Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 4.086
August 17, 1994

1) Kitchen Yiddish III (Zellig Bach)
2) Werman's Guidelines/Complaint (Mark David)
3) Yiddish literature in English translation (Gaston L. Schmir)
4) Instructional tapes (Eli Katz)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 94 20:17:45 EDT
From: Zellig@aol.com
Subject: Kitchen Yiddish III:  The Jewish Mother's Domain

I am sure my Mendele khaveyrim have by now straightened out the sequence
of my recent postings, namely:  Kitchen Yiddish I (Granddaughters and
Grandmothers) is in Vol. 4.082, while Kitchen Yiddish II (Where Did Sons
Pick-Up Their Yiddish?) is in Vol. 4.081.  The present communication is
K.Y. III.  As far as I am concerned, this is my last posting on this
subject.

Kitchen Yiddish III is not about Yiddish as such, but about the kitchen
itself, its central position in the crowded Jewish households in the
appalingly impoverished economic conditions of the early immigrant years
at the end of the last and the beginning of this century.  And it is not
about its culinary fare either.  It is about its dominant figure:  The
Jewish mother.

Jewish mothers were the heart of their families, the center of their
households, a power beyond their physical strength, exhibiting a tenacity
for living and the care of their family members in untold and unknowable
measures of energy.

The Brooklyn Museum recently renamed its western portion after the
brothers Morris A. and Meyer Shapiro.  Morris Shapiro, a Wall Street
banker, donated to the museum five million dollars.  Meyer Shapiro is a
celebrated art historian who taught art history and modern art for half a
century at Columbia University.

The Shapiros came to the United States from Shavel, Lithuania, and
settled in Brooklyn's Brownsville. Yiddish was the language of the
Shapiro household.

Meyer was three years old when he was brought to America.  As a youngster
he loved to draw, and his father had to forcibly remove him and his
sketches and pictures from the kitchen table so that the family could sit
down to dinner.

Several years ago I was told the following story for the sake of the
contrasting reactions:  It was at a time when Italian and Jewish
immigrants shared the same neighborhood.  An Italian boy came from school
with a report card full of f's (for the seven-letter word).  When his
mother saw it, she said to him in anger:  "Next time you bring me such a
card I'll kill you."  In a similar situation the Jewish mother, by
contrast, said to her son:  "Yan'kele (note the endearing diminutive),
next time you bring me such a shamefull report card I will kill myself."

I bring here this story to emphasize the point that in the United States
the secular immigrant Jews transformed the old saying "toyre is the best
skhoyre" (Torah is the best commodity) into education is the best
commodity (Education with a capital E.)  And while fathers toiled in
sweatshops 16-18 hours a day, it was left to the mothers to become the
stern checkers of their children's educational progress, especially the
education of their sons.

It is possible that the absolute estimation of education is a
characteristic of households of oppressed minorities where the mothers,
in particular, consciously or unconsciously, feel that the destiny of
their peoplehood is upon their shoulders, and divine in eduaction the
economic and political salvation of their people.

I recently came across a marvelously touching and powerful vignette of
the Jewish mother and her kitchen.  It is from a memoir by Alfred Kazin,
quoted in Irving Howe's _World of Our Fathers_ (p. 172):

"...My Mother worked in the kitchen all day long.  We ate  almost all our
meals there, except the Passover seder....

The kitchen gave a special character to our lives:  my mother's
character.  All my memories of that kitchen are dominated by the nearness
of my mother sitting all day long at her sewing machine, by the clacking
of the treadle against the linoleum floor, by the patient twist of her
right shoulder as she automatically pushed at the wheel with one hand or
lifted her foot to free the needle....  The kitchen was her life.  Year
after year, as I began to take in her fantastic capacity for labor and
her anxious zeal, I realized it was ourselves she kept stitching
together."

Zellig Bach

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 23:30:01 -0400
From: mhd@world.std.com
Subject: Werman's Guidelines/Complaint

Bob, regarding "nobody, by the way, ever answers my queries on Mendele",
I have to agree.  No one ever answers my queries either. Don't know what
it is.  Even on private followups to people I'm only batting about 333.
Shrug.  Anyway, I don't think you're paranoid.

Mark David

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 09:53:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: glschm@minerva.cis.yale.edu
Subject: Yiddish literature in English translation

[1] Larry Rosenwald asks about a bibliography of Yiddish literature in
English translation. One such bibliography was compiled by Dina
Abramowicz: "Yiddish literature in English translation: books published
in 1945-1967" New York, YIVO, 1967, 36 p.

A  second edition, including a supplementary list of translations for the
period ending April 1968, was published in 1968. 40 p.

[2] David Gasser writes about a CD entitled "Voices of the ghetto". I
would be grateful for information concerning where one might be able to
obtain this CD.

Gaston L. Schmir

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 10:56:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: katz@sonoma.edu
Subject: Instructional tapes

After a lapse of many years I will again be teach- ing elementary Yiddish
(at UC Berkeley) this fall.  I would greatly appreciate information on
any suitable tapes that might be available for use in the language lab.

Eli Katz

______________________________________________________
End of Mendele Vol. 4.086

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