Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.195 January 9, 1997 1) Jet-lag af yidish (Sylvia Schildt) 2) Poetry of Yehoash and Zukofsky (Neyekh Zide) 3) Mauscheln (Neyekh Zide) 4) Serdatsky's "Lilien" (Ron Robboy) 5) Hebrew borrowings (Irving D. Goldfein) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 17:55:31 +0100 From: creativa@charm.net Subject: Jet-lag af yidish ikh meyn es volt geven k'day az mir zoln batrakhtn dem fenomenon a bisele andersh - dzhet klingt in yidish a bisl slavish - iz lomir dos onnemen vi me nemt on un ba-arbet a slavish vortzl mit yidishe tzuklepenishn fun ale zaytn. hert zikh gut tzu: ikh bin geforn in isroyl afn festival yidish, bin ikh ongekumen a bisl fardzhetevet. forndik tzurik ahaym bin ikh ongekumen in gantzn tzedzhetevet. ven ikh vel zikh gut oysdzheteven, vel ikh onheybn mayne normale flikhtn un arbet. let's not be so literal and heavy handed. jet (dzhet) has a kind of slavic sound) so let's see what happens if we approach it from a slavicized yiddish perspective - it was a very natural process for our forebears. and yours truly. i flew to israel for festival yiddish and i arrived a little fardzhetevet. when i flew back home, i arrived completely tzedzhetevet. when i will zikh gut oysdzheteven, i will be able to pick up my normal duties and work. the consensus among attendees at festival yidish - after one or two l'khaims, was " it works for me." if this doesn't make total sense it's probably because "ikh bin nokh a fardzhetevete." sylvia schildt baltimore, maryland 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 23:29:27 -0600 (CST) From: n-zide@uchicago.edu Subject: Poetry of Yehoash and Zukofsky Lisa Tomlinson asks [6.169] about editions of Yehoash'es Bible translation. In addition to the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingual mentioned, there is a (monolingual) Yiddish edition which should not be hard to obtain from some used Yiddish book agency. As to Louis Zukofsky and Yiddish, I assume the published correspondence (e.g. with Ezra Pound, not a notable Yiddishist) was no help. Has she tried his son, Paul Zukofsky with reference to unpublished papers, correspondence ? Neyekh/Norman Zide 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 23:29:27 -0600 (CST) From: n-zide@uchicago.edu Subject: Mauscheln About mauscheln, I got one useful reply - from Yitzhak Kertesz [z"l; see obituary Vol4.273] when I asked about it a couple of years ago. (Kertesz also expressed reservations as to what Gilman said about mauscheln, in, I thnink, a discussion of Kafka.) I also asked about analogous pejorative-'comical' conventionalized 'Jewish Polish', 'Jewish Russian' and 'Jewish Hungarian', and got no replies about these. Do they exist? With the advent of Joachim Neugroschel and the current focus - foci - of Mendele, I would like to open the subject once more. And how does Joachim translate examples of, mauschel-ing? (In reply to an earlier question of JN, my (Litvak) gradmother did use 'blonde' for light and medium brown hair as well as 'true' blonde.) Neyekh/Norman Zide [For the earlier discussion of this thread, see Vol 3.049, 3.051, 3.056, 3.103, 3.104, 3.105.] 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 21:46:10 -0800 From: rrobboy@cts.com Subject: Serdatsky's "Lilien" It would certainly seem that Serdatsky's Lilien is the famous artist. Margaret Olin's reference to Aubrey Beardsley [6.187] is quite to the point. Lilien, as a graphic artist and book illustrator working in a European capital, would very likely have known Beardsley's illustrations to Oscar Wilde's scandalous "Salome," on which Richard Strauss in turn based his equally scandalous opera of the same name. A Queen of the Night, the perplexingly ambiguous figure of The Magic Flute, would seem a fitting response. (In this sense, Joachim Neugroschel's speculation about Lilith [6.187], while almost certainly way off the mark, adds an intriguing resonance to the Mozart-Schikaneder creation.) Having said this, however, what if "Lilien" really is someone other than the famous artist, as Daniel Soyer wonders [6.192]? What are some musical candidates? I have a copy of a mid-19th-century reference work which lists two sisters, the Baronesses Antoinette and Josephine de Lilien, amateurs who both published sets of keyboard variations in Vienna in 1799 and 1800, respectively. Mozart's Masonic allegory, premiered in that city in 1791 (and appeared in Paris in 1801). By the 20th century, the sisters Lilien seem to have dropped out of standard English-language reference works, but I would guess more could be found on them in German (or French?) sources. This provides, of course, a ridiculously remote new course of research, but it certainly is fun raising these kinds of possibilities. Another potentially significant musician is Ignace Lilien, a composer and pianist whose career was spent in the Netherlands, but who was born in 1894 in Lemberg (Lviv), Galicia. Ephraim Moses, the artist, was born twenty years before that in nearby Drogobych. If the graphic artist had accomplished musical family, his drawing upon a subject from the world of opera becomes all the more plausible. There is, by the way, an etching by Lilien depicting a view of Drogobych reproduced in the Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. Drogobych. Lastly, as for other works containing Lilien's illustrations, I note that Zachary Baker coincidentally mentioned one as recently as last month in his Mendele posting on Der B'rit Chadash [6.154]. Ron Robboy 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 10:34:33 -0800 From: goldfein@ix.netcom.com Subject: Hebrew borrowings A tangent: how do we get to "Yankev" from the Hebrew "Ya'akov?" Irving D. Goldfein ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.195