Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 7.064 September 24, 1997 1) Internationale (Marti Krow-Lucal) 2) When it comes to Judeo-Alsatian, I'm still confused! (Dan Leeson) 3) Prager's comment, poem for a gravestone (Gertrude Dubrovsky) 4) Poem for a Stone: Sutskever's _Mother_ (Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 13:41:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Kromobile@aol.com Subject: Internationale In a book that belonged to my grandparents, "dos revolutsionere rusland" (NY, 1917: "aroysgegeben fun tsentral-ferband fun 'bund' in ferlag fun der idisher sotsialistisher federatsiye in amerike") I find a three-verse version of the Internationale that is similar but not identical to the versions posted by M. Herzog and M. Wishner. If it is of interest to anyone, please e-mail me and I will be happy to post it. Marti Krow-Lucal Sunnyvale 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 09:05:27 EDT From: "Dan Leeson" Subject: When it comes to Judeo-Alsatian, I'm still confused! Despite the heroic efforts of many people on Mendele (about a year ago) to help me understand the difference between Eastern Yiddish and Western Yiddish (as embodied in Judeo-Alsatian), it is still far from clear in my head. I'm still trying to refine my thoughts on the matter and my aim is to boil it down to a single, clear, descriptive sentence, which is probably someplace to which I will never get. The problem and its explanation are undoubtedly not so simplistic. However, I did receive a very enlightening letter on the subject from Joachim Mugdan, professor of linguistics at the University of Munster, and who may be a lurking Mendelyaner. He has taken pity on me because of the fact that I seem to be surrounded by a state of natural confusion, and Joachim explains, with considerable clarity, the differences that he perceives between the variants. This was a private letter to me and not intended as a scholarly publication, but I found it so interesting that I reproduce it as he wrote it, with any errors being of my introduction, not his. Perhaps if Joachim knew that I would find it so fascinating, he might have spent more time on it and put in a lot more footnotes. Nonetheless, I found it very revealing as it stood. Joachim, in attempting to clarify Alsatian from Judeo-Alsatian (which is often referred to as Western Yiddish), writes the following (letter is reproduced with Prof. Mugdan's permission): Alsatian (German Elsassisch, French Alsacien) is the traditional everyday language of Alsace. And, believe it or not, it is a variety of German. The Alsatian dialects (there are some minor regional differences) belong to the Alemannic dialect group, which most of Baden-Wurttemberg (roughly south of a line Karlsruhe-Augsburg), Vorarlberg in Austria and Liechtenstein. Within Alemannic, Alsatian and the dialects of southern Baden are classifed as "Low Alemannic." (As in all German dialect names, "high" and "low" don't imply "good" and "bad" but are purely geographic terms, referring to highlands vs. lowlands; i.e., more southern vs. more northern regions.) One of the most striking characteristics of Low Alemannic, which it shares with High Alemannic (Swiss German and some dialects in the extreme south of Baden and Alsace), is that the old long vowels [i:, u;, y:] (pronounced approximately as in English sea, you and French dur) have not become diphthongs as in most varieties of German and, for that matter, Dutch and English; e.g., [is] 'ice' (Standard German Eis) and [hys] 'house' (Standard German Haus). In these respects (and some others), the vowel system of Low Alemannic retains features of classical Middle High German, but it also exhibits quite a few innovations. Some are shared by many other German dialects (e.g., the unrounding of the "umlauts" oe and ue, familiar from German gruen/Yiddish grin, etc.), others are geographically more limited (e.g., [a] in words such as [ase] (with "e" inverted) 'to eat', Standard German essen). These developments have led to a peculiar vowel system, and that makes it quite difficult to recognize familiar German words in their Alsatian forms. If you are not accustomed to High (Southern) German dialects in general, the consonant system and certain grammatical features may appear strange, too. I know two descriptions of Alsatian in English: Keller, R. E. (1961), German Dialects. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 116-160 [dialect of Barr, sample text in dialect of Strasbourg] Philipp, Martha & Bothorel-Witz, Arlette (1990), "Low Alemannic," in: Russ, Charles V. J. (ed.), The Dialects of Modern German, London: Routledge, 313-336 [dialect of Colmar] A few years ago, a large Alsatian-French dictionary was published but I don't remember the title. Like other German dialects, Alsatian is normally not used in writing and is not taught in schools. The dominant role of French as the written language (and the language of the media) has led to a decline of Alsatian, but in recent years, a movement to save it (as part of a general trend towards regionalism) has gained strength. Judeo-Alsatian (French judeo-alsacien), the (former) language of Alsatian Jews, is, in my opinion, a variety of German or, specifically, Judeo-German (judeo-allemand, Judisch-Deutsch). Through the diaspora, Jews picked up the language of their gentile neighbours, and Germany was no exception. Of course, they used many Hebrew and Aramaic words (and a few grammatical constructions influenced by Torah and Talmud) so that one can speak of specifically Jewish varieties (e.g. "Judeo-German," "Judeo-Italian," "Judeo-Arabic," etc.), but such peculiarities don't constitute a separate language. The fact that all Jewish language varieties are written with Hebrew letters is irrelevant in this regard - languages are not defined in terms of their writing systems (most of the world's languages aren't written at all), and there are a nunmber of languages which are written in different alphabets (e.g. Serbo-Croation in Latin and Cyrillic). In medieval Germany, a unified standard language didn't exist; both Jews and gentiles spoke regional dialects, and their written texts reflect regional features, too. But since Jews were predominantly townspeople, maintained close ties with relatives or business partners in other regions, and had to move a lot (for economic reasons and because of the numerous expulsions), the various regional varieties of Judeo-German tended to differ less amongst each other than the dialects of non-Jews, while the language of the Jews wasn't exactly the same as that of the gentiles in the same town or region. So, Judeo-Alsatian has some typically Alsatian features, but among other things, it differs from non-Jewish Alsatian in that it has a dipthong in [haus] 'house.' Another peculiarity, which it shares with most if not all varieties of Judeo-German (and certain non-Jewish dialects), is a historical change from long [o:] to [au] in words such as [braut] 'bread,' (standard German Brot; cf. Yiddish broyt) and Hebrew [taure {inverted e}] 'Tora' (cf. Yiddish toyre). In Judeo-Alsatian, this development affects even words which have an [0]-coloured vowel in (gentile) Alsatian but [a:] in Standard German, e.g. [naudl] 'needle as opposed to Dutch Judeo-German [no:dl] (Standard German Nadel). I have a French book on Judeo- Alsatian which lists typical words (primarily of Hebrew origin) and sayings; several "tableaux comparatifs" show some differences between Judeo-Alsatian, gentile Alsatian and Standard German, but the author just collected a few examples and explicitly says that he cannot provide a linguistic analysis: Uhry, Louis (1981), Un parler qui s'eteint: Le judeo- alsacien, Paris: Reproductions industrielles I found the book at Fraenckel's bookship in Strasbourg ... four years ago. [Leeson: this is the Librarie Cedrat, 19 rue de Marechal Foch, Strasbourg.] Some remarks on the widespread use of Judeo-Alsatian in the 19th century can be found in Chapter 5 of: Hyman, Paula E. (1991), The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, New Haven & London: Yale Univ. Press. Many scholars insist that what "we've called Judeo-German should be named "Yiddish" or, specifically, "Western Yiddish." As I see it, their reasons are essentially ideological; they want to stress that the traditional language of the Jews in German-speaking regions differs considerably from the language of German gentiles and shares important traits with "Eastern Yiddish." But if we apply the criteria linguists normally use in deciding whether X and Y are different languages or vairieties of a single language, the features of Judeo-German are not sufficient to classify it as a language separate from (gentile) German. When Jews migrated to Eastern Euopre, they did not simply take their (Judeo-) German dialects with them. Rather, these different varieties of Judeo-German mixed, new characteristics - not shared by any dialects in Germany - developed (including a number of grammatical features borrowed from Slavic languages) and new dialect distinctions emerged. As long as Jews in Germany (and Switzerland, Alsace, the Netherlands, etc.) continued to speak Judeo-German, there