Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.329 February 20, 1995 1) What's going on at Oxford (Gennady Estraikh) 2) Tevye (Daniella HarPaz) 3) Yiddish Board Games (Shloyme-Khayim Cohen) 4) Mentsh words (Meylekh Viswanath) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 19 Feb 1995 22:07:54 +0000 From: clifford@vax.ox.ac.uk Subject: What's going on at Oxford (summary) Yiddish at Oxford: February 1995 ================================ The unfortunate dispute between the Oxford Centre for Hebrew Studies and the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies will hopefully be resolved by compromise very shortly to the satisfaction of all parties concerned. The issues have been somewhat clouded by inaccurate reporting in the British press. Suffice it to say that the financial side of the dispute concerns the institutional ownership of disputed bank accounts, not any accusations of personal abuse of funds. Current activities at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies ============================================================== This term (Oxford Hilary term, Jan-March 1995), the Institute established by Dovid Katz, is offering six courses ranging from "Elementary Yiddish" to "Christian Studies in Yiddish, 1514-1913". Five of the six are taught in Yiddish. The Institute publishes the world's only Yiddish literary monthly, "The Yiddish Pen" and we am happy to offer a complimentary copy of a recent issue to any teacher of Yiddish. We are on the lookout for new talent in Yiddish poetry and prose. The closing date for our first annual prose prize (1000 pounds Sterling, about $1500) has been extended to the end of February (FAX your entries now!). The magazine also accepts short reviews of recently published books. The editor is Dovid Katz, who founded Yiddish studies at Oxford and continues to direct Yiddish studies at the University of Oxford. The editorial staff comprises Dov-Ber Kerler, Johannes Brosi and myself, Gennady Estraikh. The 1000 column folio volume, "Oxford Yiddish III" (forty papers in Yiddish literature, linguistics, folklore, history and more, edited by Dovid Katz) has just come off the press. Three new literary books (by Yonia Fain, Moshe Shteingart and Boris Karloff) are in production. Any questions about the magazine, our new books and the annual prose prize can be addressed to me at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies, Golden Cross Court, 4 Cornmarket, Oxford, OX1 3EX. Tel 01144 1865 798989. FAX 01144 1865 798987. Gennady Estraikh (Transmitted by Dafna Clifford) 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 09:41:46 -0500 (EST) From: harpaz@binah.cc.brandeis.edu Subject: Tevye My class has "finished" *Tevye* (because we must go on, we could likely talk about the book much longer) and so I wanted to just respond briefly to a couple of comments about my posting (which presented some issues my class had considered): Larry Rosenwald talked about Tevye and Chava. He said that "Tevye has to confront in her his own curiosity and has to come up against what turns out to be in him the limits of that curiosity--the place where his curiosity is bounded by dogma." I think this is a nice reading of the process Tevye goes through. In my class, though, the general consensus was that Tevye did not come up against "dogma" exactly. Perhaps this was a utopic look at Tevye on our part but, he seemed, at least in our reading of the text to be "faithful" rather than "dogmatic". What do you think? Louis Fridhandler talked about the historical significance of Chava's intermarriage and the idea of a "dorf" (village) vs. a shtetl. The issue of dorf living vs. shtetl living was interesting in class. It was clear to me that *Fiddler on the Roof* had _so_ permeated the culture in which my students grew up that despite my discussion of shtetl vs. dorf (ie., what is a shtetl? a dorf? who lived there? etc.) the class continued to ask questions like, "Why weren't there other Jews persecuted along with Tevye?" and I would continually remind them to look at the text and see where Sholem Aleykhem's Tevye lived. It was very interesting. Showing the film "Tevye" was helpful in this regard. For some reason the visual image of a kind of dorf was very helpful to them. The historical significance of the intermarriage (and of each of Tevye's new eydems (sons-in-law) was not lost on the group, although we tried to get away from talking _only_ about the novel in the context of history and to react to it as literature for the sake of literature. We are on to Peretz! First "Between Two Mountains" and then "In the Mailcoach" both from Ruth Wisse's _The I.L. Peretz Reader_. Daniella HarPaz 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 17 Feb 1995 16:06:30 EST From: smc5@lehigh.edu Subject: Yiddish Board Games Hot ir shoyn geleyent in dem zhurnal far "alumni" fun Yeshiva Universitet vegn Yidish? In demdozikn numer iz an artikl geshribn fun Joshua Fishman vegn dem "revival" fun Yidish. Oykh iz a foto fun a yidishn "Monopoly game". Ken emetsn dertseyln vi azoy ken men koyfn aza "game" oder andere Yidishe "games"? I apologize for my Yiddish. Shloyme-Khayim Cohen 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Feb 95 9:52:34 EST From: pviswana@andromeda.rutgers.edu Subject: Mentsh words Neyekh Zide asks: > How about (Meylekh Vishvanath ? ) Urdu insaan ? Of course. And since Neyekh brought that up, I started to thinking, and in Tamil, too, 'manithan' means both human being and mentsh. Perhaps this is a not uncommon phenomenon, once one goes past the western european indo-european languages. af an ander teme, ersht nekhtn hob ikh geleynt shikl fishman's artikl inem yeshiva universitet zhurnal. er shraybt vegn mendele vi a forum vi me shraybt vegn lingvistishe un literarishe inyonim. un sotsiologiye? un yidishkayt? un (ikh bin zikher), a tsol andere zakhn hot er fargesn. Meylekh Viswanath ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.329 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. 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