Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ____________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 19.010 August 23, 2009 1) bankes (Bernard Katz) 2) bezhenets (Bracha Weingrod) 3) gogel (Daniel Kennedy, Moyshe Taube) 4) zeraze (Dina Lvias) 5) zeraze (Vincent Homolka) 6) zeraze (Leonard Fox, Yankl Stillman) 7) Mark Rakovsky (Eli Rosenblatt) 8) mashkit (Z. D. Smith) 9) The secular and the worldly in Yiddish literature and Yiddish life (Z. D. Smith) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 12, 2009 Subject: bankes Over 12 years ago, Rick Turkel in response to Walter Golman's query (Mendele 6.102) said, "the word "bankes" comes from Polish/Ukrainian "ban'ki," which are, in fact, cups." No one seemed to comment on this remark at the time. Can some of our distinguished students of Yiddish etymology opine for us whether this is indeed the likely derivation? Lomir ale zayn shtark un gezint! Bernard Katz 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 11, 2009 Subject: bezhenets This clearly means refugee, as seen throughout Falk Zolf's Yiddish Classic, "On Foreign Soil." I read this in translation. It contains increasing transliteration, which I found very difficult as a Yiddish reader. Martin Green (the translator) chose the German roots, which turned the word "tsvey" (two) into "zwei," and "farshteyn" into "verstehen" and "norvos" (recently) into "nur-was." Nontheless, this is a fascinating personal account of a young man living through the turmoil of Russia from about 1913 until 1926, when he emigrated to Winnipeg, where to our great fortune he became the teacher and later principal of the I.L. Peretz Shul. Bracha Weingrod 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 11, 2009 Subject: gogel In the version of the text I've seen "tsvey antisemitn" funem band "Oremeun freylekhe" (Ale verk, Buenos aires, 1955) the word is written with a nun, not a giml. Emes, undzer held hot zikh noykem geven in der bord. Ongeton zikh un oysgeputst, take nor vi a kale, fardreyt di vontses aroyf, zikh farlozt a langn nogl un getrogn a shnips "asher loy shnipsu avoyseynu" ...if that helps (or just confuses matters more) Daniel Kennedy [Editor's note: Moyshe Taube points also to "nogl" instead of "gogl" in the text and adds that "Letting grow one's fingernail (presumably of the pinkie) was presumably one f the ornaments of the "frant"."] 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 10, 2009 Subject: zeraze I don't know the context in which you heard, or read, the word "zeraze." There is a word in Russian, "zaraza," which means contagion. Spelled as you did it, it looks like the Yiddish version of the same. The word possibly also exists in Polish. Dina Lvias 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 10, 2009 Subject: zeraze Lillian Siegfried asks the meaning of "zeraze." In Harkavy's dictionary, the Yiddish word "zaraze" is defined as "contagion, contagious disease; pestilence," with cognate verb "zarazen" meaning "to infect." He also gives the word "zaraz" or "zares" as meaning "immediately, at once." These words look Slavic in origin. Vincent Homolka 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 10, 2009 Subject: zeraze Re: Lillian Siegfried's query about "zeraze": the word is actually "zaraza," meaning "infection" or "contagion" in Russian, and used in Yiddish too with the same meaning. It is also employed to describe a very unpleasant person when the speaker wants to avoid using an obscenity. Leonard Fox [Editor's note: Yankl Stillman adds that "zeraze" is "also in Litvak Yiddish pronounced zaraze. Literally, it means an "infection." It is used as a put-down to a haranguing woman, much like kholera is in Polish. It is indeed a Yiddish, as well as Russian and possibly Polish, word..."] 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 21, 2009 Subject: Mark Rakovsky Khaveyrim, I recently came across a 1929 Yiddish translation of "Bataula," the first novel by a black writer to win the Prix Goncourt. The Warsaw publisher Mark Rakovsky was also responsible for various other translations into Yiddish , including novels and stories by Cheng Sheng, Panait Istrati, Edmondo De Amicis, and Pierre Loti, among others. Little seems to exist about Mark Rakovsky, but Christian Rakovsky, the Bolshevik and Soviet diplomat, shares a name. Does anyone know if there is a connection between these two men, if they are in fact the same person, or just who Mark Rakovsky was? mit frayndlikhe grusn, Eli Rosenblatt 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 23, 2009 Subject: mashkit In a portion of Dovid Katz's contribution to the YIVO Encyclopedia of the Jews in Eastern Europe, he makes reference to "mashkit," a characteristic typeface that was only used for printing Yiddish texts in the early days of Hebrew-letter books. In "Words On Fire" (p. 76 in the Google Books copy) he goes into a little more detail, explaining that it originated with the brothers Helitz in Cracow, no later than the 1530s, and persisted in some places azh till the 19th century. He mentions that it is also called "Meshit." http://cf.uba.uva.nl/nl/publicaties/treasures/text/t08.html doesn't mention Mashkit by name, but refers to a style, of which the Isny type is an early example. That must be the same style described by Professor Katz. And Professor Katz himself has referred me to further articles by Herbert Zafren, which I have sadly not yet been able to locate. All things considered, I have