Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.020 June 1, 1993 1) Varia: Bintel Brief, Baynks (Harold L. Orbach) 2) Geography (Yohanan Weininger) 3) Sayings and phrases (Hershel Bershady) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 1 10:10:48 1993 From: Harold L. Orbach Subject: Varia: Bintel Brief, Baynks a) Bintel Brief With regard to the discussion of Bintel Brief: the American sociologist W.I. Thomas (1863-1944) planned a compilation and publication of Bintel Brief from 1922 on. He was in New York working on the studies of Americanization with Robert E. Park (former journalist, amaneunsis for Booker T. Washington, then sociologist) and met Abraham Cahan with Park. They met various Jewish leaders and attended the 2nd Avenue theaters, schmoozed in the restaurants at night, etc. "Old World Traits Transplanted" (New York, 1921) was the book dealing with all immigrant groups in which "types" of immigrant experience were created using documents as examples. While pages 195-211 deal with the Jews, copies of parts of Bintel Breif are quoted on p.7 (1906), p.44 (1906), p.59 (1914), p.64 (1917), p.65 (1914), p.78 (1906), p.80 (1906), p.100 (1918), p.200 (1914) [These are all different Brief of specific dates; in addition there is a large excerpt from a story by M.J. Olgin from 1917]. Thomas taught himself Yiddish and collected the Bintel Brief for a separate project, an outcome of the technique of using "natural documents" especially letters as part of studying the immigration process of Polish-Americans with Florian Znaniecki. Their major work, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, was constructed around the analysis of letters among family members and also a file of letters to a newspaper in Poland early in the 20th century. The latter, however, was lost in World War I. As late as 1942 he was still writing in letters that he was working on this project, translating letters in his files. Nothing published ever came from this project before he died. His papers, such as they were, were given to the Social Science Research Committee in New York by his widow and a selection published in 1951. Sometime after that, a student used his file of Bintel Brief and published an article on them in either the American Sociogical Review or the American Journal of Sociology. [I don't have the reference at hand at the moment.] Presumably, his file in Yiddish and the translations remained in the SSRC files; these are now part of the SSRC archives in New York raising the possibility that another compilation is extant, perhaps in better form than photocopies from the Vorwarts. b) Martin Davis' idiom about 'baynks' is the same as one of my mother's favorite comments. But my memory of her yiddish sounds more like 'bankas' -- translatable as 'cups' -- an old medical treatment common in Eastern Europe and also in Asiatic medicine. I believe that 'cups' were a common form of treatment used by barbers in the old days before modern medicine was dominated by allopathy. Indeed, my daughter, who practices acupuncture and "oriental medicine" in New Mexico uses cups as one form of treatment among others. I always wondered what a 'toyten bankas' could mean and wondered if it was an up-dating and carrying over of the related old practice of using leaches. Dead leaches would make more literal sense than "dead" cups. The meaning was clear that whatever was being proposed was useless. c) My yiddish, as I explained some time back, suffers from non-use and corruption with German so please excuse my transliteration of the following, perhaps my mother's favorite idiomatic curse, offered up at various times, particularly toward antisemitic political figures: "Er zoll zeyn vee a shandeleer; hangen bei tookh und brennen bei nakht." Does anyone else know this and its origin? Harold L. Orbach 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 1 10:44:37 1993 From: Yohanan Weininger Subject: a joke with a little Yiddish geography A new immigrant-Jewish Agency joke (heard in Hebrew and Yiddish) goes: An oleh khadash is unhappy here and goes back to the country he came from. But he's unhappy there and so he makes a second aliyah. But he's still unhappy in Israel, so the Sochnut tells him: "Look, where do you want to live? Just say where you want and we'll send you there." They give him a globe, "Just point to where you'd like to live." The unhappy new oleh says, "efsher hot ir an andere globus?" - Yohanan Weininger 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue Jun 1 13:42:24 1993 From: hbershad@sas.upenn.edu Subject: sayings, phrases Here are a couple more sayings, doubtlessly prost, that I've pulled out: 1) tukhes affen tish -- literally, ass on the table, meaning, put up or shut up. 2) nekhtiger tog (tuhg) -- literally, yesterday's day, meaning, impossible. 3) sit gevorn mir finster in die oigen -- literally, it became me darkness in the eyes, meaning, I swooned, became faint. 4) ein sechs und sekhtsig -- literally, a sixty-six, meaning, I think, a stitch in the side. 5) mir shmekt nisht, si shtinkt nisht -- literally, if one doesn't smell it, it doesn't stink. There must be more that 50 yiddish words that are indispensable, no? Hershel Bershady ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.020