Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.100 November 20, 1996 1) Kalekh hakn (Yude-Leyb Prager) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 19 Nov 96 12:02:17 IST From: rhle302@uvm.haifa.ac.il Subject: Kalekh hakn _kalekh hakn_ 'pounding lime' or 'making chicken-breast balls in broth' One of the great pleasures of a Mendelyaner is dialogue with serious and knowledgeable respondents. How fortunate we are to have an Eliyahu Juni to deepen our discussions! I want to talk now about Reb Eliyohu's (Elye's?) comments (in _Mendele_ vol6.097) on my translation of "Khaye-Leye gut shabes" (in _Mendele_ vol6.093). When I worked on this song several years ago I agonized over two questions: 1) how to explain the female speaker's assertion of going to the mikve erev-shabes when this seemed historically unlikely, and 2) how to explain the words _kalekh hakn_ sandwiched in between two references to preparing food. Reb Eliyohu's suggestion that the author of the song was out of touch with the mikve culture satisfactorily explains the first question -- the author was inaccurate here. But all the other references in the song seem quite realistic, including _kalekh hakn_. I first thought it referred to preparing some food and searched in all the dictionaries, thesauri, glossaries, Yiddish language journals I own; I also queried all the Yiddish speakers I knew. And the best I could come up with was 'chopping/pounding lime'. (One doesn't have to be dependent on Uriel Weinreich's splendid dictionary to find _kalkh_, sometimes also spelled _kalekh_, rendered 'lime; chalk' -- it doesn't seem to be translated any other way anywhere.) Reb Eliyohu suggests a secondary sense of _kalekh_, which he gives as _kaalekh_, namely 'chopped chicken breasts (Yiddish _beylik_) formed into balls resembling gefilte fish and cooked in a broth'. He recalls this dish as his Minkatsher grandmother prepared it. Could it be a regional dish and its name a regional or even local one? We sometimes forget how large the Yiddish lexicon is. No one can hope to master the total vocabulary even of a single variety of Yiddish. Food names require a linguistic atlas of their own. Saltshe Vayznfraynd was Polish-born and her London audience were mainly Polish- and Ukrainian-born. Would they have recognized _kalekh_ 'balls of chopped chicken breast in broth'? Moreover, does the verb _hakn_ fit here? One would _hak fleysh_, but would one _hak_ the dish made from a particular kind of meat? One reason for _hakn_ is that it rhymes with _bakn_, but it must surely be appropriate when bound to _kalekh_. There are two arguments in support of _kalekh hakn_ 'chopping/pounding lime'. The speaker lists domestic chores in a random, rushed, somewhat hectic fashion that makes placing a non-cooking task between two cooking ones apposite. Moreover, a typical shtetl chore was the whitewashing of the stove and other walls. Apparently the woman of the household was sometimes responsible for this activity and it may have been carried out at least a few times in the year. Students of domestic life in the shtetl will be delighted to read the marvelous essay by Shoyl Hurvits "In mayn mames kikh" (_Yidishe shprakh_ 12:4 (1952), 114-118). The Yiddish here is from the Minsk region, i.e. Northeastern Yiddish, which fact helped me comfort myself for not recognizing a large part of the kitchen terminology (I am not a Litvak). At the very beginning of Hurvits's description we read: "Dem same oybnon un di gresere helft fun der kikh hot farnumen der tsigl-oyvn. Di mame aleyn flegt farkalkhn di farreykherte un shmutsike erter fun oyvn, un erev peysekh hot der mulyer im ibergekalkht in gantsn." ('The main and larger half of the kitchen was taken up by the brick oven. My mother used to whitewash the blackened and dirty places on the oven by herself and just before Passover the bricklayer whitewashed the entire oven.') Presumably the lime for the whitewash was caked and had to be pounded into powder before mixing with water, i.e. _kalekh hakn_. (I have whitewashed a lot of walls but admittedly using a prepared powder which I simply mixed with water. Any notions I may have about preparing lime for whitewashing are imaginary constructions, open to correction from anyone who is actually a _maven_ in this area.) Feygl Melamdovitsh loved Hurvits' article and wrote a one-page addendum entitled "Fun a kikh in Byalistok" (_Yidishe sphrakh_ 13:1 (1953), 25). Byalistok is not all that far from Hurvits' Berezin, geographically or linguistically, yet the author provides over two dozen common kitchen terms which differed in the two places. Writing almost half a century ago, Feygl M. communicates her fascination with terms whose charm lies in their distinctly local or regional character, not to mention their associations with home and family: "Geleyent di arbet fun Shoyl Hurvits ... un hob ongekvoln fun fargenign. Aza heymishkeyt, aza shlal folksverter -- es hot mikh poshet opgefrisht. Es hot a vey geton mameshkeyt. / Baym leyenen hob ikh fartseykhnt a tsol zakhn vos hobn ba undz in Byalistok gehat andere nemen in farglaykh mit di vos Sh. Hurvits git on fun zayn mames kikh." As Heine and others have pointed out, Jewish food has the power to arouse nostalgic feelings even in the most assimilated. But "Jewish food" covers a large map. I never even heard of _kaalekh_ (but I will certainly try these chicken-breast balls if someone will send me the recipe), which perhaps is a regional dish known only to Hungarian Jews. Perhaps there is some data in the linguistic atlas that can help us here. Again, let me say I have no vested interest in lime deposits and no desire to whitewash any lexicographic plonters I may have committed. We need to know more. Leonard (Yude-Leyb) Prager ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.100