Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.156 October 30, 1995 1) Dissertation help wanted (Miki Safadi) 2) Filmmaker Eleanor Antin (Ron Robboy) 3) Hobn/zayn (Carl Goldberg) 4) Asch's God of Vengeance (Stephen Dowling) 5) Farmishn di yoytsres (Mikhl Herzog) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 09:40:56 -0800 From: msafadi@ucla.edu Subject: Dissertation help wanted I want to write my dissertation about some aspect of vernacular Yiddish use among secular Jews. However, I am stuck for a burning theoretical question to answer. I would greatly appreciate your ideas for intriguing linguistic (not sociological) issues about current Yiddish language use/maintenance/shift/loss/trend/change, etc. A groysn dank. Miki Safadi 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 11:12:57 -0800 From: rrobboy@cts.com Subject: Filmmaker Eleanor Antin re: Ted Steinberg's request for information on filmmaker Eleanor Antin (Vol. 5.152) Eleanor Antin, born in New York in 1935, originally trained as an actress, but moved to painting in the 60s. She entered the arenas of video and performance art in the early 70s by way of the movement known as Conceptualism (or conceptual art), and exhibited internationally. In New York her work appeared at uptown museums - e.g., she had a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973 - and at downtown venues such as The Kitchen. She began making feature-length films (as distinct from videos) in the 80s. She is married to poet and theoretician David Antin, and has long been in contact with many other writers and poets. Antin has at times been highly influential as both an artist and teacher, having been at the University of California, San Diego, for more than twenty years. (_The Man Without a World_ was shot on the UC San Diego campus.) Her complex development of autobiographical forms certainly played a formative role in the evolution of performance art, though her treatment of gender, sexuality, and androgyny, while provocative, has not been as explicitly polemical as the expressly feminist work of some others. (I have in mind not only artists of her own generation but of the subsequent one as well, such as Karen Finley, whose work became one focus of reaction in the U.S. during the disastrous National Endowment for the Arts debates of the early 90s.) Much has been written about her performance art career in art-world periodical literature as well as in standard histories of the movement. _The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980_, edited by Moira Roth (Los Angeles, 1983), provides especially rich historical context for an understanding of Antin's development, including an extensive bibliography of and on Antin herself (up to 1983). What no internationalist "art-world" source that I know of mentions, however, is that Antin's mother operated a modest resort hotel in the Catskills catering to Yiddish-speaking lefty intelligentsia. Now _that's_ context, and it should help to understand how she could have so cannily approached the _Man Without a World_ project. Antin's knack for ringing true (no, Mr. Steinberg you're not so gullible) is in no small part attributable to her sophisticated grasp of both theory and practice of early 20th-century Eastern European avant-garde theatrical and cinematic movements, and of their enormous impact on theater in general and Yiddish art theater in particular. I can't direct you to precisely where it appeared, but I know that J. Hoberman, film critic for The Village Voice and author of the major history _Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds_ (Museum of Modern Art/Schocken Books, 1991), has written at some length on Antin's "Yiddish film." Lastly, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I have known Eleanor Antin for many years, counting her as an important teacher and major influence on my own work. I did music for several of her video and performance projects in the 70s and I worked on _The Man Without a World_ both as post-production consultant and providing live music during the (silent) shooting of some sequences (i.e., _not_ soundtrack music). This last technique, incidentally, is highly authentic: musicians were frequently employed on silent sets to produce ambience for the actors or, especially, to unify revelries and get people to dance together, etc. Ron Robboy 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 14:20:43 EST From: bbnk42a@prodigy.com Subject: hobn/zayn as auxiliary verbs I think it is simpler to understand the difference if looked at in terms of verbs of motion and being, on the one hand, and all other verbs on the other hand, rather than in terms of transitivity. The examples that Dan Slobin gave become clear from this point of view: "Viele Leute haben getanzt": Here "getanzt" is not a verb of motion or being, therefore it takes "haben". "Die Kinder sind nach draussen getanzt": Here "getanzt" is, indeed, a verb of motion, taking the children from one place to another. "Er ist nach Wien gefahren": Here "gefahren" is a verb of motion, going from one place to another. Therefore "ist". "Er hat gut gefahren": Here "gefahren" means "driving" as an activity, but not going from one place to another. Therefore "hat". The fact that the same word can be used either as a verb of motion or as an ordinary activity (nothing to do with transitivity) should not confuse us. I understand that there are some German dialects which do not strictly observe this difference which is strictly observed in standard High German. It is possible that Yiddish, too, deviates from this German grammatical standard, at least in some of its dialects. What do the Yiddish experts say? As Dan Slobin notes, English used to make this distinction, too, but that, over the centuries, it has fallen by the wayside. Perhaps it is falling by the wayside in other languages and dialects, too. After all, is there really any significant gain in communicative efficiency by requiring the verbs of motion to use a different auxiliary? Any comments from linguists? Carl Goldberg 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 29 Oct 1995 18:38:59 -0500 From: stdowling@aol.com Subject: Asch's God of Vengeance At the Jewish Book Center of The Workmen's Circle we stock a copy of the play that was translated by professor Joseph Landis. I think that the collection, "Yiddish Drame in tvantsik Yor hundert" is available at both the National Yiddish Book Center and CYCO. Stephen Dowling Brooklyn 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 30 Oct 95 00:06 EST From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu Subject: More _farmishn di yoytsres_ and thanks! Epithet, epitaph--abi gezunt! Thanks Louis Friedlander. Kind of you to provide an excuse for my _farmishn di yoytsres_. I probably was tired, but I may also have been in the mood to hurl some epithets. _Der iker_, _yagati umatsati_. Better still, _yagati umatsata_ 'I searched and YOU found'. Sholem Aleichem did, indeed, refer to himself as a _zhargonist, a shrayber_. Thanks again. Mikhl Herzog ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.156 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Send change-of-status messages to: listserv@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele nomail b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail c. 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