Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 14.036
April 13 , 2005

1) keyn shum hant (Aviva Astrinsky)
2) Geographic variations in New World Yiddish (Irwin Mortman)
3) Yiddish song (Sharon Bar Kochva)
4) spodek (Ruth Gay)
5) Saul Bellow and Yiddish (Seth L. Wolitz)
6) gefrayter (Noyekh Miller)

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1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: March 7, 2005
Subject: keyn shum hant

While Alan Astro translated the line correctly [Mendle 14.035], he made no
reference to the Hebrew word _shum_. Shum in Hebrew (as in shum davar) means
exactly what keyn means in German. This is a classical Yiddish usage of a
Hebrew word with its German parallel to achieve extra emphasis.

Aviva Astrinsky

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: March 30, 2005
Subject: Re: Geographic variations in New World Yiddish

I have noticed that in the USA aftsulokhes is used to signify a
"coincidence", when it means "in spite of." How this came to be is a
mystery to me.

Irwin Mortman

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 6, 2005
Subject: Yiddish song

A gutn alemen,

Ikh zukh a lid vos heybt zikh on mit di verter :

Tsi ken men aroyfgeyn in himl arayn
Un fregn bay got tsi s'darf azoy zayn
Tsi s'muz azoy zayn
Tsi s'ken oyf der velt dokh gor andersh nit zayn

Oyb emetser veys epes vegn dem lid (vu me ken es gefinen, vos iz der
hemshekh oder ver hot es gezungen), volt ikh geven dankbar far yeder
informatsie.

mit a dank foroys,

Sharon Bar Kochva

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: March 7, 2005
Subject: spodek

My father-in-law used to say: "Hak mir nisht in[?] spodek." I can't
remember exactly the word that went before "spodek"  but it seemed to
parallel the "hak mir nisht a tshaynik." Alas I never asked him what a
spodek was. Does this help to confuse matters?  But it certainly couldn't
have been a fur hat.

Yours,

Ruth Gay

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 13, 2005
Subject: Saul Bellow and Yiddish

I heard Saul Bellow speak some Yiddish in 1955 at the University of Chicago
with Rabbi Pekarsky, head of the Hillel House, where Bellow came fairly
frequently for the lectures and intellectual debates.

When I spoke with Irving Howe on some regular basis in the early seventies,
I never could got a straight answer from him about the translation of
Gimpel the Fool. I had the sense that Howe like Bellow were not active
readers of yiddish but were its friends. It was probably Greenberg, the
poet, who acted as postrodzhnik, first translator, and that Bellow was the
translator who gave it the polish. Howe may have had a hand in it too. It
was clear that Greenberg knew all the hard and rare words and the nuances.
(This is not in the least to put down either Howe or Bellow but I am
convinced that their Yiddish was a household Yiddish and the sophisticated
Yiddish style of Bashevis for his Warsaw cultured readership was not their
childhood fare.) Bashevis complained that he had to "simplify" his Yiddish
for the American readership. Also I suspect it was more likely Howe who
suggested toning down the negative allusions to Christianity in the text.
In any case, Bellow did the ingrate Bashevis a great mitzvah by making him
a household name and supported him for the Nobel Prize. But I have the
impression that relations between them were cool and Bellow preferred not
to do more translating.

In Seize the Day, Bellow has fun here and there using Yiddish syntactical
structures to catch speech patterns in English: Tommy, the anti-hero
states: "I'd have worked off my energy and felt better. Instead, I had to
distinguish myself--yet." [p.7 Penguin paper]. But I have not come across
in my experience reading Bellow the influence of the Yiddish classics or
even the awareness of our greatest stylists such as Bergelson or Der
Nister. He did little to push Yiddish at the University of Chicago and its
library holdings of Yiddish were extremely poor whereas, had he insisted,
there would be a few more texts besides the Forverts Complete Editions of
Perets and Sholem Aleykhem.

I suspect that Yiddish was a mame-loshn that he held warmly but it was a
past that had no real meaning for him but as a tribal tongue of his parents
and his inheritance but not as anything living creatively or even useful.
It was present like a piece of rye bread and a bowl of raisins and almonds
or cracked walnuts. Part of his landscape. Its destruction belonged to the
ugly realities of the century. But he was no active champion of the tongue,
its literature or culture. But it was his naturally and like Itsik Manger
he would say: Vos heyst kushn dayn shtoyb? Ikh bin dayn shtoyb./Un ver
kusht es, ikh bet aykh, zikh aleyn?

Seth L. Wolitz

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 13, 2005
Subject: gefrayter(?)

I include a question mark because I don't find this word in any Yiddish
dictionary, nor have I ever heard it in a Yiddish sentence.  But there is
the well-known Hebrew word (it means chump, sucker). And while it may be
related to M.German Gefreiter (equivalent to private first class) there is
the well-known aversion among Hebraists to build directly on German words.
Is this an exception, in which case the matter ceases to interest Mendele,
or is there a Yiddish link -- perhaps criminal argot -- our lexicographers
know not of?

Noyekh Miller

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End of Mendele Vol. 14.036

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