Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.029 June 17, 1994 1) On Philologos and some etymologies (Edward Stankiewicz) 2) Germans and Yiddish (Mark Devlin) 3) Lipe Reznik (Holger Nath) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Jun 16 20:55:12 1994 From: VBERS@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu Subject: On Philologos and some etymologies Edward Stankiewicz has asked me [v.b.] to post the following: The etymological forays of Philologos in the last issue of the *Forward* (June 10, 1994) are disappointing on several grounds. First, he keeps waffling on the origin of the sub-standard Yid. *shmolyares* (not *shmooolyares*!) though it was correctly interpreted by several readers as involving the substitution of the intial *d*- in *dolarn* with the pejorative *shm-*.The matter would have become even clearer had Philologos bothered to point out the resemblance of the ending of this word with such sub-standard playful Yid. forms as *oygenes* (for *oyg* 'eyes'), *shtivalyes* (for *shtivl* 'boots'), *volkenes* (for *volen* 'clouds') which I wrote about in a letter to *Forward* on March 10, 1994. Second, Philologos gives an incorrect account of the word *kapusta* which is not even Yiddish (the correct Yid. form for 'cabbage' is *kroyt*). As is clear by any Slavic etymological dictionary, the Polish and Russian word *kapusta* derives neither from the Latin *caput* ('head') nor from the Italian *cavolo*, but is rather a blend of Italian *composta* (Middle High German *kumpost*) with It. *capuccio* (Middle High German *kappuz*). Third, the puzzling *pachech* is obviously a phonetic distortion of the Yid. *parech* which in turn comes from the Polish *parch* 'a scab.' metaphorically used for an obnoxious, repulsive person. Edward Stankiewicz 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Jun 17 02:03:38 1994 From: mdevlin@acs.bu.edu Subject: Germans and Yiddish I hope that this response to Allan Fineberg's question will be of some help. Though I am not Jewish, like Allan I speak German and have (by marriage) many German gentile relatives. My observations lead me to the conclusion that Ger- man difficulties vis-a-vis Yiddish have two sources, one linguistic and the other psychological. The simpler (ahem) of the two is the linguistic. Allan rightly notes that Germans could probably understand a good bit of spoken Yiddish, much as many of them (from the Northwest, at least) can understand a good bit of Dutch. "German" as it is _really_ spoken almost everywhere outside of TV news broadcasts is, however, not one language but a sackful of very different dialects. I believe that Yiddish traces its Germanic roots to Middle German (i.e. from neither far North nor deep South), yet it strikes me as having elements in common with dialects from every part of the German-speaking map. For instance, the hard voiced "s" ("z", really, though the Germans don't write it that way) is characteristic of middle-to-north Germany; the double negative common in Bavaria; the transformation of "oe" to "e" or "ey" is found in Swabian, Bavarian and especially Bohemian (I refer to the phenomenon seen in the Yiddish phrase "a sheynen dank", which Germans would write, but almost never pronounce, "einen schoenen Dank"). Thus, even without regard to its Slavic, Hebrew etc. elements, Yiddish would be "tantalizingly familiar" but also somewhat strange to virtually any German-speaker. As Primo Levi remarked, German and Yiddish are cousins, each of which sounds like a parody of the other. This does not, of course, explain why Germans should show such a lack of cur- iosity about Yiddish. Here we must look to the psychological. The reason why Germans today might feel uncomfortable with things Jewish does not need to be stated. While many (especially younger) Germans _are_ curious about Judaism as a religion, their curiosity about Judaism as a culture seems limited to _German_ Judaism, and German Jews tended not to speak Yiddish. Modern Germans can deal with thinking about, say, Theodor Herzl or Heinrich Heine (the latter _geshmat_, I realize); but thinking about _Yiddish_ culture forces them to confront in a very direct way the events of a half century past. I am not speaking here of those Germans who deny or trivialize what their nation did; I am speaking of those who accept the truth and wish to come to terms with it. They can do so as long as they keep things abstract; to think too much about Yiddish language and culture transforms the victims of the Holocaust from a group numbering 6 million into six million individuals. This can overtax the capacities of even a well-intended German. What Allan suggests might be "misguided politeness" is rather, I believe, a misguided attempt to avoid the uncomfortable. As a sort of appendix, I would add that there _are_ a number of Yiddish words that have been borrowed into German. The ones I am aware of are among those familiar to most Americans: Chuzpe, Schlamassel, Schlemiel (as they are spelt in German). Mark Devlin 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Jun 17 08:53:57 1994 From: hn6@columbia.edu Subject: Lipe Reznik I am looking for some information on Lipe Reznik. He was an aspirant in Kiev (Filologishe sektsye) and graduated from the Institut far yidisher kultur in 1930. If I remember correctly, he also was a writer. (I know of Shmeruk's _Jewish publication in the Soviet Union 1917-1960_ (Jerusalem 1961). Holger Nath ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.029 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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