not yet been able to find, online, any graphic example of this style of typeface so identified. It's possible I've seen it and simply not known it as such, given its supposed survival so late into the history of published Yiddish. That said, can any Mendelyaner point me to some image or images on the web in order to demonstrate this unique Yiddish typeface, apparently so different from the standard square characters, as well as the Rashi script? I even wonder about spelling its name in hebreishe oysyes. Z. D. Smith 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: August 23, 2009 Subject: The secular and the worldly in Yiddish literature and Yiddish life Periodically a debate breaks out, where someone contends --- aiming at the many nit- geboyrne learners of Yiddish, many of whom presumably have little to no religious education --- that without a thorough background and understanding of Jewish religious life, one can never truly speak or understand Yiddish or Yiddish culture. This is usually eventually deflated, in the spirit of pluralism, as terribly overblown, at best, and someone points out the great portion of Yiddish literature that falls within the greater European humanist tradition. But I'm interested in how much leeway there was in the Yiddish communities of old (the answer is seems clear when talking about today, but for all I know there might be much more going on) for the actual apostate, for the non-frum Jew. That is to say, I can only assume that in the Yiddish-speaking urban communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, there was some proportion of yidn who simply didn't go to shul, who ate khazerfleysh, who ran with shikses and spent Friday nights at the cabaret. We know this to be the case, but did they then simply stop speaking Yiddish? Did all those secular Jews simply assimilate, and cast off their Yiddish identities? And if not, where is their literature? When I think of Yiddish literature, what I think of still does, almost always, take place in a very traditionally religious context, abounding with yeshiva bokhrim, rabonim, and the traditional folkways of the khsidim, or their less effusive --- but no less pious --- Northern cousins. If it's very edgy and forward-thinking, it might concern a free-thinking rabbi's son wrestling with his father's faith. I am curious if there is any body of work that does reflect a truly secular lifestyle. I am curious because Yiddish's image is, of course, multivalent; it was and is the language of everyday life, including everything that anybody does during the day that doesn't happen in shul. And, of course, how many Yiddish speakers, or even Yidishistn, were and are also deeply involved in politics and labor organization. So I am somewhat curious to find that I can't necessarily think of too many Yiddish depictions of the vices that I enjoy --- kortnshpiln, bronfn --- that aren't basically presented as "things which you should forgo, and lern toyre instead." I'm also interested in the treatment, within this hypothetical body of secular Yiddish literature, of the very ingrained and significant component of religious idiom and terminology in the general Yiddish language. Shlogn kapores, dos koshere khazer-fisl, the many reflexive borekh-hashems that fill Yiddish's expressive powers: it is my intuition that they would remain and be employed even by a native speaker in a Yiddish community who himself had no religious practice in the same way that more than one atheist today will still mutters a relieved "thank god." But I don't have the corpus yet to back up that intuition. In general I am confused by the contrast between the many sentiments I hear about goles- natsyonalizm, the politics of Yiddish, and the extraordinary, very earthbound acquired culture of a millennium spent bouncing around Europe; and the wholly religious milieu in which the entirety of my current conception of Yiddish literature seems actually to take place. Z. D. Smith ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 19.010 Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead, direct your mail as follows: Material for Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements, i.e. announcements of events, commercial publications, etc., always in plain text (no HTML or the like) to: [email protected] (in the subject line write Mendele Personal) Material for postings to Mendele Yiddish literature and language, i.e. inquiries and comments of a non-commercial or publicity nature: [email protected] IMPORTANT: Please include your full name as you would like it to appear in your posting. No posting will appear without its author's name. Submissions to regular Mendele should not include personal email addresses, as responses will be posted for all to read. In order to spare the shamosim time and effort, we request that contributors adhere, when applicable, as closely as possible to standard English punctuation, grammar, etc. and to the YIVO rules of transliteration into Latin letters. A guide to Romanization can be found at this site: http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=275 All other messages should be sent to the shamosim at this address: [email protected] Mendele on the web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu/ To join or leave the list: http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/mendele _______________________________________________ Mendele mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/mendele
