Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 14.004 July 4, 2004 1) I.B. Singer (Jascha Kessler) 2) English translation of Goldfaden's plays (Anna Sternshis) 3) zhaleven (Sheldon Clare) 4) Mendele mit yidishe oysyes (Zachary Baker) 5) Yiddish stories in transcription (Lynda Aronin Cohen) 6) yarmulke (Ruben Frankenstein) 7) yarmulke (Hugh Denman) 8) akht tog peysekh (Hugh Denman) Visit Mendele on the Web: http://www.mendele.net 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 1, 2004 From: jkessler@ucla.edu Subject: Re I B Singer An anecdote: Some decades ago, I was telephoned by someone at UCLA and asked if I would not undertake to introduce the writer at UCLA to a rather unscheduled public lecture in the big hall of the Students Union. Apparently, some people out here at decided to sponsor him; they brought him out, and would receive him for a private gathering that evening after the discussion group with students following the talk. I agreed, of course. To my surprise the auditorium was filled to capacity, perhaps 1000 people. Morever, they had paid $5 for tickets. Probably because it wasnt on the season's lecture schedule and the budget was all assigned already. I waited outside with some guides, since he was late from the airport. When he arrived, I told him I was Professor Kessler, and would escort him. He said he had better visit the Men's first. I led him round, and while we were both facing the wall, micturating, I said, to slow down his evident nerves or anxiety, "Mr. Singer, there is no hurry. Nothing can start until the speaker is on the platform." To the which he replied testily, "Never mind! I dont like to keep an audience waiting!" I thought to myself, this is a serious man and modest. I led him out, spoke my 5 minutes' overview of the novels and what I thought of his importance; after which he went to the lectern and, pulling a folded sheaf of paper from his breast pocket, gave his talk. In the meanwhile, I nodded to the student guides in the wings to lead him off, and went down to sit and see and hear him myself. I had been sort of bemused by the look of that talk, on faded, scribbled, well-worn and dog-eared sheets, in fact papers gray with age. The talk itself took my rather by surprise: lots of railings about modernist literature, against chic trends like Marx and Freud and Existentialists, as if they were trends after the 1960s! and some allusions here and there to Spinoza. It was more an aimless gabble of garble than a lecture on writing, and it avoided Literature and politics as well, for the most part. I was astonished at its datedness and incoherence; outdated by many decades. What sort of boiler-plate nonsense was that, and when had he written it first? Never mind - the audience was rapt and it cheered and applauded, although it wasnt what is common nowadays, the standing ovation for the dog-catcher who comes to the school to advise owners to keep their animals on the lead and to pick up after them. I picked him a short while after the lecture, when he had finished greeting and signing some autographs, not books, because nothing was available on short notice, and drove him to another place on campus to meet interested students. En route, I told him I wrote too, when he asked, and then said, most earnestly, "Mr. Singer, I was honored to have been asked to introduce you, and really amazed that so many appeared on short notice without advertising, and even more, paid $5 to hear your lecture." He replied, "Frankly, sonny, I voodnt give ten cents to hear soch a lekshur myself!" We both laughed at that. Gimpel the Fool? Yes and no. Jascha Kessler 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 1, 2004 From: anna.shternshis@utoronto.ca Subject: English translation of Goldfaden's plays I was wondering if anyone could advise me whether Goldfaden's plays have been translated into English? Many thanks Anna Shternshis 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 1, 2004 From: Clare15905@aol.com Subject: zhaleven Someone had asked me for the English equivalent for the Yiddish word "zhaleven". I knew in my mind what it meant but could not think of an appropriate word in English. Weinreich translates it as "economizing". e.g. If you are eating a piece of pie and someone asks you to share it. You then give them a "brekl". My reply would be: Farvos zhalevest'u? A dank - Sheldon Clare 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 1, 2004 From: zbaker@stanford.edu Subject: Mendele mit yidishe oysyes Alas, some of us are saddled with e-mail programs that still do not display Yiddish. It has something to do with which programs (and which versions of these programs) our host institutions authorize us to use on our computers. Zachary Baker 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 1, 2004 From: Buby8@aol.com Subject: Yiddish stories in transcription Does anyone know where i can get Yiddish stories in transcription for our Yiddish club in Dayton Ohio? Lynda Aronin Cohen 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 2, 2004 From: ruben.frankenstein@orient.uni-freiburg.de Subject: Re: yarmulke To Lori Cahan-Simon's query cocerning the origins of the word YARMULKE (Mendele Vol. 14.003 of July 1, 2004), this is a loan-word from the Polish - "jarmulka" (the "l" crossed diagonally). Thus Ignatz Bernstein (Warsaw 1907), L.Beresniak (Paris 1939), and Even-Shoshan (Jerusalem 1983). Leo Rosten in "The New Joys of Yiddish" (New York 2001) cites Sholem Alejchem's etymology (Yidishes Folksbalt, 1884) of the Yarmelke from the hebrew - "Yaray may-Elo'a" (fearing God) but that must be regarded as a joke. Ruben Frankenstein Freiburg 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 3, 2004 From: h.denman@ucl.ac.uk Subject: Re: yarmulke In response to Lori Cahan-Simon's query concerning the etymology of 'yarmulke' [14.003], I should like to remark that I don't believe there is much that is obscure or controversial about the topic. The word is fairly obviously cognate with the many slightly varying forms to be found in the coterritorial Slav languages, e.g. Pol. 'jarmuLka/ jamuLka' (where L = Pol. crossed l), Belorus. & Uk. 'yarmolka', Bulg. 'ya(g)murluk' all designating some sort of 'head covering lacking a peak'. The ultimate origin is to be found in the Turkish 'yagmurluk' meaning 'raincoat' and spelled with an inverted circumflex accent over the g. The fluctuation of the g in the Bulgarian form and the r in the Slav forms is a reflection of the fact that the Turkish consonant spelled with the accented g is itself very indistinct. The semasiological shift from 'raincoat' or 'cape' to 'hat' scarcely represents a problem in view of the common factor of protection against the elements. The Yiddish stress on the first syllable is an indication that we should most readily seek the immediate progenitor of the Yiddish word in Polish in which (as in modern Czech and Slovak) stress was consistently on the first syllable till the sixteenth century. And let us not forget that Poland and the Ottoman Empire had a common frontier from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The Aramaic hypothesis on the other hand is clearly a case of Volksetymologie or plain fantasy, worthy perhaps of Tevye and the witty confabulations of Aramaic and Ukrainian that he weaves into his pseudo-Talmudic quotations. The existence of such a hypothesis - no rarity - may tell us much about the Ashkenazic sense of identity, but has precious little to do with linguistics. Hugh Denman London 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: July 3, 2004 From: h.denman@ucl.ac.uk Subject: Re: akht tog peysekh In response to Ruth Rischall's query re 'Akht tog peysekh' 14.003, a glance in Roberta Salzman's exemplary _Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Bibliography of His Works in Yiddish and English, 1960-1991_ tells us (under item A1102) that this work appeared in _Forverts_ from 8 Nov 1985 till 25 July 1986. Hugh Denman London ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 14.004 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu