Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.049 June 25, 1993 1) Wexler again (Khaim Bochner) 2) Pseudonyms and lurkers (Noyekh Miller) 3) Introduction (Gregg Kinkley) 4) Self-review (Bob Werman) 5) Mauscheln (Neakh Zide) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 24 15:51:37 1993 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: Re: Wexler again Robert D Hoberman writes: > As I see it, Wexler's idea as of 1990 was a matter of definition, > and not really empirical at all. ... > It's all a matter of terminology. Even if ALL the elements had been > replaced, and Israeli Hebrew were entirely made up of pre-existing > Hebrew bits and pieces with no Yiddish influence WHATSOEVER, it > would make no difference to his claim. OK, but in the kind of linguistics I do, this is equivalent to saying that the claim is not interesting. A claim that is not falsifiable, at least in principle, is not a scientific claim. At least that's the way I was brought up :-) It seems to me, given the logic that Bob has sketched out, that, in Wexler's scheme, JudeoSorbian must have been a relexified version of some earlier Jewish Language, and thus, ultimately, of Biblical Hebrew. Therefore Yiddish isn't a Slavic language after all, it's actually a Semitic language that's been relexified several times. And Modern Hebrew turns out to be Semitic after all! My relief is mitigated only by the realization that English, at least as spoken by my parents, is also Semitic, since it's relexified Yiddish ;-) OK, I'll try to keep out of this until I finish reading Wexler's manifesto. Really. I'll try. But I couldn't resist this time ... -- Khaim 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 24 14:38:20 1993 From: norman miller Subject: Pseudonyms and lurkers In the wake of Neil Miller's admirable post on the use of pseudonyms, I'd like to add one to his reshime: a name that not only is meant to conceal but at the same time by its use of Hebrew to remind us that concealment is part of a long tradition: Der Nister. (Not only hiding out but perhaps even involved in some sort of mystery. Like Ben Zakkai--whose name was used by another (says Scholem) as putative author of the Zohar--studying kabala in a cave..). Der Nister (d. 1950) was a Soviet writer whose novel "Mishpokhe Mashber" is remarkable on many counts, one of them being a very sympathetic treatment of the Bratslaver hasidim. More 'ginzey nistarot'. Ellen Prince raises the question of "concealed" subscribers. I believe the current number is 1. But why concealed? Aside from "tradition", I have a story. In 1940 FDR ran against Willkie and McNary, the latter a feisty Congressman from Oregon. At some campaign stop FDR offered this parable. A bunch of kids in school on Monday morning. Teacher asks: how many of you went to Sunday School yesterday? (In 1940 they still asked such questions.) Every hand goes up but one. "Why Charlie!" drawls FDR in his most exaggerated upper-class nusakh, "Charlie McNary (laughter, guffaws)...Don't you want to go to heaven?" "Sure, teacher", says McNary, "but not with that bunch". Of course there's Groucho's famous line. And the hoary one about the 2 Jews on the desert island with 3 shuls. But FDR was there first. Maybe Judge Rosenbaum wrote it? Noyekh Miller 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 24 16:38:40 1993 From: Gregg Kinkley <70410.1373@CompuServe.COM> Subject: Introduction My name is Gregg Kinkley, and I am the new kid on this block. Regretably I know no Yiddish (though I can struggle through a newspaper from my knowledge of German and Hebrew). I am here to learn and enjoy. I am also a goy turning ger, so I am new to this community as well. I am happy there is such a thing as Mendele, and I think I will like it here. My bubby and zaydie may not have been as wonderbread as my father thought. They came from Germany, spoke little German around the house, but what my father remembers sounds very suspiciously Yiddische. For instance: "ippis" for "etwas". Can you folks confirm that this is Yiddish!? Thanks and shalom! Gregg Kinkley 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Jun 25 10:43:49 1993 From: RWERMAN%HUJIVMS.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: self-review In Mendele Vol 3.047 Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky writes: >Not only did Wexler create this Slobodjanskyj pseudonym in order to >review the book where his own article appeared, but this >Slobodjanskyj "reviewer" went so far as to basically dismiss all the >articles with the severest of criticism and praise only Wexler's and >David Bunim's work. (I assume that David is Wexler's friend). Ellen >is right, you need a barf bag, but that's only after your skin has >stopped crawling from the shock of such slimey, underhanded chutspa. *********************************************** Come now, this is fantasy stuff that we all would love to be able to do, to review our own material the way it was meant to be reviewed. None of us gets the opportunity, unless we are an Edward Said writing in Critical Inquiry or Wexler. It is the editors who allow this who should be strung up it seems to me. I live in a part of the world where this sort of acting out of fantasies is referred to as political behavior. One hopes for better in the academic world but should not be too surprised when the academic world approaches the real world in its corruption. __Bob Werman rwerman@hujivms.bitnet rwerman@vms.huji.ac.il 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Jun 25 10:23:25 1993 From: n-zide@uchicago.edu Subject: mauscheln, etc. As to a language being ' a dialect with an army and a navy', the quote is usually attributed to the Cornell linguist - Romance scholar - Robert Hall, and probably can be found in his general introductory text (and, most likely, elsewhere in his work). The lox/lax of Werman's counting (I don't know the article he refers to) may have something to do with the Indo-European cognates (I'm no Indo-Europeanist ) of Sanskrit lakSa (Hindi laakh 'one hundred thousand') meaning 'a very large number', this presumably being derived from a basic meaning , 'salmon' (that swarm in very large numbers ??). This etymology is important (to some) in that if the Sanskrit cognate is accepted it has implications regarding the original home (urheimat) of the Indo-Europeans as a place where there were lakSa ( 'salmon'). In what urheimat the bagel first surfaces is another set of problems. I would like to know what, if anything, is being done in the way of historical or critical study, - and translation of (my grandfather's landsman) Avrom Reisen, the prolific poet and prose writer. I know the translations of some of the poems in the standard anthologies. (The Penguin anthology gives the shtetl name as Keidany (sic). Elsewhere, e.g. in a pamphlet with selected poems and their musical settings prepared on the occasion of Reisen's seventieth birthday in l946, the name is given as Koidanov. I always heard it with the middle vowel reduced: Koidenov.) Information on the word - name - kafekal, meaning a faraway (strange ?, unappetizing ? useless ?) place. Most importantly, can anyone tell me about mauscheln ( with or without an umlaut on the first diphthong), which, I gather from a book about Kafka , meant to speak German in the more or less conventionalized (stage ?) variety of German supposedly characteristic of insufficiently educated (in German) Jews (in Vienna ?), whose mother tongue was Yiddish: its phonology, syntax, pragmatics. I would appreciate information and references to stereotyped (low comic, or whatever) varieties of other European languages that were supposed to represent the way these languages (Polish, Russian, French, Spanish ) were spoken by ignorant and un-educated Jews. Can someone tell me the contexts in which 'mauscheln' (jokes, skits, etc) was used, and by whom. I assume that the first language of these 'mauschlers' was , by definition, Yiddish . This follows up an earlier inquiry (and the responses to it) about Yiddish-English (macaronic) doggerel. Neakh (Norman Zide) ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.049