Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.315 April 13, 1994 1) American ganef (Leah Zazulyer) 2) Amerika ganif (Harold L. Orbach) 3) Yiddish fonts/music tapes (Leah Zazulyer) 4) Hey! Zhankoye (Harold L. Orbach) 5) Feygele -- Butterfly (Harold L. Orbach) 6) Introduction (Lew Gutman) 7) Introduction (Dovid Perlmutter) 8) Introduction (Rafoel ben Yehuda Eliezer) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Apr 11 21:19:27 1994 From: WATSON@UNO.CC.GENESEO.EDU Subject: American Ganef As a mew member, I shall first respond to the question of the meaning of American Ganef: A discussion in Yiddish Lingo, 11/12/1970, by Joel Waxman, mentions three types of thieves. "A Khamsn buys things that nobody really wants to sell. He is punished in guilt. A Gazlon is an armed robber. He must return the value of the object or return it. A Ganef is a sneak thief who must pay back twice or more what he stole because he is afraid of being caught and thus is more concerned about that than the crime itself, or more concerned about man than God." While I know little about Jewish law, it seems clear that the phrase American Ganef is very or doubly pejorative. Leah Zazulyer 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Apr 12 16:15:51 1994 From: HLORBACH@KSUVM Subject: Amerika Ganif My recollection of this favorite expression of my mother and family is parallel to that of others -- expression of "wondrous things" in the US such as the escalator -- but also as often with a sense of implied social criticism. Thus, I would expect that my relatives would easily greet an explanation of the invention of junk bonds as a mechanism to enable speculators to buy a corporation using its own money and assets and selling off parts for profit and to pay for transaction costs with the exclamation "Amerika Ganif!" And this is different from the famous joke of the physicist son explaining to his father by simple analogies of time [an hour is like a minute when one is with a loved one and a minute is like an hour when sitting on a hot radiator] Einstein's theory of relativity with the father's answer: "Und fun dos makht a yid a lebn?" Harold L. Orbach 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Apr 11 21:19:27 1994 From: WATSON@UNO.CC.GENESEO.EDU Subject: Yiddish fonts/music tapes I am also wondering if the use of a Yiddish program has been considered for Mendele? Yes? No? Is cost an issue? I find the Yiddish alphabet easier to read than the Romanized one. How about others? Second, I know of a man here in Roch.N.Y. with a considerable number of tapes of a Jewish music program from yesteryear locally--before I lived here. I have planned to look him up and will do so soon and convey what I find out. Leah Zazulyer 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Apr 12 16:15:51 1994 From: HLORBACH@KSUVM Subject: Hey! Zhankoye Hey! Zhankoye [Mendele v3.109] The second stanza as posted contains an error (in Yiddish) in the sixth line which repeats the first stanza's "S'iz a stantziye an antikel" This should be "Bayle ba der molotilke" as printed in "The People's Song Book," pp. 46-47 (N.Y.: Boni & Gaer, 1948). There one will also find the "familiar" English translation mentioned by Mikhl Herzog and others, with the "cream extractor" line, English by Peter (sic) Seeger. It was was recorded c.1940's, but I no longer have the record or remember if it was Pete Seeger alone or with the Almanac Singers. Seeger's "free" translation captured the spirit if not the literal Yiddish words. Hey! Zhankoye When you go from Sevastopol, One the way to Simpferopol, Just you got a little farther down. There's a little railroad depot Known quite well by all the people Called Zhankoye, Dzahn, dzahn, dzahn. (chorus) Now if you look for paradise You'll see it there before your eyes. Stop your search and go no farther on. There we have a collective farm All run by husky Jewish arms At Zhankoye, dzahn, dahn, dzahn ... (chorus) Aunt Natasha drives the tractor Grandma runs the cream extractor While we work we all can sing our songs. Who says that Jews cannot be farmers? Spit in his eye, who would so harm us. Tell him of Zhankoye, dzahn, dzahn. Harold L. Orbach 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Apr 12 16:15:51 1994 From: HLORBACH@KSUVM Subject: Feygele -- Butterfly Absent I.B. Singer who might tell us what word was used in Poland for a gay male (could there perhaps be something in his Yiddish papers?), and the obvious lack of this as a subject in print in the early years of this century where can one look for an early printed use? While some have