Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 09.068 March 3, 2000 1) Kotik's _mayne zikhroynes_ (Noyekh Miller) 2) porechke (Larisa Pecherskaya) 3) porechke (wlodek goldkorn) 4) di alte hagode (mitja farber) [Moderator's note] 5) mershkutz & khojzek (itsik shteyn) 6) right to ask a question (Larry Rosenwald) 7) Ashlekh, patelnye (Perl Teitelbaum) 8) Victor Packer (Ron Robboy) 9) Yiddish idioms (Barry Goldstein) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 17:14:37 -0500 From: Norman Miller Subject: Kotik's _mayne zikhroynes_ Abraham Joshua Heschel writes (09.063) that he's shocked by the passages in Yekhezkel Kotik's _mayne zikhroynes_ that are less than flattering about hasidic family life in the Kamieniec of his day. He wants to refute Kotik with evidence from interviews with "men and women that truly represent the Chassidim of yesteryear". Since Kotik was born in 1847 and was describing his home-town situation as he saw it in the 1850's and 1860's, I don't see how he can turn the trick by talking with people who were born decades later. Such materials are about as relevant to the matter at hand as is the invitation to visit Boro Park, welcome as that might be on other grounds. Now if we had evidence about hasidic family life dating from the period in question... My own trouble with Kotik is that he was given to pop-theorizing and sloppy thinking. His simplistic account of the rise of hasidism is a prime example of what the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard once called "if-I-were-a-horse" theory. Begin with noting that Jewish life in eastern Europe was highly stratified, follow with the inference that the poor must have felt humiliated -- and behold! an "explanation". That's why I'm skeptical about the "hungry wives and children left sitting in their cold homes". Granted, there are other accounts (beginning with the Brody kherem) that depict many hasidim of an earlier day as irresponsible loafers, boozers and the like. But even if that's the sober truth it doesn't follow that the scene at home was as cheerless as Kotik says it was. Did he see such blighted homes with his own eyes? He doesn't say. Making unwarranted inferences is an occupational hazard of the Platonist and I suspect Kotik's making up facts again: if the father is living it up with his cronies, then perforce the rest of the family sit and suffer. Maybe so, but I'm with Aristotle and insist on evidence. And if there isn't any? nu, az nisht iz nisht. This quibble notwithstanding, _mayne zikhroynes_ is a fine literary work and should give most readers considerable pleasure. In the weeks ahead The Mendele Review will be publishing more excerpts, in both romanized and annotated Yiddish versions. Noyekh Miller 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 21:10:26 -0500 (EST) From: "Larisa Pecherskaya" Subject: porechke Mayn bobe hot mir tomed gezogt, az nor di reyte porechke (currant) me ruft porechke, oder di shvartse is nit keyn porechke, dos is smorodine. Zi iz geven fun Mogilevske gubernie (Vaysrusland) un ale ire fraint un fraynd hobm genitst farsheydene verter far 'black currant' - smorodine, un far 'red/ white currant'- porechke. Lemoshl, lomir geyn keyfn porechke , moline un smorodine (nito keyn loshn rabim). Larisa Pecherskaya. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 15:08:42 -0500 (EST) From: "Wlodek Goldkorn" Subject: porechke porechke is currants. It comes from Polish porzeczka (nothing to do, if you want to know yiddish you have to learn Polish, as Chone Shmeruk z.l. once wrote). wlodek goldkorn firenze 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:28:17 -0500 (EST) From: "Mitja A. Farber" Subject: di alte hagode tayere mendelyaner! kh'voyn in moskve un in undzer (misnaged) shul hob ikh gekeyft an oysgabe fun an yidisher hagode - af yidish! mit di farsheydene mayses fun dubner magid un andere raboynim. tsum badoyern, emetser hot fun ir aroysgerisn etlekhe zaytn un nebekh di titl-reshime. efsher kont mir a bisl helfn - dos bukh heyst "goales (giml-alef-vov-lamed-sov) isroel; hagode shel peysekh; mit zeks un fuftsik peyrushim beivri-taytsh" - vu hot es gekont vern dershinen? (ikh ken vegn etlekhe drukerayen - "haalmana veakhim rom" in vilne, un in varshe zenen eykh geven a sakh vemen tsudrikn - nor s'volt geven prekhtik tsuvisn geney dos drukeray un a yor fun an aroyslozn). a sheynem dank. mit di yidishe grusn fun moskve, mitja farber [Moderator's note: the reference for the hagode in question can be found in the illustrated bibliography of Yiddish hagodes in Shtetl (http://metalab.unc.edu/yiddish/library/agodes.html): Kranz, Jacob ben Wolf, ca.1740-1804 Geulat Yisrael: Hagadah shel Pesah : mit zeks un fuftsig perushim be-Ivri Taytsh ... Sipure nisim... Mishle David Vilna : Bi-defus ve-hotsaot ha-Almanah veha-ahim Rom, 1893. 102p., 21 cm. This hagode was written by Jacob ben Wolf Kranz, the famous Maggid of Dubno. Iosif Vaisman] 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 13:56:08 -0500 (EST) From: shteyn@juno.com Subject: mershkutz & khojzek Lilian Leavitt in mendele 09.062 frejgt zikh nokh ojf dem batajt fun"mershkutz". baj uns in bukovine flejgt men nutzen dos wort vi an epitet far ejnem vos is mit der tzajt gevorn nokh mer shejgetz(shkutz) vi er is geven. bikhlal is shejgetz a junger goj, ober ojkh an azus-punim, a frekher jungerman, un as der shejgetz vakst -- vert er mer shejgetz oder"mershkutz". elozor oisher vil visen vos mejnt khojzek. natirlikh kumt dos fun hebreishn khazok=shtark zajn, ober grud khojzek mejnt oblakhn Zajt gezund, itsik shteyn 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 11:33:42 -0500 (EST) From: Larry Rosenwald Subject: right to ask a question With respect to the dispute over Seth Wolitz' response to Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan's question about Ruth Wisse - I thought it might be worth stating my own sense of that dispute. I took the original question to be, whether Ruth Wisse had some obligation to restrict her public utterances to those having something