Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 227 April 26, 1992 1) Matse Bray (Yankel Kessler) 2) The ham joke (Yankel Kessler) 3) A question of importance (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 25 Apr 92 14:32 PDT From: KESSLER Subject: re matzah bray Our matzah bray was good for a cool morning, but it really is not for Californi a or past the age of 40, when a person should, as the French say, know what is proper to eat and what is not. matzah broken in pieces, soaked in water to soft en, then simply fried in butter with a mixture of scrambled eggs, nicely pepper ed and salted, or paprika'ed (my wife's hungarian side). a fluffy heavyish brea kfast results, which children love,as a variant on pancakes, if one troubles to make them after they are 10, etcetera. Simple and easy, and it gets rid of the box of the usually tasteless American matzah. (I prefer what they called matza h in the ghetto of Rome, something more like, well, what the fat euchraist brea d probably was before they made miniportions for individual communicants, perha ps. A big round platzl? LIke the 12 inche halo sized breads used in an Armenian movie about he poet int he monastery I caught a midnight last night on PBS loc ally. Static set of pseudo-byzantine scenes, mixed with early Dali techniques fr om the Chien andalou. Surrealism has been recently catching on in East Europe, as I learned to my surprise in Bulgaria (I have two big etchings brought back i n 1982 from Varna). What a debacle for art that criminal society was! Anyway, t here is your matzah brie/bray, without sweetness. Save the prune jam, lekvar, for noodles, perhaps? Yankel(e) Kessler 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 25 Apr 92 14:41 PDT From: KESSLER Subject: RE: the joke Davis tells Joke about ham? Here is true story. I read it in ENCOUNTER more than 2 decades ago. There was a first feeler towards rapprochment between Madrid and the Jews, after Franco, and the Mayor, or was it King and Mayor, held a great reception in Madrid, with many dignataries invited, including the grand rabbi of Scotland, I believe it may have been. Someone very important, and sephardic of course. Many speeches, preparing in advance for 1992, I guess, and perhaps helping to undo some of the deep scarring of Opus Dei perhaps under Franco, although that worldwide pseudomasonic group may have been benevolent? technocratic/banker/catholics? At any rate after the formalities, a grand luncheon was announced, the doors flung wide in the palace, and grand rabbi led the procession. Suddenly a cry of horror rang out: the entire company was halted in its tracks, the rabbi flung himself backwards arms outstretched and was caught by the Mayor and King, say, or Prime Minister. What had he seen? A vast buffet table confronted him at the other end of the grand room, and its centerpiece was a gigantic mogen david made out of ice...and shrimp, lobster, crayfish, eels, mussels, clams...you name it! As the essayist remarked: nearly 500 years is a long time. Yankele at UCLA 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 26 Apr 92 From: nmiller@trincc Subject: A question of importance William Safire has a piece in today's New York Times Magazine on the use of the word "suit" to connote an Important Person. This, says he, is a metonymy since the I.P. is identified by something he wears as distinguished from a synecdoche where the part represents the whole. Well and good. I thought of writing him about a word that has intrigued me for some time but bethought myself that since Safire's Yiddish isn't all that ay-ay-ay while on Mendele we have emesse meyvinim (he calls them mavens) both in Yiddish and language generally. Here's the question. The expression "hoyekhe fenster" is without doubt a metonymy and means pretty much the same as "suits". But what about "pney"? Is it a true synecdoche? My own guess is that it isn't, that like "hoyekhe fenster" it's a metonymy since it doesn't at all refer to "faces" but rather to the likelihood that prominent people occupy the most prominent seats as it were. Does this make any sense? There's a second request. Would someone please sort out the changes in meaning that the word has undergone from biblical Hebrew to Yiddish and back to modern Hebrew? Noyekh ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.227 Submissions: mendele@vax1.trincoll.edu Business: nmiller@vax1.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.