Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 1 no. 32 June 26, 1991 1) Introduction (Ari Davidow) 2) Notes on Yiddish (Noyekh Miller) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 25 Jun 91 18:39:10 pdt From: well!ari@apple.COM Subject: bio? Hi, I'm Ari Davidow. I write a weekly column on Jewish telecommunications for the Northern California Jewish Bulletin. I also host the Jewish discussion area on the WELL (a commercial computer conferencing system based in Sausalito, CA), and edit the E-HUG (electronic Hebrew Users Group) digest. For a living I do desktop publishing, specializing in Hebrew and Yiddish. I have to confess that, while, I have considerable fluency in Hebrew, my Yiddish knowledge is limited to American- isms, and that knowledge of the specialized characters used by Yiddish that are common to all typographers in my position. On the other hand, one of the reasons why I am so excited by Mendele and yiddish.mail is the way they prove (conclusively, imho) that Yiddish is not a minor sideline of the Hebrew alphabet, but an important and living language. The existence of these journals give some weight to my demands of software manufacturers that Israeli Hebrew is not the sole relevant use to which the Hebrew alphabet is used, and may ultimately result in better tools for us to use in communicating in Yiddish (and Hebrew). At least, that's what I'm hoping to see. ari Ari Davidow Internet: ari@well.sf.ca.us From CIS: >INTERNET: ari@well.sf.ca.us From Applelink: ari@well.sf.ca.us@internet# "If there were a computer for the rest of us, it would know how to work in the languages other than English that the rest of us speak. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Jun 91 From: Noyekh Miller (nmiller@trincc) Subject: Notes on Yiddish [Note: what follows is a bid at getting some literary discussion going. The writer is himself not competent at this, but if someone now were to come along and do the job properly..] Vayhi Noyekh Miller 'Vayhi bimey akhilas kest.' Thus Mendele begins his story, "Seyfer Hagilgulim". A typical opening for Mendele: droll but also tsu der zakh. First a look at how it's done. 'Vayhi': what follows will be biblical. 'Vayhi bimey': biblical, specifical- ly the Megile Esther, read on the feast day of Purim. Now contradictions. 'Vayhi bimey akhilas' is unexpect- ed since 'akhilas' is more closely associated with 'akhilas moror': the feast turns bitter. Recall as well that megile and gilgul have a common root: things are turning over, changing. Finally 'vayhi bimey akhilas kest': switching from Hebrew to Yiddish signals a move (changed, mgilgul gevorn) from the sacred to the pro- fane, from a joyous, even licentious, feast day to the routine and regulated life of room and board, from adult competence in avoiding danger (without God's help in the case of Purim be it noted) to immature dependen- cy. 'Hamavdil beyn koydesh l'khoyl'. Mendele, instead of preserving that distinction, conflates the sacred with the secular, makes things seem heymish, cozy. But heymish with a twist, a mordant restatement of his principal theme: that Jews who were once a people capable of dealing with their own destiny have (at least in eastern Europe) become a band of feckless beggars and shlimazels. An isolated instance? Hardly. Mendele does it dozens of times. And here's Sholem Aleykhem playing the same tune from the opposite direction: 'a kaptsen hagodoyl v'hagiber v'hanoyre' (from "Doktoyrim"). The familiar 'kaptsen godel' is one thing, the exuberant gloss on the shimenesra, aka shemona esrey or Eighteen Benedic- tions, is something quite different. As with Mendele, funny and heymish. And bitter: using the same words to describe a poor man's plight and God's majesty. My goal in this essay is not however to discuss Mendele or Sholem Aleykhem but to speculate about the world they wrote for and the Yiddish that was once spoken or at least understood in that world. The role that Hebrew once played in Yiddish was qualitatively differ- ent from the role of any other language. When Ameri- can writers use a French word they at the very least flatter their readers by imputing to them a certain level of knowing. True as well no doubt for Yiddish writers who used Hebrew. But aside from the class or educational dimension, and the readers I think under- stood it so, was the sacred-secular. Hebrew in Yiddish had a resonance, now almost entirely