Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.014 May 25, 1993 1) For Mendele's birthday (Dovid Bayer Katz) 2) Proverbs (Victor Bers) 3) Banging one's head against the wall (Martin Davis) 4) Various (Dovid Braun) 5) Margins and kreplakh (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun May 23 21:46:14 1993 From: bkatz@epas.utoronto.ca (Bernard Katz) Subject: Mendele's Birthday A belated item lekoved Mendele's geburtstog: There used to be a comedy show on CBC Television called `The Wayne and Shuster Show'. Among other things, Wayne and Shuster would do spoofs of well-known stories, legends, and the like. Once they did the Robin Hood story, with one of them playing Robin Hood and the other Friar Tuck. (I now forget who did which). In any event, in the course of their parody, Robin Hood tells Friar Tuck to shut up. Friar Tuck replies: "Host gehert: `Shaddup' tsu a friar". Bernard/Dovid Bayer Katz 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 24 09:52:17 1993 From: Victor Bers Subject: Proverbs A favorite proverb in my family, employed when someone makes a proposal that vastly exceeds the actual resources: "A hunt hot a keshene?" Victor Bers 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 24 10:54:19 1993 From: davism@turing.cs.nyu.edu (Martin Davis) Subject: banging one's head against the wall (reply to Kessler) > Date: Sun May 23 21:18:42 1993 > From: kessler > Subject: to Martin Davis > > And how do we know he is beating his head against the brick wall? > What is the proverb? I also recalled of course Gey shlug dein kopp > in vent. > > Kessler This was in reference to a series of panels painted by Brueghel the elder on folk idioms. How do we know he his beating his head against the brick wall? Had we 21st century technology available, I'd reply by showing the picture. It can be seen in Antwerp in the original and in my home in New York City in reproduction and doubtless in various "art books." The panel shows a young man dressed in a garment that looks like a white gown with (strangely) one foot shod and the other, on which the youth is putting his weight, bare. His head is shown bent forward and touching a "stand-alone" red brick wall. The wall's proportions are like those of a large book, and it is a bit taller than the youth. It is the narrow end of the wall that his head is touching. Although Brueghel had no animation technology available, the sense of motion is unmistakable. Martin Davis 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 24 20:28:44 1993 From: David Braun Subject: various and sundry Catching up on recent Mendeles: 1) Isabelle Kreindler, I too have heard _naroim_ [naroyim], from the area between Grodne/Byalistok. So at this point we know that it is at least a "litvish" form. 2) Anybody who has heard or used "er dreyt zikh arum vi a forts in rosl" must have stopped at least once in his/her life to think: 'what the hell does this mean!!' Well, flipping through a volume of _yidishe filologye_ of YIVO, either vol. 1 or vol. 3 (because those are the only ones I own) -- these are from the mid- to late 1930s -- I came across a variant of the expression which is perhaps solves the mystery of its origin: "er dreyt zikh arum vi a frantsoyz in rosey" -- 'he's wandering around like a Frenchman in Russia'. I think I also saw the variant with "...vi a forts in vane" in that same volume. [By the way, whenever I quote something, take it with a grain of salt: I do my email in Philadelphia but my library is at home in Northern New Jersey. So citations are just by memory -- although I'd like to think I have a good memory. Somebody "caught me" a few months ago when I said that the Harkavy of the 1920s had the form _duken_ parallel to _dutsn_. Indeed it's not in Harkavy (of the 20s or the earlier dictionaries of his). Since it wasn't there, I'll be darned if I know where I saw it -- kh'zol azoy visn fun a beyzer vetshere! Efsher hot zikh mir gekholemt?! And wrt this issue: if you have access to native speakers who are non-litvakes, please find out and post what they say: ditsn/diken? Perhaps they don't have a verb form for this at all. 3) If you remember the correspondence a number of months ago, it turned out that a number of versions of kibinimat showed up. The ones I've heard are: kibinimat, kibinyamat, kibeni, kebenye matere. And all of them are quite far from the original (isn't that right, Bob Rothstein?) Whoever mentioned the expression most recently mentioned that s/he had heard the expression used by otherwise proper, even super-proper people. So have I. In Israel it's quite common (I've only heard the shoerter forms, i.e. ending with mat and not matere/matyere): I saw a bumper sticker there with the letters kuf-yud-beys-yud-nun-yud-mem-tes [with an exclamation point]. It took a few moments for it to register. Apparently the expression has lost its gravity among Jews, perhaps because it isn't analyzable. And perhaps in der alter heym, even when the utterer of the expression was in a Slavic speaking land, it was not analyzable to him/her considering how far it has evolved away from the Russian origin. Is the curse used in modern Russian? Ukrainian? Polish? How does it sound in those languages? In my family I've heard (in English) "go to your Uncle Benny" or "tell it to your Uncle Benny" and perhaps in Yiddish "gey tsum feter beni". What I chanced upon the expression in Stutshkov, I was shocked to see next to "gey tsum feter beni" an asterisk, which means in Stutshkov: "dirty word/expression". I guess "gey tsum feter beni" is a further development of "gey kibeni", and a further step away from the gravity of the curse. 3) Harry Bochner, you might've found _funem yarid_ boring because Sholem-Aleykhem never got around to revising it. He died while writing it, as he'd only gotten up to his 17th or 23rd year, or stg like that. Would a literary scholar please step in [you see, we do need literary scholars here!]: were the chapters of _funem yarid_ printed before their author's death, or only after? 4) Ben Elkins, do you know that Yiddish is taught at your university (UTexas) and that there's more than one full-time Yiddish position there, in fact? (Itzik Gottesman, formerly of Penn, is one of the Yiddish instructors and is in charge of drumming up Yiddish activity on campus.) zayts mir ale gezunt! Dovid Braun 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon May 24 09:41:29 1993 From: noyekh miller Subject: Margins and kreplakh The polls on the Great Line-Width Question are closed. Wider columns were the clear winners. However, in view of the problems that some subscribers have with full screens, it would be prudent to go no wider than 65. The shames thanks those who took the trouble to write and hopes that the new width will satisfy everyone. Morgen iz Shevuos iber der gantser velt. A gut yontif. Shevuos esst men milkhiks. A gutn appetit aykh alle! Noyekh ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.014