Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.047 June 25, 1993 1) Pseudonyms and lurkers (Ellen Prince) 2) Language, persona, journalism; goy (Bob Hoberman) 3) Re: the Slobodjanskyj scandal (Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 24 12:32:02 1993 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: Pseudonyms and lurkers re david neal miller's discussion of the use of pseudonyms among yiddish writers: thank you, that was very interesting and i stand corrected. of course, i knew about singer and sholem aleichem, but i was told the reason for them using pseudonyms, esp s.a., was that it was a shande to write in yiddish. i also knew that there was a custom among traditional yiddish grammarians to bash their peers pseudonymously. and, now that you mention it, i can think of a case of a person who writes irregularly for a yiddish newspaper and frequently does so pseudonymously, but the reason in this case is to give the appearance that there are lots of people presenting a particular viewpoint. i didn't know about the other cases you mention. could you tell me why they do it? partly, i'm curious about this custom in general and partly i still haven't got a clue as to *why* philologus writes pseudonymously, given that none of the above reasons appear relevant. a dank. btw, while for all i know philologus may reside in philadelphia, i'd bet my bottom dollar on his maleness. (just a woman's intuition, heh heh...) -------------------------------------------------- re bob werman's lower-sorbian detective work: thanks, bob. does this mean we can definitively eliminate you from the running? :) but i LOVED that tidbit about the 'concealed' subscribers to mendele! nor in yidishland... the _linguist_ list has over 3000 subscribers and is the largest in academe--and none are concealed. more dramatically, there's another list in linguistics called _outil_ (for _out in linguistics_) for bis, gays, lesbians, and their friends--and even that list has no concealed subscribers. why, oh why, would mendele? extraordinary. maybe we should start a new yiddish list with no concealment allowed, called _out in yiddish_, or, more simply and to the point, _oy_. ;) ellen prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 24 14:38:17 1993 From: Robert D Hoberman Subject: Language, persona, journalism; goy David Neal Miller's comment about Dubnov, "the russophone Kritikus was more civil and less emotionally engaged than the yiddophone Dubnov", reminded me of something my friend Larry Slobodkin said about American Jewish journalism: that it used to be much more full of controversy, covered a much wider range of opinion both political and cultural, and in general on a higher intellectual level of discussion in the days when it was mostly in Yiddish, while now the Anglo-Jewish press in American is cautious, always (in Slobodkin's opinion) afraid of making a shande far di goyim, or, more kindly, afraid of creating dissension. To those who are more familiar with Yiddish journalism than me: is this true, and is Slobodkin's idea of why correct? This brings me to Randy Kloko's introduction: "Ikh bin a goy". I think Randy used the word "goy" as Yiddish really uses it: the ordinary word for a non-Jew: Randy iz zeyer a fayner goy. However, some of my politically correct friends have decided they must refrain from using the word IN ENGLISH, because they think it is offensive in the same way that nigger, kike, spic, etc. are. Now, I like to be as politically correct as the next guy, but I just don't feel that way about "goy". While lots of Jews did and do have bad attitudes about non-Jews, in my experience even in English goy doesn't always have to have pejorative connotations. But maybe the English-speaking Jews I'm thinking of are really speaking relexified Yiddish (!), and in the English usage of the amkho (the great unwashed Jewish masses) nowadays goy really is a dirty word. Any thoughts? Bob Hoberman rhoberman@ccmail.sunysb.edu 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 24 15:11:07 1993 From: Roslyn Kalifowicz-Waletzky <0005943838@mcimail.com> Subject: The Slobodjanskyj scandal Sorry for not responding immediately but I have been searching all over for my copy of the Lingua Franca article which I hoped to reproduce here. To avoid further delay I'll just summarize it. Not only did Wexler create this Slobodjanskyj pseudonym in order to review the book where his own article appeared, but this Slobodjanskyj "reviewer" went so far as to basically dismiss all the articles with the severest of criticism and praise only Wexler's and David Bunim's work. (I assume that David is Wexler's friend). Ellen is right, you need a barf bag, but that's only after your skin has stopped crawling from the shock of such slimey, underhanded chutspa. I agree with Bob Hoberman that in the early 80's, Wexler was showing the greatest of promise. I chose to finally react to this issue on Mendele because Wexler, in the two classes that I observed when he was a guest lecturer at Columbia, seemed so ongepikevet with knowledge and linguistic skill, so capable of new and wonderful comparisons among all the many Jewish languages he knows, that to hear of such nasty doings and now to waste time and knowledge on such a totally implausible theory, is painful and disappointing for a Yiddishist like me. The state of Yiddish linguistics is very depressing. We had someone like Rakhmiel Zuckerman who is so phenomenally knowledgeable about Yiddish but is too unstable to function and then there is the recidivist challenge to Yivo orthography that is totally destructive to the whole Yiddish terrain. Then there are others who could continue in Uriel Weinreich's footsteps but don't want to be in academia. And now this business, which I recently became aware of. What can I say, it just makes me very sad. Maybe, it got to Wexler too and it has made him go off the deep end with such a theory. The problem is that this is such a small field and there is so little support available to ambitious young men in Yiddish linguistics that it drives them to take extreme positions in order to get some attention. Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.047