gone, of the prayer book, of countless daily rituals. Even Jews with a minimal knowledge of Hebrew could be counted on to catch the drift of a Biblical, Talmudic or synagogue tag. In what follows, I'm not talking about the "normal" use of Hebrew words and expressions, i.e. ones that have long ago become an inseparable part of the lan-guage, so much so indeed that they have become part even of host languages: meshuga in Germany, cobber (khaver) in Britain, chutspa in the U.S. Nor do I have in mind, and for the same reason, the kind of Hebrew that finds its way into the Yiddish spoken in Orthodox circles today. I exclude these because in both cases the use of Hebrew is essentially unself-conscious: the Hebrew is not chosen over Yiddish equivalents 'for effect' but because it's customary or the best avail-able. If we look then only at Hebrew used 'for effect' what kind of 'effect' are we talking about? I propose anti- clericalism, of which I see two forms: ironic detach- ment and the direct frontal assault. (Actually, the very existence of a Yiddish literature with or without Hebrew is evidence of a Kulturstreit and all early Yiddish writers were by definition on one side of the divide, but I prefer to leave that alone for the time being.) The examples from Mendele and Sholem Aleykhem belong to the first type. In both cases either Mendele or 'Pani' Sholem Aleykhem (or one of his detached surrogates such as the 'commis-voyadzher' of the Ayzenban Geshikhtes, reminiscent of Faulkner's sewing machine salesman, V.K.Ratliff) stand outside the give-and-take. Mendele may be harsh in his judgments but he never gets in- volved. Sholem Aleykhem is less likely to condemn but he also restricts his role to recording what he sees and is told. But why Hebrew? What does Hebrew have to do with ironic detachment? Briefly, this: the use of uncommon though generally-understood Hebrew serves to underscore the vision of a rapidly changing society and a disinte- grating culture. Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew serve as benchmarks whereby the reader, even though _and pre- cisely because_ he/she understands them can grasp the degree to which the traditional culture of eastern European Jews had already disappeared. For this is a Hebrew whose world (either the shul itself or the Jewish past as constructed and filtered through its language) is about to become as dead for most Jews as Latin has been for an even longer time for most Chris- tians. But not only as a benchmark. When we recall that most of the Hebrew words and phrases have a heavy sacramen- tal loading, a _pairing_ of Hebrew and Yiddish implies a breaking down of the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Hefker velt. So much for the ironic uses of Hebrew. What of the frontal assault? I think it's basically this: where Mendele and Sholem Aleykhem (both of them thoroughly bourgeois and conventional) duly recorded the end of the world as it once existed, the more radical veltlikhe celebrated it. If Mendele ended with hefker, these begin with it; they're possessed by a positively antinomian urge. Instead of pairing uncommon Hebrew with Yiddish, the more radical factions used _familiar_ Hebrew that had been thoroughly Yiddishized and cor- rupted it by changing one of its terms. Olev hasholem becomes olev hashnabel or olev hashulekhts; loshn koydesh becomes lokshn koydesh; etc. However, even antinomians know about the difference between the holy and its opposite; they're just as much obsessed by the distinction as their observant opposite numbers (a Yom Kippur Ball is after all still a cele- bration of Yom Kippur); and this accounts for the kind of Hebraisms I've just described. Both styles have of course disappeared long ago. The generations of Yiddish-speaking Jews for whom there was a critical distinction between Shabes and the rest of the week are gone. And so are those for whom militant anti-religious behavior was important. I suggest that this explains the virtual absence of this kind of Hebrew in the work of those later writers who knew the language as well as Mendele did (Chaim Grade, Aaron Zeitlin, the Singers, J.J. Trunk). These writers left us some wonderful work, but (even when like Zeitlin they take up classic themes) their use of language is thoroughly modern, i.e. a language in which the work of desacralization has been achieved. ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol 1.32