Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.061 July 15, 1993 1) Kafakale (Amitai Halevi) 2) Twixt Yiddish & Pennsylvanisch (Randy Kloko) 3) Gezeres tach (Alan Rutkowski) 4) Miscellaneous replies and addenda (Neakh Zide) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Jul 14 07:56:24 1993 From: CHR04HA@VMSA.TECHNION.AC.IL (AMITAI HALEVI) Subject: Kafakale bochner@das.harvard.edu writes: >Neakh/Norman Zide writes: >> No replies yet to my question about Kafekal. >Well, the first thing that came to mind was kafakale, the name of >one of the tortures a sinful soul may be subjected to oyf yener >velt. (Spivak & Bloomgarden explain: "basteyt in dem vos zi [di >neshome] vert arumgeshlaydert fun beyze gayster hin un her.") But I >didn't speak up, because you were looking for a place name ... >Since you asked again, however, I've looked into it, and found that >Weinreich translates kafakale as "limbo, purgatory", so it is a >place name after all. And while I knew it only with an -e on the >end, all the dictionaries allow the pronunciation without that. In >fact, that's the only form Harkavy gives, so that's probably the >real Yiddish pronunciation. And Harkavy translates "geyn in kafakal" >as 'to go to hell'. Does that fit what you've heard it used? >By the way, the spelling is: kof (not kuf), langer fey, dash, hey, >kuf, lamed, ayin. (But Harkavy leaves out the ayin.) > The original expression in Hebrew is "kaf-ha'qel`a", spelled as above, but very definitely with the final "`ayin". It is defined in Even-Shoshan's dictionary as "the hollow in a sling [and presumably also in a catapult _A.H.] that holds the projectile (qel`a)." It first appears in Abigail's blessing to David (1st Samuel 25,29), in which she expresses the wish that his soul would be bound up "bitzror ha`hayim" whereas those of his enemies would be tossed out of "kaf-haqel`a". (Sorry. I do not have an English Bible with me so I will not know how the term is translated there until I get home this evening.) According to Even-Shoshan, it was later used colloquially in the first sense given by Norman Zide (that ascribed to Spivak & Bloomgarden). In medieval Hebrew literature the term was used in the same sense by Emanuel the Roman (Italy, 1260-1328), and is used figuratively in modern Hebrew literature (Bialik, Klausner, Sokolov, Barash) in the description of lost and/or tormented souls. The use of the term to describe hell or purgatory (a place rather than an instrument) would seem to be a purely Yiddish development. Amitai Halevi 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Jul 14 09:56:48 1993 From: Randy Kloko Subject: Twixt Yiddish & Pennsylvanisch Since they both have roots in the Rhineland, how mutually intelligible are Yiddish and Pennsylvania German? I'm thinking about the scene in "The Frisco Kid" in which Gene Wilder, as a rabbi from Poland, comes upon some Amish farmers. Supposedly they couldn't understand each other, and switched to English. Was this just a plot device for the benefit of an English-speaking audience? Isn't there a broader base of intelligibility between Yiddish and the Rhenish dialects of German? While you're thinking about that: How much does intelligibility rely on tolerance? How much does being understood depend upon the will to understand? Randy Kloko 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Jul 14 11:09:13 1993 From: Subject: Gezeres tach I am currently translating a Hebrew article by Shmuel Ettinger about Jews in Ukraine up to 1648. The Hebrew term,"Gezerot t"akh" (Yiddish, "Gezeres tach) meaning "the harsh decrees of {1648} seems to be the standard expression for the Khmelnytsky uprising in Hebrew and presumably in Yiddish. Does anyone know what decrees are referred to? Are they the harsh decrees of Khmelnytsky, or, perhaps, of God? Alan Rutkowski 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Jul 14 13:59:29 1993 From: n-zide@uchicago.edu Subject: miscellaneous replies and addenda Thanks to Khaim Bochner - just what I needed to know about Kafakale/Kafekal. The word was used by my grandmother. Being in kafekal was being in partibus infidelium (excuse my Latin case usage), and the particular kafekals I can remember being in were Iowa City, Oklahoma and Calcutta.Not that my grandmother disapproved of these places - they were the sorts of places, apparently, that I was going to spend time,and not unhappily - but, I now see, they were a kind of limbo, were not Brooklyn or Manhattan where I should have been content to stay. Thanks also to Bob Hoberman for clearing up a small mystery. In the thirties when I used to shop at bakeries on Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park, my mother would sometimes let me buy (what we called) corn bread, something I really liked but that nobody else in the family was very fond of. It was a slightly moist (oily ?) heavy rye bread. When I first spent time in the South I tried and was disappointed by their cornbread. It was nothing like my cornbread.Back in Borough Park in the late fifties I tried to buy corn bread - with no success, and then to find out something about it. I was met with blank stares and misinformation. My cornbread is obviously Hoberman's baker's corn rye bread. Where can you find it ? For the Schiksearchiv: I was driving on the near north side of Chicago last week and passed a new Jaguar with the license plate SHIXSA. Deep sociological implications ? Neakh // Norman Zide ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.061 If your message is intended for MENDELE, please write to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu If your node is Bitnet-only and is not connected to the Internet, please send your message to: mendele@yalevm If you want to discuss personal business or have a shmues with the shames, please write to: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Please sign your articles.