Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.037 June 23, 1994 1) Introduction (Adrienne Maltz) 2) Introduction (Joseph Sherman) 3) Shoym (Michael Steinlauf) 4) Bintel Briv letters (Ellen Prince) 5) Touring Deutschland with Yiddish/Then & Now (Jascha Kessler) 6) Ganef; South African journal (Joseph Sherman) 7) Sholem Asch (Martin Davis) 8) Shabse Tsvi (Rick Gildemeister) 9) Translation (Larry Rosenwald) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Jun 22 21:21:21 1994 From: akmaltz@cpcug.org Subject: Introduction I am new to Internet and have been lurking in Mendele's halls for some weeks. There is not much to tell except that I heard and understood my grandparents' and other's Yiddish as a child, but had never heard a child speak Yiddish -- so I didn't either. Because of that, I suffer some lack of confidence. I call myself a perpetual student of Yiddish, an amateur, without credentials but with great curiosity. I come forward to write because of recent mention by some mendeleniks that they have heard some people say that Yiddish is not a real language. Why would it not be as real as French, Spanish and Italian, all derivatives of Latin? Vos iz der untersheyd? Adrienne Maltz 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 01:57:08 1994 From: 071JOS@witsvma.wits.ac.za Subject: Introduction As a newly joined member of _Mendele_ I should like to introduce myself to you all, with the hope that we shall be in correspondence for a long time to come. My name is Joseph Sherman, and I live in Johannesburg, South Africa where I teach English Literature in the University of the Witwatersrand, although my major research interest is Yiddish literature. My special areas of specialisation in Yiddish are South African Yiddish writing, the brothers I.J. and I.B. Singer, Ayzik-Meir Dik and Sholem Asch. I wonder how many of _Mendele's_ readers abroad know that there is a considerable body of Yiddish literature entirely indigenous to South Africa? I have published, in English translation, a volume of Yiddish stories about South Africa entitled _From A Land Far Off_, as well as several critical articles on Yiddish topics in journals both here in South Africa and in the States. Yiddish was a home language for me; my parents and grandparents both spoke it all the time, and I studied Hebrew to Matriculation level in a Jewish Day School here. The Yiddishists lost the battle hopelssly to the Zionists here in South Africa, and during my childhood and adolescence, many parents (not mine, borukh hashem) were actually ashamed that their children should know or speak Yiddish. I should be particularly interested to hear from other readers about the potential level of interest there might be in America and elsewhere in the world about South African Yiddish literature. If I were to translate, edit and annotate a major Yiddish South African novel, would there be readers (and buyers) of the book out there? I should mention that the novel I have in mind was written by my late uncle, Jacob Mordecai Sherman, who was for over fifty years the leading figure and guiding spirit of Yiddish literature and belles-lettres here. The reason I ask about this novel, in possible English translation, is that I am trying to persuade my university's press to publish it, and they are (I suppose understandably) reluctant to do so without knowing what kind of market there might be both here and abroad. Lost visn, khevre. Ikh vil shraybn vegn etlekhe andere inyonim, ober s'iz do shoyn genug far dem ershter mol. A tsvetyn briv vet kumen iber a por minutn arum. Al dos guts Joseph Sherman 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed Jun 22 17:53:18 1994 From: M_STEINLAUF@ACAD.FANDM.EDU Subject: Shoym Bibliographical query: When was I.B.Singer's "Shoym" (published in English in 1991 as "Scum") first published in Yiddish? Was it serialized in the "Forverts"? If so, when? Electronic query: Does anyone have Avrom Novershtern's e-mail address in Israel? (Oder efsher bist du take do in Mendele? Oyb azoy, gib a rir...) Michael Steinlauf 1)---------------------------------------------------- DatE; Wed Jun 22 18:23:03 1994 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: bintel briv letters i share dan leeson's wish that the original letters to the bintel briv column be found and made accessible. however, i should think that making the names of the writers public would be highly actionable and not something any newspaper is about to do. ellen prince 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 00:50:01 1994 From: IME9JFK@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU Subject: Touring Deutschland with Yiddish/Then & Now One is glad to hear that it is possible to tour Germany today with some Yiddish remnants. We thought we might get driven from a camera shop in Munich in 1952, July, when my wife, who has no Deutsch, broke in with a question, starting with Efsher...? The saleswoman, middleaged, to our young 20s glared at us. If household Yiddish can get one around, perhaps some things are improved. As for a Dictionary of Yiddish literati, perhaps one might turn to Gale Research, which has a lot of bibliographical projects always coming along, and might be willing to support such an