Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.244 February 27, 1997 1) Ende oysyes (Ron Robboy) 2) Ende oysyes/shlekhte tsadik (David Herskovic) 3) Ende oysyes (A. Joseph Ross) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 13:27:23 -0800 From: rrobboy@cts.com Subject: Ende oysyes The long discussions on Soviet orthographic changes [6.238-42] are endlessly fascinating. Numbers of Mendelistn have noted the several complex currents of thought and social action that may have affected the movement for change, and it may well be the case that there was no one reason. One more current, so far not mentioned, is that revolutions in typography were going on elsewhere in the world as well, transcending any internal debate within Yiddish letters. Yiddish artists, however -- from New York painters like Louis Lozowick to Soviet graphic designers -- were keenly attuned to these developments. Certainly the single most important locus for the new typographic style was among designers associated with the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, to whom early Soviet Constructivists, including notably El Lissitzky, had very close and influential ties. (Even before Lissitzky became part of that circle, it should be remarked, he had worked on Jewish book illustrations under the young Commissar Chagall in Vitebsk.) The innovations of these avant gardists were not simply in type design, but in sweepingly new approaches to asymmetrical page layout and other graphic features. And there were, it must be said, parallel Modernist typographers at work in Palestine, creating a bold new esthetic in Hebrew typeface, all driven by a conscious and explicit ideological agenda. As for Yiddish, one need only look at book and periodical covers published in the 20s, and not just in Germany or the Soviet Union. In New York, the cover design for the _Gezamlte verk_ of Vintshevsky (Freiheit, 1927), for example, epitomizes the machine-age esthetic. Or in Warsaw, the _Geklibene verk_ of the critic Bal-Makhshoves (Bikher, 1929) provides a stunning example. Similarly, covers I have seen of the journals _In zikh_ (New York) or _Yidish teater_ (Warsaw) were visually interchangeable with Russian-language Constructivist publications coming out of Germany. Having said that, I have no doubts that when orthographic changes were discussed at a policy-making level, these artists were not part of the equation. Lissitzky, in fact, had specifically articulated the principle that typographic design should be based *not* on phonetic criteria, but on optical ones. There were also competing developments. With the rise of the proletarian art movement, ideologically engaged artists favored wood- and linoleum-block prints, the techniques of which produced distinctive visual forms. Crucially, they also produced an associated stylized typography widely practiced among American Yiddish book designers. The title page, for example, of E. Korman's beautifully-produced anthology _Yidishe dikhterin_ (Chicago: L.M. Shteyn, 1928) to my eye deftly integrates a wood-cut influenced typeface into a Constructivist graphic design. Whatever else may have been in play, and however the changes were implemented, the idea that a radical change in the appearance and organization of text could and should reflect the radical changes overtaking the social order had clearly originated at the level of the designers and had been a part of the Soviet cultural apparatus from the earliest days of the Revolution. This current of thought ought not be dismissed from the discussion. Ron Robboy 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 26 Feb 97 17:59:37 EST From: 100114.750@compuserve.com Subject: Ende/shlekhte tsadik Joachim Neugroschel [6.242] mentioned 'shlekhte tsadik' as another name for 'ende tsadik', stating that shlekht in this instance means straight. Reluctantly running the risk of us two turning into a mendele version of Shammai and Hillel I would like to very humbly serve up an alternative suggestion. Not khas ve'sholem for the sake of it, but because it sounds strange that a word like shlekht which is never used in Yiddish for anything other than bad, wicked or rotten should be used on the letter tsadik and mean straight. So here is my pshat. The tsadik stands out from the rest of the set of ende oysiyes, for whereas all the other consonants do not mean anything and merely represent the letter of their name, tsadik also means a righteous man. From this, the ende tsadik has become the antithesis of the tsadik. If one is described as an ende tsadik it means a yents tsadik or a pretentious tsadik or even something of a playboy. Children of ivre learning age are also often teased (usually by men of a certain age and disposition), 'vos bist di a tsadik oder an ende tsadik? in the same way that they are asked, 'vos is vayigash geveyn, a tsadik oder a roshe? or in an Anglophone version, vos iz boy geveyn, a yingl oder a maydl? Is it therefore not possible that instead of calling the ende tsadik an outright roshe it became the 'shlekhte tsadik'? David Herskovic 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 00:34:36 -0500 (EST) From: lawyer@world.std.com Subject: Soviet Yiddish orthography Adding to the discussion of whether the reasons for Soviet Yiddish orthography was ideological or educational, I have read that, in certain circles in the United States, you could subtly call someone a Communist in print by calling him a "chaver" (comrade) and spell it in the phonetic Yiddish way, rather than the traditional Hebrew spelling. A. Joseph Ross Boston ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.244