Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 15.056
April 24, 2006

1) Call It Sleep (Bernard Cooperman)
2) bashert (Bert Silver)
3) yots and zhlob (Lynda)
4) mispalel zany (Felicitas Payk)
5) Fagin (Goldie Morgentaler)
6) Fagin (Sol Steinmetz)
7) farfl (Antonio Della Valle)
8) Macaronic couplet (Al Grand)
9) mayn yingele (Hershl Hartman)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date:  April 8
Subject: Call it Sleep

Thank you to Goldie Morgentaler for her note on the title of Henry Roth's
"Call it Sleep" but my question remains. The freighted metaphorical meaning
of the phrase at the end of the book is clear, but the phrase itself is
odd. What I am asking is whether anyone can think of a Yiddish phrase that
might have suggested this non-English locution to Roth.

Bernard Dov Cooperman

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 9
Subject: bashert

I recently attended an excellent production of the "Dybbuk" at the District
of Columbia JCC.  The director of the play changed the locale to the
country of Georgia and the actors who portrayed Georgian Jews wore
Cossack-like clothing. However, the actors portraying Georgian Jews kept
using the word "bashert," which was used in the original play.  "Bashert"
of course means fated or "meant to be" in Yiddish.

To the best of my knowledge the Georgian Jews did not speak Yiddish, so I
wondered if the Yiddish word might have been derived from Hebrew and may
have thus entered the vocabulary of Georgian Jews.  Checking a
Hebrew-English dictionary and asking several knowledgeable Hebrew speakers
convinced me that the word did not enter Yiddish from Hebrew.

In German "scheren" means to shear, and in Yiddish "basheren" refers to an
Orthodox boy's first haircut.  That, however, seems to me to be a stretch
to "bashert" meaning fated.

Can anyone on the Mendele listserve enlighten me as to the derivation of
"bashert"?  Am I wrong in thinking that Georgian Jews did not speak
Yiddish? Is there an explanation for the use of the word in the context of
a play located in Georgia or did the director use the word simply because
it appeared in the original play?

Bert Silver

[Moderator's Note:  Georgian Jews - who are not Ashkenazic - traditionally
speak a type of Georgian, not Yiddish.  "Bashert" is a word of Germanic
origin, cf. NHG bescheren.]

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 10
Subject: yots and zhlob etymology

There is a controversy raging in the National Scrabble Association. With a
recent infusion of 3,300 new words to the Scrabble dictionary, around 200
have been added to the existing list of nearly 900 Yiddish/Hebrew/Yinglish
words which are "kosher" for tournament play.

This has set us scrambling to update our Jewish word list. One of our
Scrabble mavens notes that "schlub" is a new word, but asks why not the
preferred Rosten-ized spelling of "zhlub" or "zhlob." We already have eight
ways to spell "gonif."

Same goes for "yutz." It is not in the Joys of Yiddish. Is it Yiddish? I've
heard it but no one in our crowd seems to know. I know it from my Israeli
circles as "yotzmach." I have always heard it as a derogatory word and
figured it stemmed from its root, tzemach, describing a person as a
"vegetable" and thanks to technology, also as a computer geek. But I don't
know if the dog wagged the tail -- if it was Yiddish that became
Hebraicized, or the other way around!

The question is, how did we end up with these words in "undzer" lexicon,
and what is the etymology?

Lynda

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 9
Subject: mispalel zayn

I often heard the term "mispalel zayn" when referred to praying. What
surprises me, though, is that I did not find anything about it in the net.
That is why I am not sure whether I am writing this term correctly, and
whether it even exists in this form - maybe I have heard something wrong.
So my questions are: 1. Does this term exist in the way I have rendered it,
and if not, does a similar term exist? 2. If I did not hear it completely
wrong, in which context is it used as opposed to davenen? If this glides
off into too religious matters, please stop me!

Felicitas Payk

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 12
Subject:  Fagin

Yes, I know that Fagin can also be a Jewish name, although I think it is
more commonly spelled Feigen or Fajgen when it is Jewish. However, it is
also a non-Jewish name (Irish rather than Anglo-Saxon--sorry for the
mistake). And the fact remains that Dickens took this name for the Jewish
villain of Oliver Twist because it belonged to Bob Fagin, a gentile boy he
knew when he was a child. If anyone would like chapter and verse on this, I
would suggest looking, most recently, into Peter Ackroyd's biography of
Dickens (p. 78 in the Harper/Collins edition), or Christopher Hibbert's The
Making of Charles Dickens (p. 77 in the Penguin edition), among numerous
other sources, the names of which I will be happy to supply if anyone would
like to get in touch with me. Dickens's knowledge of Jewish names (or of
Jews for that matter) does not seem to have been very extensive. The other
major Jewish figure in his novels is named Mr.

Riah--a name that sounds like it should be Jewish, but I am not sure that
it is, at least not as a family name.

Goldie Morgentaler

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 21
Subject: Fagin

Allow me to make this suggestion to everyone who has responded or intends
to respond to my message about David L. Gold's article on Dickens's Fagin:
it would be good to read the article first, because most of those who have
responded have given either information already in the article or
misinformation which the article corrects. The article, titled "Despite
Popular Belief, the name Fagin in Charles Dickens's The Adventures of
Oliver Twist Has No Jewish Connection," appeared in Beitrge zur
Namenforschung, new series, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 385-423, Winter, 2005,
Universittsverlag, Heidelberg, Germany. It would be better to build on the
article by correcting any mistakes one can find there or by adding new
information.

Sol Steinmetz

7)----------------------------------------------------
Date: April 12
Subject: farfl

The first meaning of "farfalla" (pl. farfalle) in Italian is "butterfly."
The bow tie and the pasta are called "farfalla" or "farfalle" because they
are butterfly-shaped.

Antonio Della Valle

8)----------------------------------------------------
Date:  April 12
Subject: Macaronic couplet

On page 536 of Max Weinreich's English edition of "History of the Yiddish
Language" and on page 51 of Benjamin Harshav's "The Meaning of Yiddish" is
this Russian/Hebrew couplet: "Mi piom, mi gulyayem / veato meylekh khay
vekayem!" I'm enthralled by the very Yiddish sounding rhythm of that
miniature couplet - despite its having not one Yiddish word (except
arguably "meylekh").  Neither Weinreich nor Harshav explain about the
origin of the couplet.  I'm therefore wondering if anyone can tell me how,
when and where this rhyme was (or is) used.  And (as they say at
presidential press conferences) I have a follow up question:

Does the Russian word "gulyayem" have have any relation to the Yiddish
"hulyen" (as, for instance, in "Hulyet, hulyet kinderlekh...")?

Al Grand

9)----------------------------------------------------
From: April 14
Subject: mayn yingele

Many singers and groups have recorded Morris Rosenfeld's moving poem/song,
but the most original and heartfelt version is found on The Bluestein
Family's LP, "fun vanen heybt zikh on a libe -- where does love come
from?", Greenhays Recordings GR716, marketed by Flying Fish, Inc.

The song is rendered as a bilingual duet, with the late Prof. Gene
Bluestein singing in Yiddish and daughter Frayda singing Aaron Kramer's
sensitive English translation.

Tellingly, Gene's liner notes state: "The predicament of this father who
only sees his child sleeping was shared by many other immigrants and
continues to this day."

Hershl Hartman

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End of Mendele Vol. 15.056


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