Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.067 July 24, 1993 1) Ta`tsher et al (Pe`rets Mett) 2) To Perets Mett (Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 23 Jul 93 11:02:45 BST From: P.Mett@open.ac.uk (Percy Mett) Subject: ta`tsher et al 1. To mikhl > I like the use of available ASCII characters. I first heard @ta`tsher@ about 30 years ago from a German Jew who insisted that it derived (like barkhes) from the verse "birkhath hashem hi ta`ashir" (*) which is associated with the bread on the table and is traditionally inscribed on the shabbes breadknife. I was interested that you consider @ta`tsher@ to be a localized western dialect of Western Yiddish - I think Birnbaum places it as Central Yiddish. [And it is OK - I am now used to the transcription @ay@ for the long -a- sound of pasech-tsvey-yudn!] (*) I am pretty sure ssomeone has already mentioned this. As far as the underworld goes, the word I am used to is - @untervelt@ (pronounced to 'rhyme' with Internet of course). 2. To noyekh > I cannnot let pass your remark that "As rebbes go, Reb Borukhl didn't amount to much". Maybe that was the opinion of him in Bratslav, but Bratslav was a very idiosyncratic khasides. The Medzhibuzher was well thought of in most khasidishe -sorry but I cannot abide the word 'Chasidic'- circles. pe`rets mett 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Jul 24 13:37:04 1993 From: Roslyn Kalifowicz-Waletzky <0005943838@mcimail.com> Subject: To Perets Mett First, sorry it has taken me so long to respond to the postings directed at me here but I've been away teaching at the National Yiddish Book Center and very busy preparing invitations for my son's Bar-Mitsva, so finally I can sit down and respond. To Pe'rets Mett, > While you may consider the misuse of pseudonymic authorship to be a >criminal activity, I fail to see why you have to be so derogatory >about those who are unhappy about Yivo orthography. I think we have here multiple confusions, so let me explain. I do not think that pseudonymic authorship is a criminal activity. As Dovid Miller pointed out, among others, it is to be seen everywhere in Yiddish literature and we have known for many years that most writers in the Forverts write under several names. The writer of Philologos has every right to be anonymous, if he chooses. If anything, he is probably smart to do it because I think bay undz yidn iz filologye a sport, un yeder yid zogt deyes. This way he lessens the chances of paskudne taynes. It seems that as soon as a writer's identity is known, he gets bombarded with arguments. The reason for raising the issue of who is Philologos was my suspicion that it was Paul Wexler and after such a Slobodjanksyj scandal, I personally would try not to let him get away with any more anonymity. My strong negative reaction to Wexler's pseudonomic authorship is based on the following: 1)If you have some criticism to make that you consider valuable, then you honor that with standing up and saying it without any covers. Wexler's reputation is such that he could have criticized the other articles and and stated that he is excluding his own. And although one major Yiddish expert tells me he feels that some of "Slobodjanskyj's" criticism were justified, I still feel that this is not a fair way to deal with the other contributors. Any semblance of a call to academic or intellectual excellence is exposed as a sham if you totally decimated everyone else's works and lauded only your own as being worthwhile. A lot us have fantasies of such lauditory reviews; the difference is that most people remember that you have to keep it a fantasy. Every person has dreamed of killing a parent; those who act upon such a fantasy, get reclassified by society and are punished in any number of ways for it. 2)Perhaps some people have heard of such acts before. I have never. My introduction to this whole issue was listening to my usually calm friend, a native Yiddish speaker and English professor whom I have been trying to get to enter the Yiddish academic field. Soon after our walking in for a Shabbes lunch, she rolled off a most passionate and loud denunciation of this behaviour and then handed me the Lingua Franca article, finishing off by saying, "And this is a field you're trying to get me into?!" I had never heard my friend go off like that about anything before or since. Her husband, a top librarian at Princeton, then dispassionately explained to me how defaming such a write-up in Lingua Franca is to all the parties involved. After I recovered from the shock of all this, my response was: if Yiddishphiles such as my friends who don't know anyone in the article can have such a strong reaction to such an affair, what are all the neutral people's responses?, shoyn opgeret fun di sonim. I don't think that I would have gotten so worked up if I had read Lingua Franca cold, but the consequential damage of the Slobodjanskyj scandal was very clear. This was nothing that my fears or worries could have conjured up. It was all quite upsetting. 