Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 49 July 24, 1991 1) Shiksa (Melkh Viswanath) 2) Europe and Jews (Sigrid Peterson) 3) Europe and Jews (Ellen Prince) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jul 91 11:05 EDT From: VISWANATH@DRACO.BITNET Subject: Shiksa David Hendler hendler@netcom.com asks: (via dave sherman) 1. Is _yenta_ truly from Latin _gentilis_? If so, how did it become feminine, why does it mean what it does (rather than 'Gentile woman'), and how come people don't use it instead of _shiksa_, which I consider offensive? reply: shiksa is definitely offensive, though perhaps not as much as masc. sheygets; both of them derive from shekets (heb.) which I believe means (loosely) creepy- crawly creatures. In one of my gemore shiurim we use goyeh instead. I am not quite sure if this exists in yiddish or in modern hebrew but it certainly does in gemore loshn. melekh (viswanat@draco.rutgers.edu) 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1991 08:51 MST From: Sigrid Peterson Subject: RE: Europe and Jews My comments are far afield from the original discussion on the difficulty of doing research on Yiddish among xasidim in Amsterdam or Brussels. Howev- er, Florian Brody's comments on when does one say one is a Jew reminded me of the affecting video-tape by Pier Marton, "Say I Am A Jew," where he, originally from France and the child of a Holocaust survivor, interviews other such young people now in the United States about the difficulty or ease with which they can say "I am a Jew." His videotape elicits some of the difference experienced between Europe and the U.S. I have the information on availability of the videotape, to anyone who makes an e-mail query. The one book by Peter Sichrovsky that is listed in the on-line Library catalog here is _Schuldig geboren_. English. _Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families_. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Since we have at least one course on the Holocaust, I will ask the library to order the other of Sichrovsky's books. Sigrid Peterson Sigpeter@cc.utah.edu 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 23 Jul 91 18:47:04 -0400 From: Ellen Prince Subject: Europe and Jews florian brody writes: >On shikse > >The negative implication comes - at least that is the >way I got it from home -from the fact that you can go >out with her have fun, sex, (many things you would >never do with a jewish girl who is a potential candi- >date to be the mother of your children) - whatever, >but you would never marry her because - she is (only) a >shikse - my mother who was as non racist as you can >possible be would say when one of my early relations at >the age of 17 broke up " forget her, she is only ..." >even though she had really liked her. with all due respect, i would rethink the hypothesis that your mother was 'as nonracist as you can possibly be' (at least following the current usage of 'racist' as a synonym of 'bigoted'). >On "Jewish" > >The question whether you tell people that you are >jewish in Europe vs in the U.S. is a far more inter- est->ing topic.... this is getting further and further from yiddish, but i feel obliged to clarify my last msg. the anecdote i recounted concerning the use of 'juif' vs. 'israelite' in france had NOTHING to do with whether or not to disclose one's judaism. this was in bordeaux in 1962 and there was simply no issue. i was the tenth ameri- can student this (non-jewish) family had hosted and the sixth jew. the closest thing to a problem arose when they announced to me the first friday morning i was there that synagogue services begin at such-and-such time and they would take me--and i had to explain that i was not a synagogue-goer! since then i have made over 20 trips to france, as well as assorted trips to most of the rest of western europe, and have never experi- enced even the anti-semitism i knew as a child growing up in brooklyn. and my one trip to germany was paid for by the research center in bielefeld (zif, i think it's called), where i gave a lecture on some discourse properties of yiddish. so maybe things ain't so terri- ble... yes, of course, i'm aware of anti-semitic right-wing groups in europe and desecrations of jewish sites, etc. but synagogues have been defaced in philadelphia in the past three years and the cemetery in new york where my father-in-law is buried was vandalized and desecrated two years ago. my main point is that i don't really think there's a justification for making a big distinc- tion between the u.s. and europe in this domain. ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.49