to do with Y. L. Perets, for whom I gather her Harvard chair is named, and indeed some obligation to make her public utterances be in concord with Perets' spirit and aims. Seth Wolitz's answer was, as I understood him, no and no. I agree with him on both counts. I think that holding a tenured position in an academic institution, whether with an endowed chair or not, means above all that one is free, and so almost obliged, to state what one thinks and believes as an intellectual and a scholar. Surely Ruth Wisse is doing just that. I disagree with a lot of what she says, both about the fate of Yiddish and about Israeli and American politics, but I think that by articulating her positions she's doing just what she should be doing. There's another question, too, which I'll raise but not comment on, and that is, mightn't it be possible that, in Ruth Wisse's view, what she's doing is in fact _in accord with _ Perets' legacy and spirit? I can well imagine she might argue that it is. All the best, Larry Rosenwald 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2000 16:29:23 -0500 (EST) From: PTAW85@aol.com Subject: Ashlekh, patelnye Itzik Goldenberg guessed "that ashlekh is some kind of green vegetable" Ashlekh is scallions. Patelnye is frying pan, as Itzik figured out. It may have come from Polish patelnia. Perl Teitelbaum Queens 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 00:50:50 -0500 (EST) From: Ronald Robboy Subject: Victor Packer Henik Sapozhnik inquires about actor Victor Packer [09.063] -- or rather about actor/poet/radio personality Packer. The poet part was new to me, and most intriguing. Where might we find the poetry Henik describes? My own interest in Packer was sparked by his having joined, apparently very soon upon his arrival in America, the experimental theatre group Undzer Teater, which existed for only one season in 1924-25 in New York. Growing out of the Yidisher Teater Gezelshaft, a theater studio project founded by Mendl Elkin and publishing the "Tealit" monthly journal, Undzer Teater had a joint artistic directorate consisting of Elkin, Peretz Hirshbein, H. Leyvik, Dovid Pinsky, and Khayim Shneyer, and a company of very skilled and serious actors. Their one season consisted of three productions: Pinsky's "Der letster sakhakl" (my translation a la 1980s: The Bottom Line); Elkin's reconstruction of An-sky's "Tog un nakht"; and "Shtekhik drot" (Barbed Wire), a dramatization by Ayzik Raboy of his own first novel, "Her Goldenbarg." Work I did at YIVO two years ago on this dramatization made me more aware of Packer. Playing an old, widowed and somewhat unhinged gentile farmer on the plains of the North Dakota, Packer had a major role as the principal antagonist to Raboy's nominal subject, Mr. Goldenbarg, the successful Jewish farmer. Packer's son had fallen in love with Goldenbarg's daughter (or niece, in the original novel), who was in turn in love with a young Jewish farmhand. This was the conflict driving the action of the play. The Jewish love interest was played by Clara Miller, who was then married to Packer. By the time Zylbercweig was writing about Packer in the Lexicon article Henik mentions (late 1950s), Packer had evidently been married to someone else for some time. Goldenbarg was played by Egon Brecher, who worked in Vienna before coming to New York; he eventually showed up in Hollywood, where he had a role in Zanuck's "The Sins of Man," a screen adaptation by Dr. Ossip Dymow [sic!] of Joseph Roth's novel "Job, the Tale of a Simple Man." The Raboyesque role of the young Jewish farmhand, the one beloved by Clara Miller's character, was played by Jacob Bleifer, who, like Brecher, had also distinguished himself in German theatre, working with Reinhardt and others, but had come to America as a Yiddish actor with the Vilner Troupe. Packer's son in the play, the one competing for the Jewish girl, was played by Yoysef Grinberg, who later changed his name to Joseph Green for his work as director of several classic Yiddish films ("A brivele der mamen," "Yidl mitn fidl," etc.) as well as some acting credits in Hollywood. Zylbercweig reported that actor Yankev Bergrin, who was playing Green(berg)'s brother, was absent from the last few performances of "Shtekhik drot" and that his role was performed by Yehude Bleich. Though Bleich had a long and respectable career as an actor, my own interest in him stems from his having produced "Dos goldene land," a probably unremarkable box office hit of 1943 with Lebedeff, Ludwig Satz, and Leo Fuchs -- unremarkable except for the utterly remarkable insertion of a Wagnerian quotation it contains in the verse to (at least) one of the songs by Alex Olshanetsky. Well, that was tangential. But what may be of help to Henik is that Packer's substantial collection of papers is held by YIVO -- nearly nine linear feet. The "Guide to the YIVO Archives" describes it has containing "papers pertain[ing] to his stage and broadcasting career...[s]kits, lyrics and poems written or adapted by Packer" and other material. When I was at YIVO, just before the big move to the new Center, it was not possible to access the Packer Collection, so I cannot say more about what is in it, though I am dying to know. At the time, it was described to me as "extensive" but "not processed." I took the latter to mean that there was no finding aid, and that the items may not be wholly organized by document type. Do let us know, Henik. Ron Robboy 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 14:04:18 -0500 (EST) From: Barry Goldstein Subject: Yiddish idioms Re Naomi Ribner's request for idioms (from Mendele 09.065) -- These subjects are exactly the theme of James Matisoff's book _Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears_. I found it at the NYBC and have seen it on various book lists posted on Mendele and elsewhere. Barry Goldstein ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 09.068 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu http://metalab.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html