Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.093 November 11, 1996 1) Bathhouse and mikve (Yude-Leyb Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 96 23:06:32 IST From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il Subject: Bathhouse and mikve In an essay I wrote a number of years ago I started to inquire into the bathhouse/mikve relationship which Celia Bergoffen asks about in her notice of 6 Nov. 1996 (Mendele vol6.091). In "Paul Muni's Parents Sing at a London Jewish Music Hall," (in _Language and Civilization; a Concerted Profusion of Essays and Studies in Honour of Otto Hietsch_, 2 vols. Edited with the assistance of Teresa Kirschner, Donald Gutch and Judith Gilbert by Claudia Blank. Frankfurt/Bern/Paris/New York: Peter Lang, 1992, vol. 1, pp. 428-471), I talk about the song "Khave-Leye, gut-shabes!" ('Eva-Leah, Good Sabbath!'), which was sung by Saltshe (Sali) Vayznfraynd {Saltshe (Sally) Weisenfreund} (nee Khaye-Tsilke Fishler) (1876-1934) around the turn of the century. Here is the song, romanized, Englished and commented on briefly. 1 Der fraytikdiker tog: iz a tsore a plog: Dos veyst yeder: a tshad un a roykh: Men arbet mit koyekh: nisht tsu tsuzetsn arege -- Khale bakn: kalekh hakn: tsholnt rukn: Tsupn, shtrikn: Un dos alts muz geshen in eyn tog: A rosl muz men hobn: Un tsum tsholnt bulbes shobn: Un di yoykh muz men shoymen: Un dertsu a tsimes floymen: Eyer-kikhelekh zoln gerotn: [original has _zol_] Kelberfleysh muz zayn gebrotn: Un dertsu arbes zidn: {Refrain} Es iz an alter mineg ba undz yidn: Dokh mayne libe darft ir oykh nisht zorgn: Bald nokh dem kugele morgn: Dos kepele oysgetsvogt: Nisht ka shikh un shkrabes: Vet ir mir megn ale zogn: Khave-leye, gut-shabes! English Translation 1. Friday is a pain, a plague: Everybody knows it: charcoal fumes and smoke: You work hard: no rest for even a minute: Baking khale: chopping lime: putting in the tsholnt: Last-minute shopping, knitting: And all this has to be done in a day: You've got to have a roast: And peeling potatoes for the tsholnt: And you must foam the broth: And add to that a prune stew: Egg cookies that will come out well: Calf meat must be broiled: And the peas boiled: It's an old custom among us Jews: But you don't have to worry, dear friends: Right after the pudding tomorrow: With my hair washed and combed: Not looking like an old hag: [lit. 'not shoes and tattered shoes']. You'll all be able to say to me: "Eve-Leah, Good Sabbath!" 2 Fun gants fri: Zetst men zikh nisht tsu: A bisele optsuruen: In mark araynloyfn: Un alts aynkoyfn: Akhuts in shtub tsu tun: Fleysh kosher makhn: Darfn mir gikher fun ale zakhn: A fish a dikn: In tsholnt tsu farrukn: A heysn tsvog zikh uftsushteln: Zikh tsu farkemen der man zol kveln: Un tsu raybn tsum fleysh khreyn: In dem a fetn beyn: Tsibeles mit shmalts: Mit fete grivn: Un nokh mitog zise ripn: Rozhinke-vayn dos muz geshen: Bald vi men kumt fun der shul tsu geyn: {Refrain} English translation: 2 >From early morning: you don't sit down: Resting a little: Rushing to market: Doing all the shopping: Besides all the work at home: Koshering the meat: Comes first above everything else: A fat fish: And putting the tsholnt in the oven: Boiling water for washing your head: Combing your hair so that your husband will beam for joy: Grating horseradish for the meat: Here adding a juicy bone: Onions fried in fat: Roasted gooseskin bits: And sweet ribs in the afternoon: There must be raisin wine: For right after coming home from the synagog. {Refrain} 3 Fraytik in der fri: Darf men melkn di ki: Un oystsuzidn di milkh: Kave un tsuker: Dos iz der iker: Befor me geyt in shul: Zafren in di kikhlekh: Es zol zayn mel: Un tsu brengen fun kremer dos mel: A multer, a deyzhe, a kotshere un a lopete: Holts onhakn: dos broyt tsu bakn: Di kinder shrayen, "Mame, pletselekh": Un darf men tsuhakn di kletslekh: Dos shrayt, dos veynt, dos lakht, dos pishtshet: Vesh ongreytn: Tsum merkhets farbereyten: In mikve arayngeyn: Zikh optsuvashn reyn: Dem man ongreytn di shabes-shtrayml un kapote: Es iz ba undz yidn an alte mode: {Refrain} English translation 3. Friday in the morning: You have to milk the cows: And boil the