______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.254 March 1, 1994 1) Yiddish un Vertebikher (Arre Komar) 2) Kabak (Bob Poe) 3) Prudery (Jascha Kessler) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 25 18:59:27 1994 From: "Dr. Arthur Komar" Subject: Yiddish un Vertebikher Re why Yiddish is not Jewish in English: Let us Ashkenazim not be so imperialistic as to want Yiddish to be called Jewish. There are afterall at least two Jewish languages spoken in this country, Yiddish and Ladino. It is therefore quite appropriate to employ the language's own name for itself inorder to distinguish the two. Incidently, I was born and raised in NYC 60 years ago in a Yiddish speaking immigrant family and to the best of my recollection the language was always referred to as Yiddish, never Jewish. And I can assert categorically that there never was a trace of shame in emplying the name Jewish when referring to our selves or our religion. Quite the contrary we were extremely proud and militantly Zionist about being Jewish. Re Verterbikher: I have a distinct bias in favor of the Harkavy dictionary over the Weinreich. At the expence of rekindling the Daytchmerism debate which has fortunately died down, I would like to say that to me a bilingual dictionary shoul simply and directly answer the query of the user and not have a hidden ideological agenda. As a case in point if by some chance you came across the word lezn and you did not know what it meant Harkavy tell you that it means "to read" while Wein reich refuses to answer you directly. He tells you to refer to the word leyenen. Once you do that he then informs you that it means "to read". I for one object to this ideological runaround. That is not the purpose for which a person attempts to emply a dictionary. (Needless to say, if you attempt to go the other way Weinreich will never inform the unsuspecting reader that lezn is a possible translation of the English word "to read" even though he know it full well since he has it listed in the other direction. On the otherhand if that is your cup of tea, 'khob dir maykhl. Arre Komar 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 25 18:59:31 1994 From: poe@keps.com (Bob Poe) Subject: Kabak Since Mendelnikers were helpful last fall in interpreting one of my mother's expressions, I'd like to ask for help with another one. One of her favorite exclamations was "A moshl kabak!" (Being from [the] Ukraine, she pronounced it "mushl".) The phrase was used sarcastically, to call attention to faulty logic on the part of someone else. She wasn't sure whether it was a common Yiddish expression or merely one that had been used in her family. She didn't know the meaning of the word "kabak", but she had the impression that it was something inherently ludicrous, like a pumpkin. The phrase as a whole, therefore, meant something like, "[He is arguing his point on the basis of] an example of a pumpkin"-- i.e., a pretty far-fetched (or irrelevant) example. Now, the word "kabak" (accented on the second syllable) is probably of Russian or Ukrainian origin. I have occasionally looked for it in (small) Russian-English dictionaries and usually have not found it. But once I found an entry for it, with the meaning "tavern" (perhaps a colloquial or slang usage). If this is indeed the meaning, I don't quite see how it fits my mother's interpretation of the phrase. Can anyone help with the word and/or the phrase? Bob Poe 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 25 20:56:01 1994 From: Subject: re prudery It is amazing how old folks of a certain type (zionist labor, I betcha) say, among us there were no feygeles, and no such term. An amusing sidelight: my wife 's people, Hungarians, without a word of Yiddish when they arrived here, as so many in that part of Eastern Hungary were long on the land, in Debrecen and east of it, around Miskolc, knew of such people in their small towns. There was a pair they used to call Kuli and Shopsie, before the three girls, whenever there was a homosexual around the company, and they showed up as friends in the 40s at the house. They girls never knew till the end what a Kuli & Shopsie were, o r was, until my mother-in-law said in the late 60s, We thought you understood: so and so's friends are a Kuli & Shopsie, because we had a pair of lovers in Kisvarda by those first (nick)names. Come on, folks, let us not think that our parents bought us in Macy's, as I was told for the first four years of my life, when my uncles and aunts would get fed up and say, Let's take Yankele back to Macy's and exchange him. Terror in the kid's heart! The kid used to examine pickled pigs feet in the deli in Macy's, fearing one of those jars would be a replacement for this bad boy. Thank god it was not Klein's on the Square!, where the aunts and all rushed (kid in tow) for the lingerie (underwear) sales, whole tables with panties bras and girdles overflowing to the wooden floor there in Union Square, and no shame about feygeles, either! Read Henry Miller (a German of course), his early wonderful essays, Fourth Ward and all, for a picture of Brooklyn life in the first decade, etc. One thinks people were not all dancing all the time in dance halls, etc. We have lost the whole public life since the post WWII years. Alas. But feygeles havent: try the singles and gay bars, etc, or what used to be noisy discotcques, and still are, for teenyboppers, on Hollywood boulevard, but not the same, not for adults, alas... Yankele here with a barrel of salt for skeptics. Jascha Kessler ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.254 To subscribe, send SUB MENDELE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME to: LISTSERV@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files Mendele: Yiddish literature and language