Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.039 June 24, 1994 1) A zakh verter (Arre Komar) 2) Bintel Briv letters (David Sherman) 3) Sholem Asch (Shleyme Axelrod) 4) Varia et trivia (Gaston L. Schmir) 5) Translation (Bob Rothstein) 6) Yidn viln azoy (Zachary Baker) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 10:52:20 1994 From: komar@yu1.yu.edu Subject: a zakh verter Tayere khaver Khayim, Avade, sikher, siz shayn, hipsh tsu hobn a zakh, fiele verter tsu zogen der zelbe zakh. Ober farvos ven men farzukht dos tsu ton mit lezn vs. leyenen a greyse krieg, milkhuma immer, keseyder feyngt on? Arre Komar 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 15:34:04 1994 From: dave@cai.lsuc.on.ca Subject: Bintel Briv letters Ellen Prince writes: > i should think that making > the names of the writers public would be highly actionable and not > something any newspaper is about to do. While it may be morally repugnant and therefore inappropriate, I suspect it may not be actionable if the persons involved are no longer alive. I'm a Canadian lawyer and thus no expert on U.S. law, but the general principle of defamation of character (libel/slander) requires the person to be alive to be defamed. Of course, there may be other legal issues. Copyright in the letters was presumably implicitly granted by the writers when writing in, though there might be an implicit condition attached that names not be published. Of course, the whole issue is moot (vi azoy zogt men dos oyf yidish?) unless the letters are found. David Sherman 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 16:12:20 1994 From: PTYAXEL@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Sholem Asch What I recall dimly is that the Christological trilogy got Asch all kinds of hell from readers (maybe more from non-readers) who thought that he'd become oys yid because they had no understanding of what is it a European novelist. I think he was reduced to serializing in the communist Frayhayt (Freiheit), whose editor MJ Olgin no doubt was delighted arayntsushtekn zayn apikorsishn grobn finger in frume oygn arayn. Didn't Asch subsequently write a book explaining that no, he was not a meshumed? Shleyme Axelrod 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 20:06:15 1994 From: glschm@minerva.cis.yale.edu Subject: Varia et trivia [1] Many years ago, I shared lab space with two Swiss chemists doing postdoctoral work in the U.S. Their Basel-deutsch was quite puzzling to me, who had studied some German in college, until I began to recognize some curious deviations from hoch-deutsch and striking similarities to yiddish, for example, the use of /mir/ instead of /wir/. My friends were astonished one day when they realized that I understood the word /mies/ (=ugly) which they claimed was not extant in hoch-deutsch. I therefore assumed that /mies/ in yiddish was a remnant of medieval german, which had also subsisted in some swiss dialects. However, the fact that Uriel Weinreich's dictionary gives the phonetic transcription of this word suggests that it is of Hebrew-Aramaic origin. Does this represent another instance of borrowing from yiddish into German, such as is presumably the case with /ganef/ and /meshuge/? [2] Like many others, I long believed that the word for story was /maynse/ as I heard it pronounced by my parents, originating from Warsaw and Wieruszow (western Poland). It is only when I had occasion to look up the word in Weinreich that I learned it was /mayse/. Gaston L. Schmir 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 21:03:46 1994 From: rar@slavic.umass.edu Subject: Translation 1) I may get around to doing something with it when I retire, but if someone is looking for a dissertation topic in the meantime, he or she might consider the question of Russian translations of Yiddish literature, sometimes done by the authors themselves. I've noticed some interesting revisions of the originals, sometimes in the direction of toning down the Jewish content of the texts. 2) One anecdotal example of creative translation into Yiddish: The prize for the best children's book of 1934 in the Belorussian S.S.R. was won by Ianka Mawr for his novella _TVT_. The first sentence of _TVT_ reads as follows: 1. [Belorussian original] Tolia kuliai uskochyw u khatu, niby za im hnalisia chatyry sabaki. (Tolya burst into the house like a bullet, as if four dogs were chasing him.) 2. [Russian translation] Tolia pulei vletel v dom. (Tolya flew into the house like a bullet.) But 3. [1935 Yiddish translation by H. Kamenetsky and G. Fridman] Tolye iz fayl fun boygn arayngefloygn in tsimer, punkt vi nokh im voltn zikh hundert zibn un fertsik meshugene hint geyogt. Bob Rothstein 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Jun 24 10:34:42 1994 From: BM.YIB@RLG.Stanford.EDU Subject: Yidn viln azoy Addendum to my posting on the use of the YIVO acronym in occupied Europe, taken from Nachman Blumental, Verter un vertlekh fun der khurbn-tkufe (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz Publishing House, 1981), p. 149: YI.V.O. -- (Yidn viln azoy). Roshe-teyves fun Yidishn Visnshaft- lekhn Institut -- far der milkhome in Vilne, haynt in Nyu-York. "Di agents YI.V.O git iber vegn an intervents fun Ruzveltn bay yenem [i.e., Hitler] vegn der lage fun di yidn, mit der droung aroystsushikn di 8 milyon Ashkenazim fun Amerike" ([Emmanuel] Ring[elblum], Nov. 1, 1940). "Onshtot zogn, az di zakhn zenen nisht geshtoygn nisht gefloygn, gezogt az dos zenen YIVO-nayes" (Seyfer Koriv, z' 446; Seyfer Zhetl, z' 349; Rayzer, Grodne, z' 94). "In yedn nitsokhn fun di daytshn, hobn di YIVO-istn gor gezen a natsishe mapole" ([Yonas] Turkow, Azoy [iz geven], z' 89). Zachary Baker ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.039 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. Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu