. Winer, Lexicon manuale Hebraicum et Chaldaicum in Veteris Testamenti Libros, Fridericum Fleischer, Leipzig, 1828, gives "fluxus aquae, flumen" and also gives the Ephraimite pronounciation sibboleth. 2. In gathering information for this discussion, I am deeply indebted to various members of the mailing list centred around the "Mendele" website, and have been requested to credit the archives of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, housed at Columbia University, New York, and published by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen. 3. "Mendele: Forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language" (http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele) 4. Romanized Yiddish words are written here according to the Standard YIVO Orthography. 5. "To disambiguate the homonymy that results from the merge of 's' and 'sh' in Litvish," according to another correspondent from the Mendele mailing list, Mr Mikhl Herzog, speakers of Litvish also added a second component to stress the meaning "fish" when they meant "fish" and not "calf's foot": the Slavic word for fish - ribe, or the Hebrew word for fish - dogim (Ashkenazic pronounciation) was added to the stem fis (fish), making another pleonastic construction - fisribe or fisdogim (i.e. fish-fish). 6. In response to my surprise at reading of the origin of the word petchah, Mr Mikhl Herzog replied that "as for Turkish influences in Yiddish, there are several that probably made their way up, largely from the southeast (via Ukraine, I'd think).. even royte patlezhanes [red aubergines] - 'tomatoes'." Russell Harris 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 12:58:39 -0700 (MST) From: Diane Rabson Subject: Vilner lasunes--lyokum bembe! Recently our Vinkl's leyen-krayz translated a satiric folksong collected by Y. Dobrushin in 1937. (The song also appears in abridged form in Ruth Rubin's "Voices of a People.") The reading circle got stumped by four words. Briefly, the song's first stanza satirizes dwellers of several shtetlakh between Vilna and Minsk; the lines always end with the nonsense term, "lyokum bembe!" E.g., 'Vishniver klotnikes--lyokum bembe!' (Vishneva brawlers--l.b.) Here are three of the words that stumped our mitglider: Vilner -LASUNES- (Vilna ???--glossed by Rubin as 'dandies with a sweet tooth') Lebedver -KULAHE- (Lebedzeva ???--one guess was 'shouters') Krever -MEKHILE- (Krevo ???--no ideas) In addition a later stanza contains these lines: Un hot untergeshmisn Mit a milkhike -KUTNITSE- (And had beaten With a milkhike ???) The song is published in Sovietized Yiddish. Does anyone have any thoughts about these words? Should I spell out the words using the names of the letters? A hartsikn dank, Diane Rabson Boulder, Colorado 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 21:29:37 -0500 From: "Sholem Berger" Subject: "yidish in di oygn fun di yunge" mirke herbst bet me zol shikn gedanken vegn yungelayt un yidish, nor kh'veys nisht vos ikh ken mekhadesh zayn af aza oysgedroshener (ongeveytikter? tragish-komisher? khad-gadyesher?) teme. ikh bin lefi-erekh a yunger (khotsh ikh ver alts elter), iz... eyn zakh ken ikh yo zogn. bay di ale yingere yidish-reder vos ikh ken (tsvantsik? finf un tsvantsik?) iz es do a heskem-kulem af eyn punkt, dehayne, az der yidishizm aleyn iz vayt nisht genug far a fuln yidishn, oder yidishlekhn lebn. er darf tsunoyfgeport mit, oder gikher untergevorfn zayn a hoypt-ideologye. zol zayn der bundizm, zol zayn di frumkayt (vos fara min frumkayt me vil), zol zayn der tsienizm, der dubnovizm, der hefker-yungizm --- abi a fulshtendike, koshere, ekhte yidishkayt. me darf belaz "hobn a lebn." me ken zikh nisht opzundern in yidish vi aza min poresh kedey "zikh aleyn oystsugefinen," vi me fleg zogn in di 60er yorn, vayl me filt zikh mikloympersht vi an aropgefalener fun an andern planet. yidish iz nisht keyn beduke-sgule, nisht af ale yidishe tsores, nisht af ale ikhishe ranglenishn. zi iz a vunderlekhe shprakh, nor baym endgiltikn analiz nor a shprakh. me muz dokh a mentsh un a yid oykh zayn. derfar kumt yungelayt azoy shver optsugebn tsayt dem yidishizm. ershtns iz nishto keyn yidish-redndike svive, vu me ken opklaybn a shteyger lebn vi in posek shteyt, d"h vi a bal-habkhire. (in di hayntike yidish-redndike svives, bay di khsidim meyn ikh, iz nishto keyn gedanken-frayhayt.) un tsveytns, oyb me vil shoyn yo voynen mekhuts di hayntike yidish-tsenter, lemoshl in der treyfener shtot manhetn, iz far vos (iz zikh meyashev der yungatsh) far vos zol ikh opgebn azoy fil tsayt a shprakh, vos iz eygntlekh nisht keyn ideologye, nisht keyn shteyger lebn, nor bloyz fun azelkhe zakhn a min forbading oder baze?! beser zikh opgebn koydem-kol an ideologye, a shteyger lebn! (do barir ikh afile nisht dos same vikhtiks: di froyen [mener] vos me vil mit zey mitgeyn redn dokh nisht keyn mame-loshn.) kurts tsu der zakh: in mizrekh-eyrope iz meglekh geven zikh oystsulebn af yidish on keyn bavustzinikn yidishizm. haynt iz azoyns nisht meglekh mekhuts bruklin un monsey un efsher amsterdam, london, un beney-brak. do ligt der hunt bagrobn. nishto keyn nays. kh'hob gekent farshporn di verter. sholem berger n"y ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 07.137 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html