Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.338 May 1, 1994 1) Asch transliteration (Mindy Krushen) 2) Kik a mal (Anno Siegel) 3) Kik a mal (Yude Rozof) 4) The Light Ahead, ironies, miracles (Michael Steinlauf) 5) More on Yeke (Golda Werman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 10:55:16 1994 From: msavelev@mentor.cc.purdue.edu Subject: Asch transliteration I am the foreign languages cataloger at Purdue University and have done some cataloging of our Yiddish collection. If you have a book called Hebraica cataloging: a guide to ALA/LC romanization and descriptive cataloging it may be of some help. Transliteration of Yiddish seems fairly straightforward, with the exception of words of Hebrew origin. The section on Yiddish romanization begins on page 22. Mindy Krushen 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 20:50:57 1994 From: anno4000@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE Subject: Re: kik a mal In mendele 3.377 Harold L. Orbach wrote: >Years ago my wife (born in Berlin and not a Yiddish speaker) told me of >what she said was a Berlin [children's ?] slang expression: "Ikka Dikka, >kik a mal". Some Germans I have known, including one Berliner, have no >knowledge of it and suggest it was Berlin Yiddish. Anyone know this?? "Icke, dette, kieke mal." It's a very common saying in Berlin, not only with kids, used to refer to the Berlin dialect, and it just combines three especially characteristic variants of common words: "Icke" for "Ich" (I), "dette" for "das" (that) and "kieke mal" for "guck mal" (now look). I don't think it's Yiddish. Anno Siegel 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 12:35:30 1994 From: jrosof@sas.upenn.edu Subject: Kick a mal In response to Mr Orbach: I am a speaker of both standard Yiddish and standard German. Here is my attempt to explain. I cannot understand why the vowel is i: kick. Perhaps Icke and Dicke are children's figure and were therefore made to rhyme with the verb. I can't rule out but I discard the possibility that this is from yiddish, here is why: "Gucke mal 'her" pronounced Kuke mal (hier)her or just plain Gucke mal are extremely common on all levels of spoken German. The word mal is used to add strength or urgency to the request to look. Eg. Bringe mir mal das Buch! Emphasizes Bring me! I have never seen this in Yiddish where "mol" means exclusively time in the sense of one time or 5x5. In view of this, the expression Kick mal is clearly rooted In German and not in Yiddish. The only question is what is the reason for the i vowel and what is Icke Dicke? The latter probably is a children's invention but who knows? It seems to me that if you can establish Icke Dicke as a German expression than you may discard a theory of Yiddish influence. If you can find Icke Dicke in Yiddish then Yiddish influence is likely. I don't recall whether dick meaning fat is used in Yiddish (I personally you grob, grobboykhik, or fet). If dick meaning fat is used only in German as I suspect may be the case, then you can probably rule out Yiddish influence altogether and attribute the i in kicke to rhyming with Icke Dicke. One thing is certain, the rhyme could never have occured in Yiddish alone, 1) because of the -e added in the command form GuckE mal and 2) because of the mal added for stress. At most the expression represents Yiddish influence on German, but the phrase itself cannot be described as a Yiddish one. Yude Rozof 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Apr 29 14:35:22 1994 From: M_STEINLAUF@ACAD.FANDM.EDU Subject: The Light Ahead, ironies, miracles Where would Jews be without irony? In this case, first of all, the suggestion by Ben Alpers, responding to my comments on "The Light Ahead," that I am disrespectful of "historical losers." As someone who turned to Yiddish as a way, among other things, of fulfilling Walter Benjamin's injunction to "brush history against the grain," I totally and completely concur with Ben's concern for remembering both the apparent "winners" and the "losers" of history. Indeed, my own tastes tend toward siding with the latter. Insofar as my original posting can be read as suggesting something different, I accept Ben's criticism and stand corrected. But I don't consider it self-evident that to call Jewish communists in the late 1930's "ideologically-crazed" is simply a reflection on their failure to predict the future. Here again I entirely concur with Ben (indeed, it's a cornerstone of much of what I do): it is outrageous to reproach anyone, Jew or gentile, for failing to predict/conceive of the Holocaust. But my comment was less about a failure to see into the future, than about a particular view of the present. One character from "The Light Ahead" has particularly stuck in my memory: the stocky, beardless Jew, worker's cap on his head, who, throughout the film, and especially when Mendele's delegation of "proste yidn" confronts the balebatim, manifests a stereotypically pure and focused anger. This Jew's upraised fist, endlessly multiplied, is what, for the makers of this film, would overthrow oppression everywhere, throughout the world. To believe that the planet was locked in combat between all the world's balebatim, be they the rulers of a shtetl or the rulers of Germany, on one hand, and on the other hand, all the workers of the world, to believe with absolute, politically-correct, messianic certainty that this conflict could only end with the victory of the latter -- this is what I call "ideologically-crazed," and although this too is not evident from my original comment, it is a state of being I'm hardly unambiguous about, be it in the 1930's or 1960's. Nevertheless, the occasion for all this (Rick's original posting) is OUR reaction to a film, and here it is impossible FOR US not to view the film through Holocaust lenses, for us not to counterpose the film's "light" to the darkness that ensued historically, not to ponder the "craziness" of Jewish belief in the "light ahead" at such a time... Finally, Birobidzhan. It was in my mind because I had just lectured about it in my course on East European Jewish history. I ended the lecture with a description of the destruction of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union climaxing in 1952, and the subsequent Jewish renewal movement which discovered itself in Hebrew. When a student then asked about Birobidzhan and Yiddish today, I answered that nevertheless one never knows. Between the fall of the wall and the Internet, I replied, who knows what may emerge into light. The following day on this very screen my own posting to Mendele appeared followed by the miraculous electrons from Birobidzhan... Thanks, Birobidzhaner khaveyrim, for this small miracle, which Jews need as much as they need irony, and thanks, Ben, for the opportunity to reflect more deeply. Michael Steinlauf 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun May 1 10:30:55 1994 From: RWERMAN@vms.huji.ac.il Subject: More on Yeke In Sh.Aleichem's story "Joseph" (_Monologues_) the narrator refers to the young intellectual socialist Jews as Yenkele. Could this be a precursor of Yeke? __Golda Werman, Jerusalem ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.vol3.338 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Archives available via gopher on: gopher.cic.net Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. To subscribe, send SUB MENDELE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME to: LISTSERV@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu