Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 172 February 15, 1992 1) Sitter (Dovid Braun) 2) Gribn (Martin Davis) 3) Farshidens (Yude-Leyb Proger) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 13:56:12 EST From: David Braun Subject: sitter Refoel, For me, zitsern/zitserke conjures up the image of markzitsern/markzitserke 'woman who sells various foodstuffs (beans, etc.) at a market; low-class woman'. Incidentally, there's a transliteration/transcription question connected to this. The -i- before the -n is not pronounced, although it is written in Standard Yiddish spelling. Some transliterate _zitserin_ and others - _zitsern_ which is truer to the actual pronunciation. This is of course the situation with _zinger(i)n_ 'female singer', _lerer(i)n_ 'female teacher' etc. etc. (If you say _lererke_, _zitserke_ like me, then you have no trouble at all!) Yiddish as written in the USSR (olevasholekhts) got rid of the orthographic yud in the feminine-marker -n. --Dovid Braun 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 14:56:39 -0500 From: davism@turing.cs.nyu.edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.171 As a boy I loved my mother's "gribn" (she definitely pronounced it with a "b"). They were made in the frying pan from chicken fat and had the consistency (as I found much later) of small bits of fried bacon. In later years my wife used a similar process with goose fat with which she also pleased me greatly. The term she knew for the process (coming from the US midwest) was "rendering." Martin Davis 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 12 Feb 92 20:14:57 IST From: RHLE302@HAIFAUVM.BITNET Subject: More salad FEET AND NUTS: KEEPING THE FACTS OF YIDDISH STRAIGHT When errors are repeated often enough they become accepted as fact. It is best to stop them in the bud. We ought to be especially concerned that information about Yiddish be accurate. In _Parade_ of 22 March 1987, Nat Broudy says that Yiddish _nisl_ means 'Nut' and Yiddish _fisl_ means 'feet' (neither word is transcribed there according to the Standardized Yiddish Romanization). _Nisl_ means 'little nut' (it is a diminutive form of _nus_ 'nut') and _fisl_ means 'little foot' (it is a diminutive form of _fus_ 'foot'. Since February 1988, Avshalom Kor has had a spot talking about the Hebrew language on Israeli television. It is called "Higia Hazeman Lashon," which is a pun on Heb. "higia hazeman lishon" 'It's time for bed'. On 3 March 1988 he mentioned "the Yiddish word _frekh_." There is no such Yiddish word. He meant the German word _frech_. Also on 3 March 1988, the Hebrew radio reported on the approximately half million documents about Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel which are now housed in a museum in Kefar Tavor. The director of the museum, David Goldman, said that certain of the documents were in (Heb.) "zhargon" {'jargon'}. One rarely hears this pejorative Hebrew name for Yiddish today, and it is all the more unexpected from the lips of someone whose Hebrew is decidedly influenced by Yiddish. On 3 March 1988, an Israeli Jewish college teacher, Ashkenazic, interviewed on Hebrew television, complained that Israeli soldiers were taking the "Christian attitude of 'if someone spits on you, say it's raining' and 'if someone slaps you on one cheek, let him slap you on the other'." The second attitude is indeed Christian (see the New Testament), but the first is based solely on the Yiddish saying _az me shpayt der hur in ponim zogt zi, az se regnt_ 'if you spit a whore in the face, she say's its raining'. The Yiddish saying has been taken into Hebrew in a generalized form: _yorekim alecha bapanim, veata omer sheze geshem_ 'They're spitting you in the face and you say it's rain'. ****** IS IT TRUE THAT THERE ARE YIDDISH-SPEAKING ORTHODOX JEWS WHO AVOID USING WORDS OF HEBREW-ARAMAIC ORIGIN IN CERTAIN PLACES OR SITUATIONS? Very Orthodox Jews in Ashkenaz 2 (and 3?) tried to avoid words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin while in the bathhouse, a place of lower order (compared to home or synagog or mikve), as evidenced in the fact that it had no mezuza on its door. Devoted as it was to physical hygiene, to washing the _body_, it might aid in achieving holiness but was not in itself a sanctified or sanctifiable place. Thus an Orthodox Jew would avoid speaking the word _Shabos_ or {Yiddish} _shabes_ 'Sabbath' on Friday afternoons when in the _bod_ 'bathhouse', but referred instead to _der zibeter_ 'the seventh (day)' (a case of style-switching). Conceivably, this very same Jew might have been one of those very few Orthodox Jews who tried to speak Loshn-koydesh on the Sabbath, thereby sanctifying that day further and not desecrating it by using the profane vernacular (a case of code-switching). Not much is known about this remarkable practice of certain diglossal Jews in the not too distant past to shift their speech from one style or code to another, depending on time and place. All of us switch registers when we find ourselves in certain situations, but these are not ideologically motivated, intentional behaviors, but conventional learned responses (e.g. as when we switch from informal to formal speech in certain ceremonious settings). How much is known about ultra-Orthodox Loshn-koydesh avoidance in the bathhouse and vernacular-avoidance on the Sabbath respectively? ******* DO JEWISH THEATERS GENERALLY HAVE MEZUZOT ON THEIR DOORS? Presumably, in Israel at least, public places of entertainment, including theaters (unless specifically proscribed), have mezuzot on their doors. A stormy discussion arose at the end of 1987 around the statement of the Haifa Chief Sephardic rabbi that the mezuza be removed from the Haifa Municipal Theater building because of the lewd plays performed there, plays often featuring nakedness, obscenity, illicit relations, etc. Modern European theater, of which Israeli theater is a descendant, traces its ancestry from fifth century BCE Greek ritual and medieval European Christian Easter tropes; its religious origins and affinities are well acknowledged. On the other hand there is a long tradition of rabbinic opposition to theater among the Jews, which parallels similar Church opposition to public plays. Interestingly, the Yiddish theater, which is perhaps the major immediate source of the Israeli theatre, saw its first "regualar" play produced in a yeshiva by yeshive-bokher actors: _Serkele_ by Shloyme Etinger (1803-1856) in the Zhitomir Yeshiva, with Avrom Goldfadn, founder of the modern Yiddish theatre, in the lead female role. In the West, there has always been tension, as well as reciprocity, between theater and religion. In Israel moderate Orthodox Jews attend the theatre (one can identify them by their head covering), and extreme rightist secularists often oppose the theatre when it engages in bold social and political criticism. The demarcation line between supporters and opponents of the theatre is not drawn on strictly religious lines. Nothing has actually happened to the mezuza at the Haifa Municipal Theater; it's removal was merely broached -- that was enough to set off a public debate. ****** THE ASHKENAZIC BACKLASH On the eve of the Israeli elections in 1981, Dudu Topaz, a popular entertainer, made an ethnic slur on television which proved disastrous to the Coalition (Mapay and Mapam): he referred to Israeli Jews of Asian and African origin as _tshachtshachim_, a Hebrew ethnophaulism which until then had not seemed so sinister. The largely Ashkenazic Labour Party apparently suffered from Topaz's indiscrete utterance, but some Ashkenazim, at least in their hearts, took some cheer from it. Topaz's faux pas was a harbinger of what in retrospect we may call "the Ashkenazic backlash," a barely articulated sense that there had been continuous and persistent emphasis on the culture of non-Ashkenazic Jews and relatively little attention (some would say "virtual silence") about the thousand-year-old heritage of Ashkenaz and, in particular, of Yiddish, its chief vernacular and (together with Hebrew) its major carrier. Yude-Leyb Proger ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.172