Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 08.078 October 25, 1998 1) The Well/Di Krenitse - A Naye CD (Andrew Cassel) 2) "Der Onheib" (Herman Taube) 3) der bay website (Philip "Fishl" Kutner) 4) Vos zol men zogn af der profesorke? (Louis Fridhandler) 5) Translation in Forward (Bob Hoberman) 6) translation in Forward (Elliott Raisen) 7) translations in Mendele (Naomi Fatouros) 8) Defining Galitsyaner and Litvak (Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan) 9) brokhes (Dovid Herskovic) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:23:21 -0400 (EDT) From: "Andrew Cassel" Subject: The Well/Di Krenitse - A Naye CD ikh bin punkt in maskem mit Adam Whiteman vegn "Di Krenitse" fun Khave Albershteyn un Di Klezmatics. s'iz a mekhaye tsu hern. 'kh'ob oykh gehat di gliklikhe gelegenhayt tsu zey zeyen in konzert do in Philadelphia -- s'iz geven a freylekher, vunderlekher nokh-mitog. k'hob nor eyn tayne -- zey hobn tsvishn di lider gornit dertseylt vegn di lider un di shraybers. lemoshl, hobn zey gezungen fun leivick's a lid, a sheyner, posheter vos heyst "zayt gezunt". m'zol visn az leivick hot es geshribn vegn a tsarishn tfise in sibir. un ikh volt mer visn vegn zhame telesin, ver hot geshribn a lid "ikh shtey unter a bokserboym" vos Khave hot gezungen azoy zis. nu, meyle; s'iz take a geshmak, finer forshtelung. Andrew Cassel 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:23:02 -0400 (EDT) From: HTaube218@aol.com Subject: "Der Onheib" Nor vos dershinen: Numer 27 "Der Onheib", a zhurnal aroysgegebn fun "Ko'ordinir Komitet fun Yiddishe kultur-klubn in Miami, Florida. Redaktor: Alek Silver. Redaktzie secretar: Noah Chaim Lewin. Der numer 27 hot a raychn oyswall fun artiklen, dichtungen un essayen fun, un vegn, Binum Heller, Ezaria Dobrushkes, Yitzchak Katzelesson, Yeho'soh, Aaron Tzeitlin, Yaakov Biber, Abrohom Hartszik, Motl Grubian, Alex Silver, Grunia Slutzki-Cohen, Ariel Koprov, Abrom Glazer, Yitzhak Ginzburg, Dr. Nosn Birenbaum, Herman Taube, Zina Scheibman, Moshe Rozen, Yisroel Kapito, Mair Schulman, Troym Katz-Hendler, Rochk-Leah Boyarsky, Boruch Goldstein, Yehudith K. Bregman, Charli Appelbaum, Esther Kerschman-Mulschtok, Yosef Shabbat, Merrill Leffler, Berl Medresh, Wolf Artzt, Leon Zarek, Yosif Levitt, Motl Derbarimdiker, S.Simchowitz, Grunia Slutzki-Cohen, Arie Gilinski, Judi Levin, Shmuel Katz, Der Nister, Pinie Plotkin, Bernard Konopko, Sz. Frug, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Feigele Kovarski, Chaya Ziepa, Emanuel S. Goldsmith, Abraham Sutzkever, Peretz Miranski, Michealin Amir, Semour Mann, Yechezkiel Mandelbaum, B. G. Chofetz, Chaya-Sarah Hershenbaum-Rauch, Chaim Lewin, Osher Schuchinski, S. Simchowitz, A. M. Weisenberg, Morris Rosenfeld, Nachum Summer, Herold Block, Miriam Bekerman, Samuel Eichenthal, Dr. G. Swerdlin, Chava Bodenstein. Dr. Elliott Perlin, Yiddith Zilberman, Albert Bainerman, Mendl Fligler, Helen Sendik, Nechamie Knobl, Reb Yisroel Baal-Shem-Tov -ZTL, Yitzik Manger, Zishe Landau, Sholom Hershkop, Hershl Altman, Benjamin Dolinski, Zalmen Furman, Zienia Kernkraut-(Golomb), Shlomo Zektzer, Zalmem Fayerwerker, Gavriel Weinshtein, Helen Helfand, Shmuel Eichenthal, Bfenig u.a. Oych a tzul bagrisungen un brief fun Mordche Tzanin, Elie Wiesel, Lilke Majzner, Luis Schuchinski un andre schreiber un lezer. Ihr kent dem Zhurnal bakume bay: "DER ONHEIB" 231 174th Street Apt.1120 Miami ,Florida, 33160-3318. Telephone: 305-935-9907. Herman Taube 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 19:19:18 -0400 (EDT) From: "PHILIP \"FISHL\" KUTNER" Subject: der bay website How does one keep a secret today?? I wanted to work on the site and try to develop it and clean up the errors. Therefore I told only 3 people to check it. After reading an article in the paper about megasearches, I put in Yiddish club. Lo and behold up comes my secret website. It isn't fair. Anyway, if you get a chance to do some browsing, stop by and say hello. Please be sure to put in suggested additions, deletions, and corrections. http://www.derbay.org mit frayndshaft, Philip "Fishl" Kutner San Mateo, CA 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:57:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Lfridhan@aol.com