Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 4.266
January 8, 1995

1) Gedabrt (Paul Pascal)
2) Gedabrt (Harvey Spiro)
3) Lehavdl (Michael Shimshoni)
4) Bund/Vaad (Moyshe-Shaye Steinlauf)
5) Grodno (Bernard S. Greenberg)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: 06 Jan 95 00:55:31 EST
From: 75332.2735@compuserve.com
Subject: Gedabrt and other matters

It has seemed to me that the word "gedabrt" as an alternate for "gedavnt"
is an absorption of the Hebrew "daber" meaning to speak.  This reference
to imitative horse sounds is stretching it, IMHO.

Regarding the request for help on "kof-lamed, daled-kof-fey-vov-nun"
etc., this is not Hebrew but Aramaic, read "kol dikhfin yeysey
v'yeykhoyl" from the Peysakh Hagode: "let all those who are hungry come
and eat [with us]".

Finally, on the matter of splitting, it would be a real pity.  Mendele is
a wonderful blend of dense, geshmake pilpul, and light, heymishe
over-the- backyard-fence shmues.  If one or the other of those
ingredients doesn't appeal to some people, let them skip over reading it;
I think this makes for a readable, yet elevating experience.  On the
other hand, as a people we are prone to splitting off as soon as there is
the least makhloykes, resulting in "the shul I'd never set foot in" :-).

Paul Pascal

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri Jan  6 15:55:07 1995
From: hjs@nrc.gov
Subject: Gedabrt; oder klopn a toytn ferd

Garry Margolis asks:

>> couldn't someone contact the primary source,
>> Theodore Bikel, and ask him?

In fact the album notes, in Hebrew alphabet, clearly use the word
gedabrt, with the expected spelling of a Yiddish verb that uses a Hebrew
root.

Of course, if someone knows Bikel and could entice him to join us on
Mendele, I'm sure we all would be delighted and honored.

By the way, what IS the Yiddish equivalent to "beating a dead horse"?
Certainly not what I used. ;-)  (Maybe: klopn kop in vant, or gey shray
khay vekayom?)

Harvey Spiro

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 95 12:40:25 +0200
From: mash@weizmann.weizmann.ac.il
Subject: Lehavdl

I had  contacted Zellig Bach  about something  he had posted.   Now at
Zellig's suggestion  I am posting  these remarks to Mendele.   All the
translations of  Hebrew phrases  into Yiddish are  of course  his (you
cannot expect a Yekke like me to to write such good Yiddish!).

Zellig Bach had written on the uses of lehavdl:

>If one brings up in a conversation a great Jewish religious leader
>contiguously with the head of the Christian church, the traditional
>linguistic usage calls for an immediate "lehavdl."

That is how it is used also  in Hebrew.  Sometimes we add something to
specify  what we  separate.  Additions  could be  "bein qodesh  lehol"
(optsusheydn tsvishn  dos heylike and  dos vokhedike), or as  a stress
"be'elef  havdalot" (mit  toyznt lehavdls)  or even  stronger "be'elef
alfei havdalot" (mit toyznt toyznter lehavdls).

Zellig went on:

>Similarly, if one mentions in the same breath the name of a deceased and
>a living person, the prompt interposing of a "lehavdl" is obligatory .

This may be the use in Yiddish, but in Hebrew we would not use lehavdl
here but after  (or before) the name of the  living: "yibadel lehayim"
(zol zayn opgesheydt tsum lebn).   Sometimes one puts it even "lehayim
aruqim" (tsu lange yorn).

I  hope that  you all  will "forgive"  my mode  of transliteration  of
Hebrew words  but Hebrew is *my*  mame loshen (which my  late Mame and
Tate have never quite mastered...).

Michael Shimshoni

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 1995 10:39:48 -0500 (EST)
From: m_steinlauf@acad.fandm.edu
Subject: Bund/Vaad

Tayerer Dovid Braun,

Maskim, efsher zenen yo geven identish der Bund un der Vaad Arbe Arotses,
ober vi kenstu, apikoyres eyner, dos aroyszogn on a lehavdl?!

Moyshe-Shaye Steinlauf

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 1995 18:11:44 -0500
From: bsg@world.std.com
Subject: Grodno

Grodno was also the center of mass, as it were, of a now wholly extinct
flock of Polish Wooden Synagogues, remarkable, exotic structures after a
Slavic/Russian fashion, graced with curve-sloped, multi-decked mansard
rooves and eaves with Russian "eye" dormers enclosing vast internal
vaulted spaces, often with rings of trompe-l'oeil perspective galleries
supported on central pillars surrounding a Bimah, executed wholly in wood
by anonymous architects from the 17th to 19th centuries.  These buildings
were wholly unlike Russian and Polish Christian houses of worship, and
owe far more to secular architecture in this region at that time.

The most beautiful was at Wolpa, with shells of beautiful ogee-curved
roofs.  This incomparably graceful baroque aedifice is often cited in
more general collections of famous synagogues.  These beautiful and
idiosyncratic structures were uniformly burned by the Nazis, often with
the Jewish population imprisoned inside.

The classic work on these structures is Piechotka & Piechotka, "Bo'z.nice
Drewniane", Warsaw 1959, available in English in rare prints as "Wooden
Synagogues", containing hundreds of photos, cross-sections and plans
created as part of a Polish Goverment effort in the 30's, whose surmise
that this unique cultural heritage would soon vanish was all too
tragically prescient.

I realize that there is something cruel and brutal about lamenting the
destruction of a couple of hundred exquisite wooden buildings when six
million people met the same fate in the same gesture for the same reason,
but my aesthetic sense feels violated by the prospect of declining to do
so on those grounds.

Does anyone else here share this interest of mine?

Bernard S. Greenberg

______________________________________________________
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