Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 59 September 10, 1991 1) Bashevis' funeral (Bob Werman) 2) Yankel fort avek (Yankel Kessler) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 10:40 +0300 From: RWERMAN@HUJIVMS.HUJI.AC.IL Subject: Bashevis' funeral The following appeared in Shalom Rosenfeld's column in Ma'ariv of August 9, 1991. According to a generous estimate [Bet Hillel] there were 200 people present at the memorial service in honor of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in the funeral home in Manhattan. A more conservative report [Bet Shammai] counts only 150. It is not clear whether this funeral service was carried out according to our religious practices or whether it was improvised. It is clear, however, that the usual eulogies [hespedim] were not delivered. Only two people spoke at the ceremony - actually they related some stories and anecdotes about Bashevis and others that he himself had told - Rabbi William Berkowitz and the author's son, also an author and journalist in his own right, Israel Zamir, of Kibbutz Bet Alpha. What was absent at the ceremony to honor one of the great writers of Yiddish in our generation, a Nobel Laureate? Yiddish was absent. And, had Rabbi Berkowitz not quoted a part of Bashevis' famous speech in Stockholm in which the author defined the language he created in as "a loshon fun galus, on a land un on grenize" [a diaspora language, without a country and without borders] - we might have been witnesses to an amusing episode in the history of literature: a memorial service for an author in which almost no word in the language he wrote in was spoken. Following the funeral car to the cemetery in some God forsaken place in New Jersey, following the coffin of of one of our most famous authors, were about a dozen people of his family, in 3 [THREE!] cars. Such is New York. The New York of millions of Jews, among whom tens of thousands read his works in their original language, over a period of decades, particularly on the pages of the FORWARDS. I recall a sad meeting that I once had with the [Yiddish - RW] poet Itzik Manger, who lived many years in the shadow of death [he was an alcoholic - RW]. He begged me to promise him that, if his luck turned bad and he were to die in America, I would do everything to arrange for his corpse to be brought to Israel for a Jewish burial here. "If I die in New York," he said, "not even a dog would come to my funeral." Itzik Manger died in Gadera. His funeral was held in Tel Aviv and many thousands followed his coffin. __Bob Werman rwerman@hujivms Jerusalem 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 06 Sep 91 17:42 PDT From: KESSLER Subject: RE: Vol 1.58 And Mendele, wish me safe travel to Istanbul and Anatolia, where I go to find G reeks and Indians and assorted nuts and fruitcakes for the XIIth World Poetry C ongress Turkiye. Got any lost relatives there? Jascha Kessler [Af a gute sho! nm] ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.59