still was a certain linguistic unity between East and West, at least in the written medium. That unity was lost when (in connection with the Emancipation) Jews in Germany began to use Standard German in Latin letters for written communication and eventually gave up Judeo-German as a spoken medium, too, while those in Easter Europe developed a new literary language distinct from literary German: modern Yiddish. By similar processes of gradual divergence, culminating in the codification of separate literary standards, German and Dutch eventually became different languages, and so did Spanish and Portuguese, etc., etc. But I don't think that those modern distinctions should be projected back into earlier periods in time when they simply didn't exist yet. Yiddish proper (alias "Eastern Yiddish" -- the language of Mendele and Mendelyaners) has been brought to Western Europe by several waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Well into the 19th century, teachers were often "imported" from Poland, and in the reminiscenses of their former puils, one often reads about the "jargon" they spoke. On a much larger scale, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to cities in Germany, France, England, etc. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially after World War I; there may well have been a small Yiddish-speaking community in Strasbourg, too. In Germany, these "Ostjuden" were usually rather poor, and their assimilated brethren tended to look down on them; the situation in other countries is likely to have been similar. Today, Yiddish speakers in Western Europe are, for the most part, elderly Holocaust survivors and post-war refugees from Poland, Romania, Russia, etc., or, in some cities (notably Antwerp), chassidic or yeshivish groups that consciously maintain Yiddish as their main, everday langauge and pass it on to their children. Still confused? Or even more confused? I'll never succeed at explaining the Great Alsatian Mystery. Well, it is a lot more muddy than it was, but in some places it is getting clearer. What I think I heard here was that Western Yiddish and Eastern Yiddish are not connected by virtue of their origins being German in both cases, but are, in fact, separated by this phenomeneon. Oi am I confused. Dan Leeson, Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 14:34:46 -0400 (EDT) From: GDubrovsky@aol.com Subject: Prager's comment, poem for a gravestone A poem on a gravestone is not necessarily an academic exercise. The reader asked for suggestions and I offered a transliteration of part of a Yiddish poem that is on a stone. Is it the only and definitive applicable example that can be culled from the whole canon of Yiddish poetry? Of course not. But I did not set out to do that. I am sorry about the errors I made in the transliteration. I fail Prager's test for excellence. He fails my test for sensitivity. How silly to point out that the subject of the original poem is male not female -- as if poetry cannot rise above the specific and still be understood. But I am even more sorry that Prager failed to recognize the underlying metaphor in the reference to blood and tears. The man who chose to put this poem on his wife's gravestone did it deliberately. Both he and his wife, when she was alive, were aware of the wanton destruction of their families and their homes in Eastern Europe. Blood and tears -- bodily fluids if you will -- are never far from death. Bathetic? Maybe. But neither the poem, nor my farmer friend and poet were pedantic. Sincerely, Gertrude Dubrovsky 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 17:43:00 -0400 (EDT) From: SHirshan@aol.com Subject: Poem for a Stone: Sutskever's _Mother_ To answer some questions: Sutskever's poem that I quoted (in Vol 7.063) is called _Mother_ and has eight subdivisions of perfectly honed, unforgettable images. The quotation is section V111 - and the voice (or point of view) is the mother's. In t he first 7 sections he speaks to her - of his anger at her horrific death, his sorrow, his deep regrets. Such mournful lamentations. Section V111, is his mother's reply: "You speak to me straight - Don't, my child. It's a sin, a sin. Accept our separation as just. If you remain I will still be alive as the pit of the plum contains in itself the tree, the nest and the bird and all else besides." Always, he enfolds us in his affinity to nature. My quest: Where can I find this in the original mameloshn? Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan Boynton Beach, Florida ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 7.064