Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.235 January 28, 1996 1) Yiddish books in London, England (Roger Harris) 2) Soviet Yiddish songs (Shleyme Axelrod) 3) Yiddish dictionaries (Serge Rogosin) 4) Pluperfect (Neil Jacobs) 5) Pluperfect (Meyer-Leyb Wolf) 6) Rebirth of Hebrew compared with that of Yiddish (Morrie Feller) 7) Badkhn vs. marshelik (David Goldberg) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 22:19:16 +0000 (GMT) From: rwsh@dircon.co.uk Subject: Yiddish books in London, England In Mendele vol.5.230, Alan King wrote: A question: Could anyone please tell me where (if anywhere) one can buy Yiddish books in London? I maintain a list of Judaica and Hebraica booksellers in the United Kingdom. It is available at the following sites: ftp shamash.nysernet.org/israel/ejin/brijnet/books/list.txt gopher shamash.nysernet.org/ejin/brijnet/books/list www url http://shamash.nysernet.org/ejin/brijnet/books/ It is hard to know what stock is being held at any time by any particular bookseller so you may have to do some browsing or telephoning. Book dealers in the Stamford Hill area (postcode/zipcode = N16 ___) are likely to have Yiddish books in stock and to speak Yiddish too. If you are planning to visit London in March then please see the entry for Jewish Book Week which will be held during 10-17 March 1996. The Friends of Yiddish meet every Saturday afternoon at the Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial Street, London E1, at 3.00 pm. The nearest Underground railway station is only a few steps away: Aldgate East (Metropolitan and District Lines). Contact: Majer Bogdanski, +44 (0)171-488 3092. The Spiro Institute is planning a Yiddish seminar to be held in London during the second half of August 1996. I shall post details when they are available. Please e-mail me if you need any further information. Roger Harris 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 17:55:36 -0500 (EST) From: ptyaxel@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Soviet Yiddish songs Michael Shimshoni (5.233) adds a verse to the Soviet Yiddish song cited by Iosif Vaisman (5.219). I assume that the following, a fragment recalled from my 1930's childhood in Brooklyn, is from the same song, though the _ay_s were _day_s in my version. Khaver Stalin iz gekumen, Comrade Stalin came, (Day-day-day, day-day-day!) Hot er undz tsunoyfgenumen. And he gathered us up. (Day-day-day, day-day-day!) (Bob Rothstein: Can you provide any more verses?) Shleyme Axelrod Buffalo, NY 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 20:20:50 -0500 From: srogosin@aol.com Subject: Yiddish dictionaries Is there a Yiddish dictionary--etymological or otherwise--that lists the first appearance of a word in Yiddish, as the OED does for English? As I mentioned in a previous thread, I am researching Jewish connections to the balalaika for a book that I am writing. I would like to know if "balalaika" is listed in any Yiddish dictionaries. Can anyone remember if Sholem Aleichem used the word in any of his works? Thanks for the attention. Serge Rogosin Queens Village, NY 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996 23:31:28 -0500 (EST) From: njacobs@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu Subject: Pluperfect and other particles On Ellen Prince's point about the pluperfect marker being a particle rather than a verb: In the spoken American English of many people, there appears to be a irrealis-subjunctive particle * -a * , which derives from the verb *have*: For example: "You shoulda ran faster, man..." "You shoulda went to the store earlier, before it closed" "I coulda ate the whole pizza if you didn't ask for some". For speakers who have this construction, they use -a + 2nd form of the verb (e.g., ran, went, ate). Note that when these same speakers are producing straightforward "have" constructions, they use the 3rd form of the verb, even when have is reduced: "I've run faster before; You've gone to the store too late; I've eaten the whole pizza--would you like an apple?" Neil Jacobs 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 01:10:23 -0500 From: wolfim@chelsea.ios.com Subject: Pluperfect To Ellen Prince: Sorry, I got the impression that you were suprised that some Litvaks werent auxiliary challenged. I've forgotten how long it took Yehoash to carry out his translation; I know it was a long and not very easy time. I suspect that when he was translating the section where he used 'gevest' he may have been under the influence of older translations. Most Tora translators, from Mendl Satanover on, have tried to reproduce the sonority of the old translations and experimented with using some of their special vocabulary as well. Your question on the 'pluperfect _particle_' is a good one -- meaning I dont have a real answer. I was glossing