milk: Coffee and sugar: That's the main thing: Before going to synagog: Saffron in the cookies: You have to have flour: And you have to get the flour from the shopkeeper: A trough, a kneading trough for bread, a poker and a shovel: Chopping wood: Baking bread: The children scream, "Mama, rolls!": And the wood blocks have to be chopped: This one screams, that one cries, that one laughs, this one whines: Doing the laundry: Getting ready to go to the bathhouse: Entering the ritual bath: Washing oneself clean: Preparing your husband's Sabbath headgear and cloak: Among us Jews this is the old fashion: {Refrain} * * * * * "Khave-Leye, gut-shabes!" captures the sense of hurry and overwork which characterizes Sabbath preparations among observant Jews. But it is not a song of complaint or protest. The woman says that in the end she is in complete control and everything turns out fine. In fact, the song is not so much about preparing for the Sabbath as it is about a woman's ability to remain attractive and on top of her nearly impossible work load. It touches on religion because shtetl life, which it vividly evokes, was saturated with religious observance. On one level the song reflects the Old World rather than London (cf. the cows). But the urban features of the shtetl are seen in Khave-Leye's shopping at both _mark_ 'marketplace' and _kremer_ 'shopkeeper'. Especially New-World is the degree to which vanity takes precedence over religiosity. "Khave-Leye, gut-shabes!" tells us that after making the kugl (the last of the Sabbath dishes to be prepared), women could attend to their own grooming and wash their hair in a basin or trough of hot water. The previous generation of married women would have worn wigs topped with kerchiefs, but the wig {Yiddish: _shaytl_} had ceased to be universal even in Eastern Europe by the beginning of the twentieth century. The women of the family probably washed in a basin, for they would not normally have had time to go to the mikve during the day on Friday; yet the song reads: "Getting ready to go to the bathhouse: / Entering the ritual bath: Washing oneself clean," indicating that the speaker did go to the mikve to wash herself on Friday. Folksongs, not to speak of music-hall songs, do not always perfectly reflect social reality and we need not credit the notion that women went to the bathhouse or to the mikve on Fridays (even if we allow for differences in the religious customs of Eastern Ashkenazic shtetls). In many communities, Thursday was women's day in the bathhouse and, almost universally, Friday was men's day. Moreover, it was unusual for men to go to the mikve. Khave-Leye prepared the menfolk for the bathhouse, which must be kept distinct from the mikve, even though the mikve in Eastern Ashkenaz was generally close to or attached to the bathhouse. For the most part, the mikve was where women went after menstruation (see Sol Steinmetz's article on _ritualarium_ in _Jewish Language Review_ 7 {1987}, 11-20). Some people outside Eastern Europe have confused the mikve with the {Yid.} _bod_ (or, more learnedly, _merkhets_) 'bathhouse'. Thus we read: "the men and boys...bear down on the bathhouse.... There they will be cleansed in the bath and purified by three ceremonial immersions in the pool of 'living waters' known as the _mikva_. Meanwhile they will be entertained by the conversation of their peers" (Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, _Life is With People; the Culture of the Shtetl_, New York: Schocken, 1962, p. 41 {first published New York: International Universities Press, 1952}. This wrongly suggests that the mikve had to be IN the bathhouse and that, like the bathhouse, it was a social center. Although bathhouse and mikve were often close to each other, they should be distinguished. Yet their conflation does have an historical basis: "In many instances the _mikvaot_ of the Middle Ages served as bathhouses because of the order forbidding Jews to wash in the rivers together with Christians" (_Encyclopaedia Judaica_, Jerusalem, 1971, 11:1544). In his _Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish; the Old Ashkenazic Jewish Community in Palestine_ (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1966), Mordecai Kosover discussed the word "_khama'm_ = hammam, 'bath, Turkish bath', still known in Yiddish as _terkishe bod_." He writes: "A detailed description of a Turkish bath in Jerusalem in the eighties of the nineteenth century is to be found in Itta Yellin's reminiscences _To My Offspring_, part II, pp. 18-20. She mentions four such steam-baths in the Old City: hamam al batraq, hammam el-'eyn (Bath of the Well), hammam el-sifa (Bath of Health), and hammam sitti maryam (Bath of Lady Mary). In each of these there was a _miqva_, a pool for ritual ablution for Jewish women, under the supervision of a Sephardic woman" (p. 310, #524). The bathhouse was everyone's, and in some places local Gentiles as well as Jews used it (see _Algemeyne entsiklopedye_ 5:44 {New York, 1944}). Chasidim went to the mikve before the New Year and Day of Atonement and some of them immersed themselves in the mikve before the Sabbath. In at least one place, male Jews (and not only Chasidim) immersed themselves in the mikve on Sabbath morning before going to the synagog (private communication from Yisrael Walker regarding the town of Nadvirna, now in the Ukrainian SSR). The woman of the song has many young children. Those big enough to help would do so, but the small children and infants must have been especially burdensome on Fridays, when there was so much work to do and so little time to do it. The song's three stanzas yield a catalog of stated or implied realia (to which one should add _di ki_ 'the cows', which only a fairly well-off family would own -- see Mendele Moykher-Sforim's _Dos toysfes-yon-tef-kelbl_ {undertranslated in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., _A Treasury of Yiddish Stories_ (New York: Viking Press, 1954) as 'The Calf'}. The following is a schematic presentation of shtetl life revealed in that one song, much of whose charm lies in its evocative power. Implied items are in brackets. A) Utensils and materials: _deyzhe_ 'kneading trough (for bread)', _holts_ 'wood', _kalekh_ 'lime', {_keml_} 'comb', _kotshere_ 'poker', _lopete_ 'shovel', _multer_ 'trough (for water)', {_shpizlekh_} 'knitting needles', {_holtskoyln_} 'charcoal'. B) Foods and food ingredients: _arbes_ 'peas', _broyt_ 'bread', _bulbes_ 'potatoes', _eyer_ 'eggs', _fish_ 'fish', _floymen_ 'prunes', _grivn_ 'roasted gooseskin bits', _kelberns_ 'calf meat', _kave_ 'coffee', _khale_ 'Sabbath and holiday loaf', _khreyn_ 'horseradish', _kikhlekh_ 'cookies', _kugl_ 'pudding', _mel_ 'flour', _milkh_ 'milk', _pletselekh_ 'small rolls', _rosl_ 'broth'(see the discussion of _rosl_ and _roslfleysh_ in Roslyn Schwartz, "The Geography of Two Food Terms: a Study in Yiddish Lexical Variation," in _The Field of Yiddish, Third Collection_, London / The Hague / Paris: Mouton and Co., 1969, pp. 240-266). _rozhinke-vayn_ 'raisin wine', _shmalts_ 'animal fat', _tsholnt_ 'Sabbath stew', _tsibeles mit shmalts_ 'onions fried in fat', _tsuker_ 'sugar', _yoykh_ 'chicken soup', _zafren_ 'saffron', _zise ripn_ 'sweet ribs'. C. Institutions: _shul_ 'synagog', _mikve_ 'ritual bath', _merkhets_ 'bathhouse'. D. Traditions: _shabes_ 'Sabbath', _mikve_ 'ritual bath', {_kidesh_} 'benediction over the khale and wine'; male dress: (a) _shtrayml_ 'Sabbath and holiday hat', (b) _kapote_ 'Sabbath and holiday coat'. Technical notes: Some of the spellings on the songsheets reflect Southern Yiddish pronunciation. And some of them, while not sanctioned by today's Yiddish spelling codexes, are authentic older spellings (like fusing the indefinite article and the following noun). "Khave-leye, gut-shabes!" has _atsore_, _ayeder_, _tsu tsu zetsn_, _yokh...shomen_, _analter_, _abisele...op tsu ruen_, _fis_, _far kemen_, _gribn_, _ribn_, _oys tsu zidn_, _arayn geyen...op tsu vashn_. "Khave-leye, gut-shabes!" has the New High Germanisms "ales," "befor," "dazu," "farbereyten." _Khave-leye_ 'Eva-Leah' is a typical compound Jewish given name. The song "Khave-tsipe, gut-shabes"('Eva-Zipporah, Good Sabbath'), which I have not seen, may be a variant of our song. Leonard (Yude-Leyb) Prager ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.093