Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 161 February 4, 1992 1) 'Shoah' (Dovis Braun) 2) 'Shoah', etc. (Mark H. David) 3) Introduction (Itzhak Finger) 4) 'Skotsl kumt (Rapael Finkel) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 03 Feb 92 16:12:03 EST From: David Braun Subject: thanks for the tikn-toes Thank you for the tikn-toes on Shoah. Dafke the couple hours I saw didn't have Yiddish. Will have to re-view it. __Dovid Braun 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Feb 92 18:35:13 EST From: gensym!mhd@harvard.harvard.edu Subject: "Shoah", Yiddish in Film, etc. I only saw the first video of the five in "Shoah", but I do recall there being some Yiddish, though perhaps too little, considering the subject matter and that the film . The documentary "Partisans of Vilna" has many interviews conducted in Yiddish. There is no dubbing, only subtitling. This film is excellent, I think, in terms of including Yiddish. It has other languages, too. Avi Kovner for some reason talks in Hebrew, but that's because he wanted to, I guess. I found dumb the use of Yiddish accents in the film "Enemies, A Love Story". If you think about it, in "real life" the characters were really speaking Yiddish much of the time with no accent whatsoever among themselves, and occasionally venturing out into accented, probably broken English. Instead they were portrayed as people who spoke English all the time, all in the same phony, Yiddish-accented English. It would have been much more interesting and authentic to just have the characters use whatever language they should be using. The film "The American Friend" does a good job of this, I think, with English and German. I think this is one of the really great features of film/television that you can't have with radio, theater, or the written word. The films "Hester Street" and "Imported Bridegroom" do let Yiddish speakers speak Yiddish when Yiddish is what they're speaking. The main problem is that when you see them, it's not credible how little Yiddish is spoken. It's as though the filmmakers found it too much of a pain to have their characters speak Yiddish, so they just wrote it into the plot that they only spoke Yiddish a little bit. If you can't have the characters speak Yiddish when they ought to, they should have spoken English with no accent when they were really supposed to be speaking Yiddish, and speaking with more or less ability, and an accent, when they were really speaking English. If that cannot be done, the least that should be done would be to have them speak standard, unaccented English throughout the film. That is, I believe, what what was done with in the film -- sorry the name escapes me -- about the man from Salonica who saved himself in Aushchwits by being a boxer and never losing a match. Presumably, he spoke Ladino (or Greek?) most of the time; but, whatever the reason, the audience was spared having to endure a phony Ladino dialect for the entire movie. Maybe dialog coaches for Yiddish-accented English are easier to find? :-> Mark David 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 03 Feb 92 18:00:06 PST From: jfinger@adobe.COM Subject: Introduction I am interested in seeing Yiddish culture and literature preserved, and I have recently begun studying the language. This group is of interest to me in order to know what Yiddishists are discussing, but I suspect that I have little to add myself (for now). -- Jeff Finger -- 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1992 09:32:13 EST From: Raphael Finkel Subject: grayzn shkotsl kumt: From the contexts where I have seen it used, skotsl kumt seems to mean "look who just came in!", or even "look whom the cat dragged in!" It may even derive (pure guess) from 'dos kotsl kumt', where kotsl would be a variant of ketsl, but specifically tomcat (kotter). There might be a connotation of 'the tomcat, having been out all night, has finally come home'. Itsik Manger uses the expression in the Megilas Itsik. He also uses 'a teyrets far di bentshlikht', which to date no one has suggested a meaning for. noyekh mit finf grayzn I always heard this just as a spelling game: can you misspell noyekh in five different ways simultaneously? An example is but I only count fir grayzn. Raphael Finkel ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.161