Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ____________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 23.003 June 16, 2013 1) Dona Dona (Stanley F Levine) 2) Dona Dona (Sandor Schuman) 3) Vi halt men shoyn bay zey? (Stanley F Levine) 4) kiemizm (Suzanne Faigan) 5) IB Singer's Nobel Prize address (Kalman Weiser) 6) Avrom Karpinovitch's Vilna stories (Helen Mintz) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: May 16 Subject: Dona Dona For the most part, the translation reads nicely in English, but it sometimes misses the point of the Yiddish.  For example, the second strophe - Turn toward the west, turn toward the east, And the rest - turn toward the south, - mistakes the number three "dray" for the verb "drey."  Even without the pasekh to help, the latter is impossible for a few reasons: -- since the narrator is speaking to more than one bird, the verb "drey" would have to be plural imperative: "dreyt" (with a final t). -- to be consistent, the translation is forced to insert the verb "turn" in the second line, with no equivalent in the Yiddish original. -- if the tree is abandoned, as the following line tells us, the birds did not "turn," they flew away. -- To make the imperative "drey" coherent, the third line would have to be another imperative, or a future, not past. -- if the translation's understanding of this third line as "the tree is left alone" were correct, the Yiddish would have read "der boym" not "dem boym." un azoy vayter.... Stanley F Levine 2)---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Dona Dona Date: May 15 Wikipedia has a useful entry on this song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Donna Sandor Schuman 3)---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Vi halt men shoyn bay zey Date: May 16 I had always understood this line as meaning, how are things (progressing) with respect to them (the other, yet-to-be-married-off daughters).  If this is a misunderstanding, can someone explain to me why? Stanley F Levine 4)---------------------------------------------------- Subject: kiemizm Date: May 15 Hello, I wonder what you might understand by the term "kiumizm" which I have found, in a list of other -isms (Yiddishism, Hebraism, culturism) in a Yiddish-language feature article from 1968. Thanks in advance for any comments, Suzanne Faigan 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 15 June Subject: IB Singer's Nobel Prize address Can anyone tell me where to find the text of the Yiddish version of IB Singer's speech upon winning the Nobel Prize? He can be heard giving the speech on Youtube but I cannot locate the actual text. Kalman Weiser 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: May 28 Subject: Avrom Karpinovitch's Vilna stories Sholem aleykhem: I am preparing a collection of translations of Avrom Karpinovitch's Vilna stories. I would appreciate help with the following: 1. Translation help: In the story "Vladek" (*Baym Vilner Durkhhoyf)*, Karpinovitch writes: "der lerer gershovits, vos mir hobn im gerufn katzefay mit di beblekh, hot farshtanen mit vemen er geyt tsum tish. . . " Does anyone have any suggestions for the translation of katzefay (or possibly katzefey or katzepey) mit di beblekh? There's really no other information in the story about Gershovits to help contextualize what this might mean. - Eliezer Niborski suggested it may be related to (kutzefayke): jacket; short pelisse; quilted jacket/coat;*iron. * old-fashioned outfit. And Solon Beinfeld weighed in with the following: "Dear Helen: Harry (Bochner) is checking with a Slavicist he knows to see if "katsap" with various endings is a common slang term.  In Yiddish its as far as I know just a derogatory term for an ethnic Russian (as opposed to aPole, Ukrainian, etc.) in an area of mixed population.  It doesn't have the feel of "upper crust" to me.  As for "beblekh," in Russian "bobyl" can mean a lonely old bachelor, seemingly derived from "bob" (bean).  Beans certainly are not an dish favored by Russians if they can help it. In Russian to get beans for your efforts is to get nothing.  Well, there is no end to conjectures, but if you go with katsap and beans, the students would seem to be mocking Gershovitsh as being like a poor Russian peasant. I am not familiar with the story, so I don't know what characteristics Gershovitsh had that students would pick on. Solon" Other suggestions out there? II. Glossary help: The manuscript includes a glossary giving background information about items that appear in the stories. Do you have information on the following? 1) Lerer Gershovits: a teacher at the Tores Emes school in Vilna during the interwar period. [from the story "Vladek" (*Baym Vilner Durkhhoyf*)] 2) Lerer Eyzikov (or Ayzikov):  a teacher and the principal at the Tores Emes School in Vilna during the interwar period. According to the story, "Valdek," he committed suicide in the Vilna ghetto. 3) Kahne-Bashke Funk: also a teacher at the Tores Emes school In Vilna. A daughter of the Funk family who owned a bookstore. 4) Does anyone have any information on Khayim Gordon? To date I've been able to find the following: Khayim Gordon: Khayim-Meyer Gordon, the shames of the Great Synagogue is described in "The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania" in the entry July 4, 1941 as "a big, tall Jew with a white beard" (Kruk 2002). 5) Siomke Kagan, reporter for the Vilner Tog during the interwar period. Any information about him would be helpful. I'd particularly like the dates of his birth and death. According to Liba Augenfeld, a native of Vilna, Kagan was a poet and a real character. He lived with the gypsies, learned their language, and translated some of their songs into Yiddish. 9) Date of birth and place and date of death and any other information on Feyvush Krasni (Krasny), the director of the Mefitse Haskole Library from 1918 until the Nazi invasion. Any information about him would be helpful. I'd particularly like the dates of his birth and death. 7) Khaykl Lunski , librarian at Strashun Library. Does anyone know the year of his death? According to Shavit, (Shavit, David. 1997. *Hunger for the Printed Word: Books and Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe*. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.), Lunski was murdered by the Nazis at Treblinka. 8) Does anyone know whether any of the interwar Vilna publishing houses published serialized shund novels? Which publishing houses? When Tall Tamara (Vilna Mayn Vilne. Tel Aviv: I.L. Peretz Publishing House, 1993.) moves out of the whorehouse she takes with her ale forzetzungn fun dem roman, Regine di Shpionke vos zi flegt koyfn yedn fraytik. Presumably this was a shund novel. 9) Date of death of Stan Bronetsky (b 1894). He was an actor, first in the Polish theatre and then in the Yiddish theatre in interwar Poland.  He married the actress Dina Halperin. They moved to New York in 1938, where he met with failure in the theatrical world. There is an entry on him in Der Leksikon fun Yidishn Teyater, vol 6 (1969). 10) Date of death of Leyb Shriftzetser.  He was an interwar Yiddish actor, known for his declematie of the works of various Yiddish writers. He was murdered at Ponar. There is an entry on him in Der Leksikon fun Yidishn Teyater, vol 5 (1967) as  well as in the first volume of Farloshene Shtern  by Yanosh Turkov (Tsentrale-Farlag fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentina, 1953.) 11) Does anyone have a record of publication of Karpinovitch's biography of Branislav Huberman, written in Hebrew and also released in Spanish (according to the Leksikon fun der Nayer Yidishn Literature)? Helen Mintz ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 23.003 Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. 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