Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.230 February 11, 1994 1) Introduction (Dan Leeson) 2) Jewish diseases, Khazars (Sheldon Benjamin) 3) "Say It in Yiddish" (David Sherman) 4) Yiddish theater (Paul Bakan) 5) Introduction (Daniella HarPaz) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Feb 10 19:29:48 1994 From: leeson@cedar.fhda.edu Subject: Introduction My name is Dan Leeson and I live in northern California. It has been years and years since I spoke Yiddish and I am afraid that I have forgotten much of it. Like most children, I lived in a bilingual Yiddish/English household but when my grandparents died, little need for bilinguality existed. Years later in Paris, while shopping for a challah on the Rue de Rosiers, I began speaking Yiddish to the shopkeeper and she laughed, saying "You speak Yiddish like a child" which was true because I had not spoken it since the time I was a child. I miss mamaloschen. It is comfortable like an old shoe. And, heartbreakingly, I never learned to read or write Yiddish so I cannot console myself with Peretz or Sforim or even Gimpel the fool. I am a retired businessman who plays clarinet with the San Jose Symphony orchestra and does historical research. A shaynem dank Dan Leeson 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 11 00:19:32 1994 From: sbenj@MIT.EDU Subject: Jewish diseases, Khazars Although having them certainly can not be interpreted as evidence that one is Jewish there are a large number of diseases, especially neurodegenerative diseases, that occur so much more frequently in Ashkenazim than in the general community that neurologists and medical geneticists typically ask patients if they are Ashkenazi as part of the screening history. I believe Bill Kavesh once wrote an article detailing what was known of these conditions in The Jewish Almanac. I donUt have his article handy but I suppose I could ask him to verify the reference if anyone is interested. Regarding genetics and the Khazars...I once had an interesting brush with the genealogy of disease. About 20 years ago, my grandmother developed a rare type of cancer of the eye. I was a medical student at the time and was running to the library when anyone I knew became ill so that I could sound like I knew something about something. I learned that this type of tumor had been reported in Mongolians, Siberian natives, and occasionally in certain Native Americans (presumably from the trans-Aleutian migration). Ultimately she lost her eye and finally succumbed to the disease, but not before mentioning that a similar condition had occurred in her father at about the same age. Only when I took a close look at the old photo of him in Russia did I see what she confirmed, that he, too, had a false eye, apparently from the same problem. In his photo he obviously had a mixture of oriental and European features when one looked closely and my grandmother could not explain this, except to say that others of the older relatives in his family had those features. I have traced his family back to the early 18th century in Belarus but the coincidence of oriental features and a tumor only found in individuals from the Russian far East and Mongolia have always made me wonder whether, in fact, there were Khazarian genes in the pool. Sander Gilman: Are you the same Sander Gilman that wrote a wonderful volume called, "Seeing the Insane?" If so, I have enjoyed reading it immensely--it's an incredible collection of material. Sheldon Benjamin 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 11 03:45:45 1994 From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca (David Sherman) Subject: Re: "Say It in Yiddish" >Just took a look again at Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's Say It in >Yiddish (Dover)... ZIT (I with a macron) ah-zoy GOOT, FORT >pah-MEH-leh-khehr. I wonder what the "tourist" market is for such a book. Reminds me of the answer I sometimes give to the interminable questions, "Why do you speak Yiddish to your kids?" ... it'll be useful if we ever visit pre-war Poland. :-) David Sherman (I actually have a range of answers to the question, depending on how offensively it's asked, whether the asker really cares and how snarky I feel at the moment. The tamest is, "It's the only way they'll learn it.") 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 11 11:44:45 1994 From: Paul Bakan Subject: Yiddish theater The discussion re Yiddish theater brings up a memory from 1941 or so. It was the year of my parent's silver anniversary and the five children decided to give a big surprise party. I was assigned the task of getting them out of the house while the party preparations were done. So I bought them an anniversary 'givt', a matinee performance at the Yiddish theater on the East side, Manhattan. We saw the play "Duvid und Esther". I remember little about the play, but the theme song "Duvid und Esther" keeps reverberating through my mind after more than 50 years. Does anyone know of the play or the words of the song? Paul Bakan 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 11 13:27:02 1994 From: Daniella.HarPaz@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Introduction sholem aleikhem! I am excited to have joined you all on "mendele" I am a lecturer in Yiddish at the University of Michigan. I have my MA from here in Near Eastern Studies, specializing in modern Hebrew (having focused on literature and comp. lit. more than language). I am currently browsing through PhD options for myself, not yet totally decided on the specific field...my interests being both in literature and language education. I'm not quite sure what else to tell you about myself in this e-mail intro. format...so if anyone would like to know more, please ask! zayt ir ale gezunt, Daniella HarPaz ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.230 To subscribe, send SUB MENDELE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME to: LISTSERV@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files