Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 4.082 August 15, 1994 1) Kitchen Yiddish I (Zellig Bach) 2) Kitchen Yiddish (Harvey Spiro) 3) New Yiddish language & culture bulletin (Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 14 Aug 94 12:34:14 EDT From: Zellig@aol.com Subject: "Kitchen Yiddish" I This is a re-posting because my original message apparently got lost in a computer scramble. My note in Vol. 4.081,3 on the same subject should therefore be considered "Kitchen Yiddish II". In a recent article in the New Tork Times Magazine (7/31/94) Martha Lear describes in _The Roots People_ her own search for roots , specifically her trip to Russia where she traveled to her mother's birthplace in Stavishche in the Ukraine. The present population of Stavishche is 9,000, among them 11 aged and aging Jewish families down from about 4,000 Jews before WW II. There she met the chief of the local traffic police who turned out to be a Jew and who spoke some Yiddish. She then writes: "I speak a bit of kitchen Yiddish myself, the hundred words recalled from a childhood amid my grandmothers." "Kitchen Yiddish" seems to me is a good descriptive term, defining the measure and quality of Yiddish that an American-born granddaughter absorbed from her grandmothers. Of course, not everyone's "kitchen Yiddish" is the same since a number of significant variables come into play: How much, or even how good, was the Yiddish of the mother or grandmother, that is the supply source; what was the scale of the inter-generational talkativeness, so to speak; how attentive was the native grandchild to the, to her ears, foreign sounds; and what is, or was, the child's aural memory. For some reason we usually speak of a general, undifferentiated memory. We say, for instance, he or she has a good memory. But when it comes to language, as is the case with many Mendelyaner who try to transcribe the remembered Yiddish sounds of their childhood, one may wonder whether or not there is a differentiated range in the aural memory factor. Zellig Bach 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Aug 15 11:07:15 1994 From: hjs@nrc.gov Subject: Kitchen Yiddish Zellig Bach asks: Where did grandsons learn Yiddish? I have two answers that apply to me and certainly others. When I was a child, all of my adult relatives could speak Yiddish. Although my American-born mishpokhe, and those who came to the U.S. at an early age, also spoke relatively unaccented New York English, they easily switched from one language to another, either to make a point, to conceal from eavesdropping kids, or just azoy. When relatives spoke to those whose English was more of an effort, Yiddish was simply a more comfortable choice. So there was always Yiddish to be heard at family gatherings, which seemed to occur almost weekly when I was young. However, the primary language was still English. Second, I was lucky enough to have my grandmother living with us for about ten years. Born in northern Poland, she came to NY in the early part of the century as an adult, and lived first in the Lower East Side and then Brooklyn. Ver hot gedarft lernen oder reden English in aza ort? To my recollection, my parents spoke to her in either language. We kids spoke to her in gradually- absorbed gemutchete Yiddish; she replied in either Yiddish or broken Yiddish/English. The need to communicate with her probably drove us to develop at least a working knowledge of the language, not to mention the classic incentive of understanding the Secret Conversations of Grownups. As a 10-year old talking to an octogenarian grandmother, did we discuss Peretz and Glatshteyn and Opatashu? Aza narishe kashe. Did we have high-level philosophical discussions on Bundists vs. Zionists, Yiddishists vs. Haskalists, or even on fine points of halakha or minhag? Avade nisht. Our conversations were those of kids talking about simple matters to their grandparents. We discussed school, friends, the weather, Kennedy ("a sheyner mentsh, khotch er iz a Katoliker yingl") vs. Nixon ("a momzer"), "Eddie Solomon" (whom you may know by his TV name, Ed Sullivan -- my grandmother thought he was Jewish). As a result, my conversational Yiddish never advanced beyond the rudimentary level needed for those conversations - "kitchen Yiddish," if you will. As I grew older, Yiddish gradually disappeared from my life as the Yiddish speakers in my family died. Only as an adult did I discover the real secrets that Yiddish was hiding: the joy of reading Sholem Aleikhem or Zinger in the original!!! Although the few survivors from my parents generation (now in their seventies and eighties) once spoke Yiddish as their first language, none has retained more than a passive understanding and a marginal interest in Yiddish. For my family tree, if I don't help to keep Yiddish alive, no one will. Harvey Spiro 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Aug 94 11:10 EST From: reyzl@mcimail.com Subject: New Yiddish language & culture bulletin Dear Friends, The Congress for Jewish Culture is about to initiate a regularly published bulletin in Yiddish and English dedicated to the field of Yiddish language and culture. The purpose of the bulletin is to gather and disseminate news and information about Yiddish language and culture in America and internationally to both speakers and non-speakers of Yiddish. We hope that this bulletin will serve as an informational clearinghouse in a manner and breadth not available in any other single publication. The bulletin will cover literature, media, computers, language instruction material and programs, e-mail, services, conferences, as well as performances, meetings, events and activities sponsored by various groups and organizations around the world. This bulletin should be useful to all lovers of Yiddish, whether the interest be of an ideological, popular, or academic nature. We plan to publish this bi-lingual bulletin quarterly in print and monthly by electronic e-mail (in English). The print bulletin will be sent out to our mailing list and to anyone who requests it at no cost at this time. The on-line publishing on internet and BBS's will be local and international, requiring only a phone and modem connection. Detailed information about this will soon follow. We ask that all organizations, groups, colleges, synagogues, community centers, performers, and teachers involved in Yiddish language and culture send us information about your present and future programs, activities, classes, products, and services on a regular basis and we will include as much of it as possible. You may fax us anytime at 212-473-5102, or call me at 212-505-8040 from 10:30-4:30 P.M. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays. We believe that this bulletin will be useful to all those interested in the field of Yiddish language and culture. Thank you, Mit khaverishe grusn, Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky Executive Director Congress for Jewish Culture 25 East 21 Street New York, N.Y. 10010 ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 4.082 A Table of Contents is now available via anonymous ftp, along with weekly updates. 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