endeavor, who knows? They are in Detroit, the Penobscot Building. Yours, Jascha Kessler 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 02:37:24 1994 From: 071JOS@witsvma.wits.ac.za Subject: Ganef in Charles Dickens and a South African Jewish Periodical Having just introduced myself, I feel no shame in writing immediately again in regard to the correspondence about ganef which I have been following since I joined _Mendele_ a week ago. Perhaps those who do not already know might be interested to learn that the word ganef, spelt 'gonoph' is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as 'slang, 1852', and its etymology is of course given quite correctly as from Yiddish via Hebrew. Of further significance is the fact that the word is used by Charles Dickens in _Bleak House_ (published 1853). In Chapter 19, the policeman who has come to arrest the little vagrant orphan Jo, who lives at Tom-all-Alone's, tells Mr Snagsby (who has taken pity on the child), "He's as obstinate a young gonoph as I know. He WON'T move on.' Now Dickens's extensive knowledge of criminal and underworld slang, and his intimate familiarity with the workings of the London police force of his day is well known; in the novel, the policeman who uses this word clearly has his beat in London's East End, and from the context in the chapter just cited,it is evident that the word is as commonly known to and used by the policeman as those he addresses. So there you have a piece of information which raises, for me at least, another side issue, for which I hope others will provide an answer. Why did Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants always seemm to settle on the _East_ End/Side of great cities -- compare London with Manhattan. A bitterly ironic inversion of the mizrekhvant, perhaps? Any ideas? I would like to let you all know that here in South Africa I am the editor of a quarterly journal devoted to Jewish Studies entitled _Jewish Affairs_. I would welcome essays of between 3000 and 6000 words on any subjects relating to Yiddish Language or Literature. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pay for contributions, but we offer lots of yikhes. Contributions can be sent to me at above e-mail address and I will have them (mayne mitarbeter, nebekh, gebensht zoln zey zayn) reyped from the mashenke. Alternatively, they can be posted to an address I will supply, if potential contributors so prefer. I must warn, however, that the mail system in South Africa has recently collapsed, and were it not for e-mail I would be even more cut off from colleagues overseas than I am already. Lost hern fun zikh vi gikh meglekh. Joseph Sherman 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 05:22:58 1994 From: cutello@liotro.dipmat.unict.it Subject: Sholem Asch I well remember as a child my father's intense anger at Asch's choice of subjects. Martin Davis (hiding in Cutello's account in Catania, Sicily) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 08:45:30 1994 From: EEGLC%CUNYVM.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: Shabse Tsvi Maybe this has already been discussed, but in Yiddish the "s" from Shabse occurs as a "sof", (I think), a tof minus dot in the middle. Then there is the leveling of the final vowels, which is a feature of Yiddish, usually has ay level out to e. Example: Mordkhay = Mordkhe. I imagine the Ashkenazi whole Hebrew would be Shabsay, unless there is another vowel between the b and the s; the Yiddish name is Shabse Tsvi. Hope this came out clear. Rick Gildemeister 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 23 10:46:02 1994 From: LROSENWALD@WELLESLEY.EDU Subject: translation To add to what Kathryn Hellerstein, Seth Wolitz, and Leah Zazulyer have said: My own sense is that there's been very, very little critical discussion of translations done from Yiddish. As an example: everyone seems to love Hillel Halkin's translations of the Tevye stories, and I too admire them a lot, but I'd like to see a less syncophantic discussion of what Halkin has done to the original text - lots of shortenings and clarifyings of Tevye's interminable but wonderful repetitions and nested clauses, lots of cultural adaptation of figures of speech. I don't object, necessarily, to Halkin's having made these choices, but I'd like to see them assessed more rigorously. Another example: the discussions I've seen of the Harshavs' American Yiddish Poetry and of the Penguin Anthology of Modern Yiddish Verse don't look very closely at the quality of the particular translations. There's a difference, I think, between, say, John Hollander's astonishing mimicry of Moshe-Leyb Halpern and Cynthia Ozick's radical compression of Yankev Glatshteyn, and between both of them and Marcia Falk's sometimes brilliant, sometimes (in my judgment) misleading and aggressively colloquial adaptations of Anna Margolin. And it's not that I hold dogmatically to any of these assessments - just that I wish that the reviews I've seen of these important translations had undertaken the job of assessment more seriously. Best, Larry Rosenwald ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.037 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. Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu