Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.268 March 6, 1996 1) Kemp Nitgedayget (Aren Portnoy) 2) Kemp Nitgedayget (Jascha Kessler) 3) Kemp Nitgedayget (Zelma Teicher) 4) Kemp Nitgedayget (Harold L. Orbach) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 14:15:25 -0500 (EST) From: ep73@columbia.edu Subject: Kemp Nitgedayget In response to Itsik Goldenberg's questions (Mendele Vol 5.265) as to why _kemp nitgedayget_ was spelled phonetically: As he mentioned, Sovetish oysleyg, or, Soviet spelling, in which Hebrew admixture was spelled phonetically, was used world-wide by Yiddish-speaking communists, though not all. The Frayhayt, the official Yiddish organ of the communist party did not, though some of its satellite journals, like Signal, did. Numerous other books and journals which used this spelling system were also published outside the Soviet Union (more accurate info is surely available from bibliographers: names, I won't mention). Additionally, it would be interesting to find out if any of the zetsers (typesetters) ever protested Sovetish oysleyg. Anybody know anything about this? Nitgedayget was not a children's summer camp like Boyberik, Hemshekh or Kinderland, but a resort for workers and their families, built in the early twenties by the far left of the needle-trade unions. A little write-up of it by Michael Gold was printed in The Nation of 9/29/26. Here are two telling paragraphs: "No one can come to this camp who is a boss or who owns a business of any kind. But any wage earner, and this includes intellectual workers, can come at the low rate of $15 a week. He is given clean linen and two wooly blankets and can climb to his tent among the trees to rest until the camp gong brings him down for dinner. He can sleep. He can roam the hills. He can sing in the moonlight. He can swim, take sun-baths, listen to lectures, sing in the mass chorals, act in proletarian comedies, read in the library, talk, laugh, play games, go about all day in nothing but bathing trunks until his body is brown as a faun's." "Yiddish is the prevailing langauge, though English breaks out at strange moments, and half of the lectures are in English. I cannot tell how queer and new it seems to an East Sider who has grown up with a kind of prejudice against Yiddish to hear and see a baseball game conducted in Yiddish. Yes, the needle workers play baseball at their camp. Some of them even become good players. They don't know all the rules...but they throw themselves into the game with passion. Anyway, these strike pickets, these readers of Marx and Tolstoi and Lenin and Gorki play as joyously as sandlotters. The teams are made up of all ages and both sexes, girls and men and children, anyone who can learn to swat the ball. They play a rough game of soccer too; it is the second most popular game in the workers' camp." Sounds to me like it was a fargenign and a metsie. Aren Portnoy 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 11:25:55 +0000 From: jkessler@ucla.edu Subject: Camp Carefree As I recall it, my father, when a stalwart founder of the Fur Workers Union with Gold, the trueblue Communist union, used to want take us to Camp Nitgedayget, with the chaverim, but my mother, always skeptical of that crowd resisted, and so I never saw it. She _had_ to belong as welfare supervisor in the Bronx, I say _had_ to, to have a job at all (they were both eventually thrown out of the CP for a trait in our genes: undisciplinable people, around the time of the Moscow Trials). It was up near Peekskill or Poughkeepsie. And it was rather popular with thinking workers. We ourselves deplored folksinging and all the rest of the specious kulchur of the CP, it seems, and especially we deplored in my family any mass actions, mass meaning anything more than the family itself. I suppose we should have been Confucian skeptics, by name, and that is something handed down. If one thinks for oneself, then Leninist tyranny was to be avoided at all costs, and so it was in our family, after 1922, when the "Revolution" was over for good and all forever. I am sure some sentimentalists are to be found on this list, who may even have been at that camp with the comrades. Well, it was affordable, at the price of organized activities. That the world loves those things is commonplace: look at the success of the cruise ships in our own decade. Jascha Kessler 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 13:01:04 -0800 (PST) From: zizi@ns1.aplatform.com Subject: Camp Nit Gedayget I was a camper there sometime in the late 1930s. My mother was a single parent and worked in the separate hotel area. I suppose as a condition ofher employment I received a free campership. Most of the kids were there just two weeks. I have only good memories of the counselors who were a happpy group and taught us the Yiddish songs we sang on the walk to the camp dining area . I remember the International, shteyt auf mir ale zeinen gleiche, Tumbalaika, etc. Only the wealthy at that time could afford to stay at the hotel and send their kids to camp. Most of the kids were sent there by some Jewish agency. At that young age I think I sensed the rich from the poor kids. I never see a big glass pitcher that fails to remind me of the pitchers of heavy sweet cream with several placed on each table for us to pour on Our breakfast hot cereal, plus heaps of unsalted butter waiting to be added to it all (that is my secret craving). Hey, I hope I am telling you about the right camp. Zelma Teicher 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 6 Mar 96 00:10 CST From: hlorbach@ksuvm.bitnet Subject: Kemp Nit Gedayget Itsik Goldenberg [v5.265] asks about Camp Nitgedayget. While I have no lucid memory of the camp, I do recall trips there with my parents when I very young (and spoke only Yiddish) and have pictures of them with some of their friends dating from the mid-1920's before I was on the scene. The name was a recurrent one in my early childhood and I have a vague memory of Yiddish comics' jokes about Kemp Nitgedayget... The phonetic spelling may reflect the political orientation of the camp. It later became known as Camp Beacon and was located just south of Beacon, New York. I don't know when (if?) it ceased to exist. The camp was connected to the Jewish People's Fraternal Order of the IWO [International Worker's Order], the more left competitor of the Workmen's Circle. Nearby was another Yiddish camp that had changed somewhat by the time I worked there as a waiter in the summer of 1946. Called Camp Eden then, it was run by the Jewish Cultural Farband and while still Jewish in cuisine and character, was no longer basically Yiddish. I was one of the few Jewish persons on the "working" staff (unlike what I had found a year earlier in the Catskills' hotels.) Eden was east of Cold Spring, across the river from West Point, and about 25 miles from Nitgedayget/Beacon. The physical location of the two parallels the close physical location of the two children's camps of the JPFO and the Workmen's Circle, Kinderland and Kinderring, a subject covered in Mendele a few year's back. Harold L. Orbach Manhattan, Kansas ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.268