3)Those of us who are preparing to publish in the same forums as Wexler and Slobodjanskyj are more sensitive to a selfish shpitsl like "Slobodjanskyj's" than those who are not preparing submission of articles. When I submit my work, I will have worked hard and I would like the criticism (hopefully constructive) straight and up-front, just as I give it. 4)There have been many discussions through the years about what will happen to the Forverts and all its resources after this generation of Yiddish speakers are gone. One of the main question was whether it will continue to be the direct mediator between the Eastern European Yiddish world and the assimilated, English-speaking, American Jews. The Forverts farvaltung decided some years ago that it will continue to serve in that same capacity, but this time, in English. After listening for years to stories from the last two generations of willing writers, futilely trying to raise the level of the Forverts so that it may attract young American readers, I am very pleasantly surprised with what they have accomplished in the English paper. I am terribly impressed with the high quality of the English Forwards and how popular it has become in all intellectual Jewish circles. Not only do young frum people read the paper (as you see from the personal ads), but so do my American contemporaries who always looked down at the Yiddish Forverts as old-fashion and unsophisticated. But now, there is very little in the English Forwards that deals directly with the Yiddish language, save Philologos's column. Iz hot men shoyn a groysn oylem un a populern oylem, un s'iz shoyn af a hoykhn nivo, darfn zey ontrefn in azelkhe tamevate ide'en? Now that you got the readers, this is what is presented and given credence with four articles? As long as I believed that Philologos was really Paul Wexler, my feeling was: it's bad enough that what seemed in the early 1980's like such a rising star with so much talent, superb knowledge and smarts isn't putting it together in some wonderful works, but now he is in this new, very important and promising paper anonymously peddling such ridiculous ideas that, as Elliot Gertel told me in last week, they were loudly rejected by every single person in the audience at the Yiddish conference at Oxford as far back as 1985 (or was it '86)? Not only are they presented vi gut gelt, but the fourth Philologos article on Wexler falsely claims that the majority of responses to Wexler's theories are neutral or lukewarm. All of us on Mendele read Stankiewich's totally negative letter to the Forwards on Wexler, but Philologos presents Stankiewich as one of the scholars with a lukewarm response? This is clearly a deliberate misrepresentation. I personally have great hopes for the role the English Forwards will play vis-vis the Yiddish world and I feel very protective of it. I am not God-forbid saying that discussing even far-fetched ideas in a column such as Philologos is inappropriate, but then we all have the right and responsibility to respond to it as we see fit. Since the Sorbian/Turkic theories were presented in the first three Philologos articles without any commentary, I believed that the writer was first testing responses before going into publication. Polite silence is one approach and probably a wise one, ober mikh hot men gelernt andersh. I feel bound to respond. Again I don't know Wexler, never spoke to him, and I'm sure that he doesn't even know I exist. And now I've had my final say on it, I think. Second, what I was referring to in my comment about Yiddish Orthography refers to Yiddish only and not to Yivo's rules of Yiddish transliteration. I agree with you that it's hard and confusing and the whole -ey /-ay business is unsuccessful and I personally hate reading or writing transliteration. As you see here even a Yidishist like me vil nisht tsebrekhn di oygn mit a sakh transliteratzye. I happen to own the custom-made Yiddish Notebene software program which I would love to use here but I don't believe that this is electronically possible yet. Anyway, the issue is that men hot nisht keyn breyre. All orthographic rules are arbitrary (though my husband Josh disagrees with this). But once they have been set up, I believe we have to accept them. I think most Mendelnikes who are active in the Yiddish world knew exactly to what I was referring in my comments, and that is what has been coming out of the Oxford School of Yiddish (my friend Dovid Katz zol mir moykhl zayn). I will not get into this issue here, but I'll just tell you that issues like the shtumer alef in Yiddish have been dominating the Yiddish air and press for some time now. Just this week, I came across Dr. Joshua/Shikl Fishman's article in the May 7th issue of the Forverts, who expresses the exact same concerns and disappointment as I did here. It's a wonderful article and will familiarize you with some of the issues. This whole matter is important because books are being published with a new personal type of orthography and hundreds and hundreds of students have been taught this new personal system. I say, if one seriously objects to YIVO's Takones of Yiddish Orthography or Transliteration, one calls together all the institutions that are affected and then lobbies at a conference to change the rules. This orthographic making-Shabbes-far-zikh is very destructive. So now you have a fuller statement. Third, on this point, I have in the last 2 weeks found out who Philologos is. Zachary's sources said the same thing as mine, and they each derive from a "most reliable source". It is Hillel Halkin and not Paul Wexler. So now that Zak and I have blown his cover, he can come out and join the conversation. Un mir kenen im itst zogn undzere deyes. On the issue of koyletsh, it is synonymous with khale, not bigger or smaller. I myself have over the years asked many sources the same question because it was never used in my house. I have finally even asked my own mother about this and she says the same. If there is one region that differentiates, then I don't know about it and the Yiddish Atlas can tell us. I am relatively new to posting on Internet. I promise I'll try to learn how to do shorter postings. If you don't think I need to learn this, please let me know. Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky reyzl@mcimail.com ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.067