Subject: Vos zol men zogn af der profesorke? Khaverte Sylvia Schildt (8.075, 1) fregt vos me zol zogn af Ruth Wisse vos zi makht khoyzek fun yidish un fun di vos interesirn zikh in mame loshn un meynen az s'iz a neytike arbet. Efsher zol men zogn gornisht, gole gornisht. Farvos zoln mir zikh ergern, un laydn agmes-nefesh ven azamin gornisht vi Ruth Wisse zogt epes krum? Can she be surrounded by so many bigots at Harvard as to feel personally threatened? Maybe it is simply an irrational fear of hers. She seems to take on some kind of protective coloration which may not be necessary. I can't think of it, but I dare say Yiddish does have a word for right wing authoritarian personalities who suffer such unbearable, irrational fear for themselves as to escape into so cowardly position as "Identification with the Aggressor" (in Anna Freud's apt insight); and at the same time feel driven to violate Emil Fackenheim's suggested 614th commandment: "Thou shalt not afford Hitler a posthumous victory." She knows very well that Yiddish language and culture were direct targets for annihilation. But.... Professor Wisse: "Hey! Listen! Good news! They've been licked! You don't have to join them!" She does sound to me to be rather a pathetic personality. How thoroughly irrelevant SHE is! Zi makh a lebn fun yidish, un dafke bayst zi di hant vos git ir shpayzung. Hot ir gehert a bisl?!? Louis Fridhandler 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:20:08 -0400 (EDT) From: "R. Hoberman" Subject: Translation in Forward Leah Zazulyer wrote about the poet/writer Rabandranth Tagore. "The Victorian translators of Tagore, who were British, thought that there was a need to "ELEVATE" his language. By the same token, some translators are still trying to elevate Yiddish along the lines of some Victorian concepts." The irony of it is that the Victorian translator of Tagore was: Tagore. He himself selected among his own poems those he thought would go over in England, and "translated" them into acceptable style. People who know his poetry in Bengali say the English versions are a pale imitation. Translating is always full of difficult choices, always questions of what to sacrifice for what and whom to please. To do a great job takes creative genius on the level of writing great original work, at least linguisticly, and then the next generation might not think it was such a good job after all. I too wish the English Forward didn't translate beautiful Yiddish into English jingles. Bob Hoberman 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 06:48:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Elliott Subject: translation in Forward I tend to agree with Leah [08.075]. It disturbs me to read the translations and realize that the Yiddish worrds in mayny cases are completely different. In my opinion two translations should be given the literal one and the poetic one. Elliott Raisen 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 19:43:14 -0400 (EDT) From: NFatouros@aol.com Subject: translations in Mendele Dear People, I tried sending this message privately to Sylvia Schildt but it bounced. So I am resending it to all of you with some alterations to the text. Except for an occasional exclamation or remark, I did not hear Yiddish spoken in my childhood home. My Lower East Side father heard and spoke it in his family, but my mother didn't in her Cleveland home. . In fact, like many other middle class Jews of German or French background, she thought Yiddish was a debased form of German. Yet, when she grew very old, she used a lot of little Yiddish expressions which I think she learned not from my father so much as from the Hadassah ladies she worked with. Also, from some source, she got the notion that Yiddish was an " antique" form of German, not really a debased one, which gave it a certain "cachet" in her eyes. I joined the Mendele mail group out of curiosity. In the beginning I made great efforts to translate every message, and then, every other message, and now, I seldom read through but one of the messages in each compilation. What I had to do and still must do is translate a message mentally into German, which, alas, I do not know very well, and then imagine what the Yiddish would sound like. Since my father and I stopped going to Brooklyn to visit his Yiddish-speaking sister and mother when WW II broke out, (he had to give up his Buick because of the gas shortage) my idea of what Yiddish sounds like is ridiculously vague and is not much aided by comics who shpiel their jokes with New-York- Brooklyn-Yiddish intonations. So I appreciate it very much when people in this mail group bother to translate what they write in Yiddish. This helps me and maybe some other equally ignorant subscribers very much. As I muddled through the Yiddish paragraphs of Ms. Schildt's message today, I was delighted to see that I was not mistranslating greatly what I was reading, as I corroborated what I had done mentally with Ms. Schildt's own English paragraphs. One of these days I will begin making a greater effort to re-learn the Hebrew alphabet so that I can read certain books, especially Yizkor books. I did take some Hebrew lessons as a little girl, but I hated going to Hebrew school since I had very little free time as it was. I had several piano, singing, and eurythmic dancing lessons at Juilliard School of Music, and later weekly ballet and art lessons. When my Hebrew teacher told me that Hebrew rarely used vowel signs, which I had learned, that was the last straw. I rebelled, and my mother gave in. She didn't like Ansche Chesed anyway. She preferred Temple Emmanuel, where I was bas-mitzvahed without having learned anything there about Judaism or Hebrew for that matter!. But now I am struggling to teach myself Russian (I learned modern Greek fairly well when I was in my thirties.) Trying to teach myself both the Hebrew alphabet and the Russian is rather difficult for me, as I am sure you can understand. Still I wonder how my grandfather's first cousin managed to teach himself Bulgarian within a few months well enough so that he could assume a professorship at Sofia University, at a time when he wasn't permitted to teach in Odessa, where he had been educated, unless he converted. So this is just to tell you, in my windy way, why I am so grateful to Ms. Schildt for having taken pains to do her own translation. If more people on the list would do this, I would learn Yiddish, at least, transliterated Yiddish much faster, and obliquely, I might even improve my knowledge of German. Naomi Fatouros 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:18:49 -0400 (EDT) From: SHirshan@aol.com Subject: Defining Galitsyaner and Litvak For a lecture I'm working on for Brandeis Groups, I would appreciate it if our illustrious Mendelyaner would create defintions for _Galitsyaner_ and _Litvak_ including the geography, the linguistics, their warfare, customs, attitudes, etc. I've seen the gefilte fish boundary line that Roskies reports. Any other culinary distinctions of note? Thanking you in advance for helping me with my homework; this sounds like fun, Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan 9)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 12:00:30 -0400 (EDT) From: David Herskovic Subject: brokhes di shale of a brokhe of kompyuters volt zikh gepast far aysevn ven er hot osgenart zan tate. kompyuters est men nisht, tu vi ken men makhn a brokhe? v'im timtse loymer klayder in shikh in azoy vater iz take a shvere kashe. ober an erenstere shale iz vos far a brokhe makht men of viagra. nu, di gedoyle haposkim hobn gepaskent az di brokhe iz yale veyovoy. ayn daye iz ober farhan az men makht of deym di zelbe brokh vi of mon, val okh in viagra zogn di mevinim ken men shpirt ale tamim. (far di nokh-brokhe shrabt mir perzeyndlekh; ikh vil kholile nisht kalye makhn di kindergartn kinderlekh. Di vos zenen loy olayni avek fin viagra rift zikh az zay zenen nistalek gevorn mit a mises neshike. ayn shale hob ikh nor viazoy rift men viagra of yidish? kol tiv in a git vinter, Dovid Herskovic ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 08.078 Address for the postings to Mendele: mendele@lists.yale.edu Address for the list commands: listproc@lists.yale.edu Mendele on the Web: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mendele.html