raised the question of a link to butterfly, it should be noted that this is not an obvious one. While Spanish has used 'mariposa' this never made it in French because the word had already been taken over by prison argot to refer to one who escapes from jail by "flying" over the walls, as in the movie "Papillon" with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman some years back, based on the book of the same name. The "Dictionnaire de L'Argot Moderne" (1953 [1957]) gives this usage. On the other hand, "M. Butterfly" suggest this as an English move ... Can one make anything of the obscene German 'voegeln' for f--k, screw, in Langenscheidt's (1984) Taschenwoerterbuch as indicating a linguistic link? Is there any parallel in German slang? Harold L. Orbach 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Apr 12 19:42:38 1994 From: gutman@nosc.mil Subject: Introduction My name is Lewis (Leib) Gutman. I have been trying to teach myself Yiddish for the last year or so, and have slogged my way through Weinreich's "College Yiddish". I can read (very slowly) di Forverts, with a lot of help from my dictionary, and have picked up four or five miscellaneous books from the Nat'l Yiddish Book Center. A problem I have here in San Diego is that, though there are Yiddish discussion groups here, they all seem to meet in the middle of a working day. Because of that, I can't practice with anyone (until now :-). Ich ken layenen besser vi redn oder shraybn. Please excuse my spelling and grammar. I just ordered Schaechter's intermediate textbook, and that's my next assignment. Anyway, I've read a lot of the Mendele archives with gopher over the last couple of days and enjoyed them a lot. I grew up on Long Island, and neither of parents spoke very much Yiddish, just a phrase here and there. My contact with Yiddish was limited to a neighbor's father who retired from his profession of kosher butcher. He spoke mainly English with my family. Does anyone have a suggestion for a lexicon of Yiddish slang and colloquialisms? Also, does anyone know where I can get (facsimile) copies of back issues of di Forverts and other Yiddish newspapers? I'd like to read issues from before World War I. Looking forward to reading the next issue of mendele, Zei gezunt, Lew Gutman 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Apr 12 23:59:40 1994 From: dmp@psych.rochester.edu Subject: Introduction My name is David Perlmutter - I'm a theoretical linguist, now at the University of Rochester. I've been "lurking" on mendele for a while now, so it is high time I introduced myself. I spoke Yiddish for a very brief period in my childhood - a brief exposure for a matter of months when I was four, then for a year or so when I was six. My first and strongest language was English, which was the sole language of the household all the time I was growing up. My periods of exposure to Yiddish were the times we lived with my grandparents, who spoke only English at home. But the people who came to the house - writers, poets, theatre people, educators - they all spoke Yiddish. So I quickly got the message: English was an everyday language, a "kitchen language," while Yiddish was the language of High Culture! And I went to a Yiddish school besides during that period, with the result that I now read Yiddish reasonably fluently, though I haven't really spoken it for a long, long time. Reading mendele has been a wonderful experience. Like so many others, I had thought Yiddish was moribund, if not altogether dead. And the truth is that most of us are not members of a community where the language is used. Who would have thought that the Internet would CREATE a community that would enable the language to go on living for those of us who have no other contacts with it! Di gelegnhayt tsu leyenen yidish oyf mendele hot mir gebrakht a sakh hanoe. A hartsikn dank aykh alemen! Dovid Perlmutter 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Apr 13 01:26:33 1994 From: rafoelg@aol.com Subject: Introduction Transplanted first generation Brit.living in Texas for 17 yrs. My parents were from Kovno & Baranovich respectively. Education : Orthodox day schools, C of E high school, & University College London. Hobbies: Talmud, squash, theatre, reading. For : health insurance reform. Nor uf simchas!! Rafoel ben Yehuda Eliezer ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.315 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Archives available via gopher on: gopher.cic.net Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. 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