Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 4.138
October 14, 1994

1) C.M.Y.A. (Michael Shimshoni)
2) Shostakovich and Yiddish songs (Alice Nakhimovsky)
3) Red and yellow beards; o/u; tomatoes (Mikhl Herzog)
4) Bobe maynses and sex changes (Harvey Spiro)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 12:23:34 +0200
From: mash@weizmann.weizmann.ac.il
Subject: C.M.Y.A.

William Wallen wonders:

>Line 1 contains an apparent abbreviation in Yiddish, with the following
>letters appearing right to left, each followed by a period:
>
>        Chet
>        Mem
>        Yud
>        Aleph.
>
>This stands for something, but what? I figure that the Chet stands for
>=chevra=, but after that I am stumped.

I can only  guess, and that for  the last two letters,  Yud and Aleph.
They might  stand for Yehudei  (or something else related  to Jewish),
and the Aleph could  be the first letter of Ostrin  (does not in "line 2"
Ostrin  start with  an Aleph?).   Mem could stand  for all  kind of
words.

As said, just a guess.

Michael Shimshoni

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: 13 Oct 1994 08:42:07 -0400
From: alice@cs.colgate.edu
Subject: Shostakovich and Yiddish songs

Ruben Frankenstein writes of Shostakovich that "he just composed melodies
to translations of yiddish songs he found somewhere."  This makes
Shostakovich's choice sound kind of arbitrary, and was in fact precisely
the line taken by his official biographer.  But the reality was
different. For a highly visible Russian to go about setting yiddish songs
in 1948 -- the beginning of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, the beginning
of the end for Soviet Yiddish culture -- was an act of devotion and
courage. In Shostakovich's case it seems to have been connected with the
murder (January 1948, by Stalin) of his close friend Shlomo Michoels.
I'll stop here because the connection with Yiddish is getting tenuous...I
just didn't want to let that impression stand.

Alice Nakhimovsky

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 94  08:29 EDT
From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu
Subject: Red and yellow beards; o/u; tomatoes

1. Redheads/Yellowbeards (for Dan Leeson):

Your facts are right, essentially; in the Litvish Yiddish (of Lithuania,
anyway), a redheaded male was referred to as "der geler" (not "di"). On
the other hand, my grandfather (Litvish Yiddish, but from Belorus) had "a
reyte bord". Yiddish "blond", not "gel", generally refers to 'blond';
Yiddish "gel" to 'yellow'. These, I think, are the "facts".

Why apply "gel" to readheads? I can only speculate that it has something
to do with a system of color classification that divides the spectral
continuum in a different manner than we're accustomed to. It's just a
matter of shifting the border somewhat. Some degree of redheadedness may
have been seen to lie within the yellow range. Apart from hair color, the
words "royt [reyt]" and "gel" for 'red' and 'yellow' were apparently used
as we would expect.

Such differences in color classification are not unusual, although
they're not often apparent in western society. (Still, would we all agree
on just what is meant by "off white" or "shocking pink"?). Reyzl Waletzky
did a study of some Yiddish color terminology. Perhaps she could
enlighten us.

Related, but perhaps irrelevant: blondness among Ashkenazim is
particularly characteristic of Lithuanian Jews. More accurately, perhaps,
of Jews from the Lithuanian-Polish border area whence, also, the highest
concentration of Tay-Sachs ancestors. Blondness is a characteristic of
Tay-Sachs children.

2. Getting it "right" (for Yide Rozof):

NO ONE says "zul"; "zol" is universal. As for "nukh": There are two words:
"nokh/nukh" meaning 'after'; the word you intended means 'more' and is
universally "nokh" (never *nukh).

3. Tomatoes (For Bob Werman):

Bob, in 1964, Mikhl Herzog (!) published an article entitled "Channels of
Extinction in Yiddish Dialects", in the Festshrift _For Max Weinreich on
his Seventieth Birthday_, (Mouton and Co., The Hague). It deals with,
among other things, the Jewish belief that tomatoes are "treyf" (when you
cut them open they bleed, no?), a rationalization that must have
reflected the general stricture against eating tomatoes in European
folklore where tomatoes were generally considered poisonous (they are,
after all, part of the nightshade family) and, as a result of the
metanalysis of pomme de Moro (pommes d'amour!), aphrodisiac as well.

In 1965, this material was incorporated into M. Herzog, _The Yiddish
Language in Northern Poland: Its Geography and History_, Chapters 2 and
6, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Mouton & Co., The Hague.

I venture to say that this is what you're looking for.

Mikhl Herzog

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Oct 14 09:12:34 1994
From: hjs@nrc.gov
Subject: Bobe maynses and sex changes

I'd like to add a tangential postscript to the discussions (Mendele 4.118
et seq.) over poor Professor Pinker's inadvertent mangling of the R-rated
Yiddish proverb, "Az di bobe volt gehat ...."

Microsoft's popular "Encarta 1994" CD-ROM multimedia encyclopedia,
arguably the best product of its type on the mass market, presents sound
clips as examples of about 50 languages; these include counting to ten,
yes and no, and a proverb or brief quote.  Yiddish is one of the
languages presented.

The proverb used in the sound clip, and also presented in Yiddish script,
is: "Az di bobe volt gehat a bord, volt zi geven a zeyde."  (If grandma
had a beard, she would be a grandfather.) This is also the PG-rated
version that I grew up hearing.  (To my ear, the speaker's pronunciation
is klal shprakhik.)

Encarta also presents capsule articles on Yiddish language, Yiddish
literature, and small articles on Mendele, Sholem Aleykhem, A.B. Cahan,
I.B. Singer, Ansky, and Asch.  Glaringly absent is any article on Peretz.
I believe the section on Yiddish was prepared by Professor Nahum N.
Glatzer of Boston University and Brandeis.

Curiously, the presentation on the Hebrew language includes the following
proverb/quote: "Mi shetarakh b'shabbat, yo'khal b'shabbat," which is
translated as "The one that prepares food before (sic) the Sabbath, will
eat on the Sabbath."  (Apologies for my nonstandard transliteration.)

Does anyone know the source of this quote, which is unfamiliar to me?  It
might refer to the gathering of manna on Friday, or simply to the need to
prepare food early before Shabbat.  A check in my Tanakh concordance came
up empty handed, so I assume it's either of Talmudic or midrashic origin.

Harvey Spiro

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