Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 219 April 21, 1992 1) An entfer (Mikhl Herzog) 2) Yiddish doggerel (Gerald M. Phillips) 3) Had Gadya/Bialik (Dan Breslauer) 4) Entfers (Dovid Braun) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Apr 92 18:29 EDT From: ZOGUR%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.218 Gus Grannen: NO! NO! And, in addition, "no" to "bentshEn'. It's "bentshn". Mikhl 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Apr 92 18:40 EDT From: GMP@PSUVM.PSU.EDU Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.218 I found this bit of doggerel written in handwriting and tucked into an old Haggadah I bought at a used book sale. Can anyone comment, tell me if there were other bits of screed like this. I am very interested in the internal Yiddish comedy of the early 1900s and the effect it had on burlesque. The poem follows: Er zis gevendt a kalte, und ah regendicke nacht. Erzis gedundet, erzis geblitzt, erzis geknacked. Sizt an alte, kalte, toches oif McKinley's kaveh und kocked. Haef zuech oif McKinley undt zagt mit a kvitch, "Fehr vass kockst du oif mein kaveh, do sonuvvahbitch?" There are clearly political implications in this, but the verse is reminiscent of some of the bawdy songs done on the Orpheum circuit and also of the British music hall genre as "My old man said to follow the van, and don't dilly dally on the way." Comments? Gerald M. Phillips 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Apr 1992 18:16 CST From: Dan Breslauer Subject: RE: Mendele Vol 1.218 Thanks to Bob Werman for his Had Gadya. I like the idea that now nothing works right but that when the Herr comes it will. My in-laws, who do know Yiddish, helped us with the song for our Seders. My mother-in-law, however, says that they would *never* use Herr to refer to Der Eybeishe (spelling?). My teacher used to tell the following story about Bialik (from whence it comes I do not know). According to the tale he happened upon some reform Jews eating bread on the eighth day of Passover, late in the day. He said to them: You had better eat in haste, soon you won't be able to sin any more! Dan Breslauer 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Apr 92 19:47:28 -0400 From: David Braun Subject: entfers _bis_ in Modern Hebrew (as in: ten li bis 'give me a bite') comes from Yiddish _bis_ (as in: gib mir a bis). _a bisl_ is the diminutive of _bis_ 'bite', meaning 'a small bite' and by extension, 'a little bit'. English _bit_ is related to English _bite_, just like in Yiddish case. Speakers of Modern Hebrew also say _shluk_ (as in: ten li shluk) for 'give me a sip (of what you are drinking)', which comes from Yiddish (although daytshmerish) _shluk_. So maybe, on second thought, it's straight from German. In Yiddish it's _shlung_ 'swallow' (noun form). Yiddish equivalent for 'give me a sip' would be: gib mir a zup. zupn = 'to sip'. Could you say: "gib mir a shlung vaser"? Peysekh(d)ike latkes, khremzlekh, bubelekh (never heard of this before), and let's not forget pampeshkes/pompeshkes! Thanks, Bob Werman, for reminding me of the Yiddish khad-gadyo. I introduced this item to my Intermediate Yiddish class at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. I've done this with numerous other items discussed in Mendele, so zayt visn, everyone, that Mendele is used as a classroom tool as well. And shkoyekh for all the interesting stuff printed lately! Gus Grannan: the sentence is bad, because Yiddish follows what's called the verb-second constraint. The tensed verb must (generally) be the second constituent in the sentence. In U. Weinreich's _College Yiddish_ you'll see this formulated as: the inflected verb must be the second (or in no position after the second) "sentence unit" of the sentence. nokhn bentshn [note: no second _e_ in proper transliteration/transcription] is the prepositional phrase which is in first position, so the inflected/tensed verb must come after it, in second position. A basic of Yiddish word order. By the way, you say there are no informants in your area. Where are you? Maybe I can shatkhn you up with some. I'd be happy to have people share Yiddish versions of ekhod mi yedeye/Ehad Mi Yodea. The one I know (famous thanks to recordings by Moyshe Oysher and Theodore Bikel) is: mo adabro, mo asapro ay-day... ver ken zogn, ver ken redn vos di eyns/tsvey/dray/... batayt, vos di ... batayt eyner iz dokh got un got iz eyner un vayter keyner tsvey zaynen di lukhes un eyner iz dokh got, etc. And the whole progression: draytsn iz bar-mitsve tsvelf zaynen di shvotim elf zaynen di shtern tsen zaynen di gebot nayn zaynen di khadoshim akht iz der bris zibn zaynen di vokhnteg zeks zaynen di mishnayes finef zaynen di khumoshim fir zaynen di imes dray zaynen di oves tsvey zaynen di lukhes un eyner iz dokh got un got iz eyner un vayter keyner hey! There's another version with the refrain "eyn got, undzer got" but I don't know the rest. This version, I think, is related to the ekhod mi yedeye that the yekes (German Jews) sing which has in its refrain "... unser Gott, was er lebt un was er schwebt". The parody of this that the mizrekh-yidn [Eastern European Jews] sing (I think printed in the classic 1901 collection of Yiddish folksongs by Ginzburg and Marek) is: eyns iz a yidene, nit zi lebt un nit zi shvebt. Anyone know these? (Incidentally, the Ginzburg-Marek edition has just been reprinted by Bar-Ilan Univ. with a foreword and other research tools, under the editorship of Prof. Dov Noy.) A question to all Philadelphians, and also to all non-Philadelphians [!]: in Adir Hu, I've heard American-born Jews from Philadelphia substitute a funny English line for the second verse of the loshn-koydesh original: adir hu, adir hu, yivne beysoy bekoroyv [or _ou_ instead of _oy_] leave them alone and they'll come home wagging their tales behind them eyl beney, eyl beney, beney beyskho bekoroyv Is this familiar to anyone? What the heck is it?! With regard to the song "tsar nikolay", it's familiar to me only in the Slavic version, sung by a Yiddish-dominant woman who didn't know the exact meaning of the "dirty words": tsar nikolay yotfoyamot [distorted from: yop tvoyu mat'] moya zhona rozetshka [?] kapitan The question mark stands for two uninterprettable syllables. The obscenity is Russian, but the rest is Polish, right Bob Rothstein? [moja z.ona Rozeczka...] It seems that the severity of Russian curses incorporated into the vocab of Israelis has been lost. (And not just among Israelis but, apparently, Eastern European Yiddish-speakers, as evidenced by my info from this singer and from the references to the utterance of these curses by numerous koshere yidishe tekhter, mothers of our own Mendele-khevre.) A middle-aged acquaintance of mine, of Bukharan-Israeli origin, uses the curse: shetelekh kibeni (Mod. Heb.: 'may you go kibeni'). yop tvoyu mat' has become yotfoyamot (stress on final syllable) in the repertoire of an Israeli male I know, who also doesn't know its exact (or approximate, for that matter) meaning. Yiddish has the curse, which now I see is probably related: gey tsu dayn feter beni 'go to your Uncle Benny' (this version is in my family). I never understood it before, and especially since there is no male first name _beni_ in our dialect. (If anything, it would be [benyi].) In Stutchkoff's _oytser fun der yidisher shprakh_ ['Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language'], whenever this Benny guy is mentioned, an asterisk appears next to the word, meaning: vulgar. I guess it all comes together now. _feter beni_ is the interpretation by Yiddish-speakers of the similar sounding Russian words. Dovid Braun ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.219 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.