the yiddish grammatical term 'invaryant', but I dont recall when I first took to considering the pluperfect 'gehat' an 'invaryant'. I cant find any mention in the literature. I believe the notion originated with Uriel Weinreich and I heard it in one of his classes on Yiddish grammar. In any case, in his dictionary, under 'gevezt', he calls the form "a particle used in forming the pluperfect". Meyer-Leyb Wolf 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 10:43:16 -1000 From: feller@indirect.com Subject: Comparison of rebirth of Hebrew with revival of Yiddish Bob Hoberman in 5.232 gave a summary history of the Hebrew language and its rebirth in Palestine. He ends his story with the statement: "So Hebrew was revived because there was a need for it, people wanted to talk with each other and had no other language in common". I have just finished re-reading "Tongue of the Prophets" by Robert St.John which tells the story of how Eliezer ben Yehudah struggled to revive the Hebrew language. And, "mirabile dictu", I got a completely different picture of what ben Yehudah was faced with. There was no obvious need for it, and the people were not interested in making Hebrew their common language. Ben Yehudah had an up-hill battle all the way to force the Jews of Palestine to learn and speak Hebrew. For further corroboration of the difficulties which the rebirth of Hebrew faced, these will be found in "Hebrew the Eternal Language" by William Chomsky. Recognizing that efforts which are being made, and will be made, to ensure the survival and growth of Yiddish also face difficulties, albeit of a different nature than those which Eliezer ben Yehudah faced, there are reasons enough to feel that in the long run we will succeed. One of these reasons is the fact that Yiddish is not nearly as close to being dead as Hebrew was. If we will it, it will be no dream. Morrie Feller Phoenix 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 26 Jan 96 17:51:59 EST From: david.goldberg@smtpgwy.mla.org Subject: Badkhn vs. marshelik Sara Benor [5.234] asks about the distinction between badkhn and marshelik in Fefers poem "A khasene in birobidjan". If Weinreich and Harkavy treat the two as having the same meaning, we can probably say that in the period their dictionaries describe there was no distinction between the terms. Another source for the idea that the 19th (considering the literary sources Harkavy used) and 20th century Yiddish world did not distinguish between the two is Petrushka's Yidishe folks entsiklopedya, which mentions that the two words are synonyms,and also notes that the first use of the word badkhn can be found in Rashi (!), and documents previous appearances of the aramaic root *beyz-daled-khes* (freyen) in talmudic literature. Possibly there was an earlier time in which the terms had distinct meanings, say for instance if the pompous figure of the German Hofmarschall (Lord Chamberlain, according to my Cassell's) was mocked in some sort of carnival/purim upsidedownday, and later that mocking role or material or costume from it was added to the badkhonish repertoire, or both roles were played by the same individual. But that is not, I would guess, a distinction that Fefer could make. I suggest, instead, that Fefer is inventing a distinction supported by the source languages of the two words: badkhn being a loshn-koydesh word, and marshelik being of European (French?) origin. Fefer is caught, as every Soviet Yiddish writer was, in the impossible situation of having to reject and denigrate a tradition while writing from within it, and not without some measure (notoriously small in Fefer) of affection for it. Fefer here (my supposition continues) seizes on the clearly traditional, loshn-koydesh word and the figure it names as a target for his rejection of the traditional world: certainly there would be no old fashioned badkhn figure in birobidjan. But he is describing a Jewish wedding and it does have a traditional flavor (and, by God, he likes it) and so he resurrects the word marshelik to identify the non religious jester who entertained at the wedding: taking the traditional role (but not back to its ancient, biblical roots implied by the semitic name) and transforming it into something new. Badkhns are identified as part of the trappings of traditional clericalism and despicable religiosity elsewhere in Yiddish Soviet literature at this time: an example is found in the children's play from this period by Itsik Kipnis: "Di farshterte khasene". Fefer knew the basic outlines of Jewish history, by the way, but his eye for Jewish detail was not always particularly on target: in _Shotns fun der varshever geto_, I believe, he describes a beutifully set seder table that includes a *koylitsh* ! David Goldberg ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.235