Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.234 February 20, 1997 1) The death of Leo Rosten (Dan Leeson) 2) Al kheyt (Khane-Faygl Turtletaub) 3) Place names (Joachim Neugroschel) 4) Some websites for Yiddishists (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 09:04:50 EST From: leeson@aspen.fhda.edu Subject: The death of Leo Rosten I regret to announce the death of Leo Rosten as posted today in an extensive obituary in the New York Times. Mentioned with great fervor was his wonderful "The Joys of Yiddish," a joyous book if there ever was one. Dan Leeson Los Altos, California 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 13:35:17 +0100 From: doctorkf@gte.net Subject: Al kheyt Vegn Mekhl Asheri's entfer [6.231]: Ikh meyn az m'zogt klapn al kheyt nisht shlogn al kheyt. M'shlogt kapores. Khane-Faygl Turtletaub 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 12:47:55 -0500 (EST) From: achim1@cris.com Subject: Place names In the discussion of place names, there's been a confusion of two things: an actual change of name as opposed to the names for the same place in various languages. Castle Garden was replaced by Ellis Island,just as Constantinople was replaced by Istanbul in 1452. But the city known as Lodzh in Yiddish has always been called Lodz (pronounced "woodzh") in Polish. The Yiddish and German names did not disappear in their respective languages, they were simply not official terms. The only time the city's name was actually changed was during the German occupation in World War II, when the conquerors renamed it Litzmannstadt (after a German general who had distinguished himself with the usual atrocities during World War I). In fact, it was called Litzmannstadt even in a secret journal kept by German-speaking Jews in the Nazi ghetto in Lodz. Similarly, the city known as Lwow in Polish has always been called LEmberik by Jews: note that the Yiddish name is tri-syllabic even though the misleading spelling Lemberg is simply a straight transcription of the German name Lemberg (not Lemburg!). The various names exist simultaneously in various Languages, and as long as you know what's meant there shouldn't be any problem. (If you do enjoy such confusions, try hitching through, say, Belgium: for every village you wander into, the Flemish name is totally different from the French name!) Problems arise only when you have to translate geographic names: presumably in talking about Jewish life in Czernowitz, it's best to use that name (the Czernowitz Conference) rather than the Romanian term. It gets tricky when cultures intersect. Sacher-Masoch (yep, the Austrian baron and German-language writer who gave us the word "masochism") also wrote several volumes of stories about Jewish life in and around his home town Lemberg/Lemberik/ Lwow/Lviv. Which form should one use in English when translating his works? Further complications arise in English because it tends to use the (Norman) French forms of geographic names: e.g., "Milan" for "Milano", "Moscow" for "MoskvA". While Yiddish and Ladino use the Hebrew forms for Israeli cities, e.g. Yerushalayim, the latter has been truncated to Salem in America. just as well: or would you rather talk about the witches of Jerusalem? There are certain Eastern European villages that were founded and named by Jews--so their Yiddish names should certainly enjoy the prestige of seniority. But I'm sure the Polish or Ukrainian government won't get around to using the Yiddish names all that soon. Finally, there's the contrast between the local Yiddish name and the standard Yiddish name: Bohemia is called "Beymen" in standard Yiddish (from German "Boehmen"), but the local Jews there called it "Peymen." The same holds true for the German city of Munich: English uses the French form, standard German uses Muenchen (from the Latin word for "monks"), but the Munich dialect uses "Minge"--and Italians call it Monaco, or more precisely "Monaco di Germania" to distinguish it from Grace Kelly's principality. In various Slavic cities such as Lwow or Lodz, it's not the name that's changed--it's the dominant culture. The official name is determined by whichever language group happens to be in charge. The various names have usually existed as long as the various languages in those places. Yiddish often uses some form of the German name for a Slavic place: e.g. "Varshe" (from German "Warschau" as opposed to Polish "WarszAwa". So I can understand that a Pole might resent a Yiddish place name, say, Lemberik, which, to Polish ears, sounds too much like the German name. If you feel like using the Yiddish form in English, just explain to an outsider that it's not the German form and that in fact Lemberik was once as much a Jewish city as a Polish or Ukrainian (Ruthenian) or even Austrian one. And if you're talking about Kant, I don't see any problem in calling his native city Koenigsberg instead of the current Kalinograd. Yiddish speakers in Canada refer to their current country as "KanAde"--but that's because the name was taken over from Polish "KanAda" long before any Jews arrived in North America. All I ask is that if you're using the Jewish name for "Lemberg" please make it tri-syllabic: "LEmberik". (Incidentally, Paul Celan's most famous poem, "Todesfuge"--Death Fugue--was inspired by a newspaper account describing the final liquidation of the Nazi Ghetto of Lemberik/ Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv. Celan himself pronounced it "Lemberg" since he wrote in German.) Joachim Neugroschel 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 From: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu Subject: Some websites for Yiddishists While the World Wide Web is mostly junk, hoopla and tararam there _are_ a comparatively small number of useful sites and some of them are becoming daily more useful. Others, let us hope, may follow suit. Here are three. The Virtual Shtetl, conducted by Iosif Vaisman. Indispensable. http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/ Another is Refoyl Finkel's with among other things his "Yiddish typewriter and spelling checker" that enables one to type a document in Romanized Yiddish and to wind up with one in Hebrew characters. (If I'd used it in transcribing the selection from Chaim Grade, I could have avoided a few mistakes.) http://www.cd.engr.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish.html Now from quite a different quarter comes a very rich lode of Yiddish documents: the Library of Congress, which has made available 77 unpublished Yiddish playscripts (out of a much larger 1200 or so that were registered) are now available for viewing and downloading. Amerike! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/vshtml/vsyid.html Don't expect a new Euripides or Racine. These are as we used to say shmates shbshmates, potboilers of no literary value. Most are hand-written and hard to decipher. (There's a typewritten one by Boris Thomashevsky.) Nevertheless, for anyone with any interest at all in the New York Yiddish theatre, popular culture or language this is a gold mine. And presumably there's a lot more that may yet come our way. Noyekh Miller ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.234