Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 5.167
November 14, 1995

1) Dialects and standards (Larry Rosenwald)
2) Dialects and standards (Shleyme Axelrod)
3) Dialects and standards (Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 1995 15:43:50 -0500 (EST)
From: lrosenwald@wellesley.edu
Subject: Dialects and standards

I read Eliyahu Juni's last posting [5.163] with great interest, but not
always with unmixed agreement.  I express (and feel) my dissent very
tentatively - I know much less about these matters than he does.  But the
issues are crucial, and worth discussing.

1.  At the recent conference on women and Yiddish in New York - which I
thought was very inspiring, by the way, and would love to hear other
Mendelyaners' opinions of - there was a debate related to this matter -
Sharon Kleinbaum, who's the rabbi of Beth Simha Torah in New York, was
arguing that a secular commitment to Yiddish will inevitably have to
confront the fact that Yiddish is rooted in Hebrew.  (She wasn't arguing
against such a commitment - she was for a while assistant director to the
National Yiddish Book Center - only trying to state what she thought its
limitations were.)  Then Irena Klepfisz got up and spoke.  She's very
much committed to a Yiddish-based, secular leftist politics, and these
issues mean a lot to her, and she had a lot to say about them.  But what
I particular remember, in this context, was her statement that though di
klasiker - Mendele, Sholem Aleikhem, Perets - in fact write a Yiddish
literature that's deeply rooted in Hebrew, many women writers in Yiddish
do not.  She was talking mostly about the autobiographical literature
she's been investigating, I think - and her recent article in _Bridges_
quotes (in Yiddish and in translation) fairly big chunks of that
literature, and from what I can remember, what she quotes bears out her
assertion.  Certainly - to take another, disparate example - the poems of
Anna Margolin that I've looked at aren't rooted in Hebrew in the way that
Perets stories are.

So I guess the claim I'd be advancing here would be that some Yiddish
writing can be described the terms Eliyahu Juni is using, but that some
cannot.

2.  My second claim is actually a little like my first, but concerns not
women's writing but another domain, namely that of the Yiddish critical
essay.  I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but when I read such
essays - Glatshteyn's, say, or Ayzland's _Fun unzer friling_ - they seem
to me not very deeply rooted in Hebrew either.  I don't mean that the
writers of the essays weren't so rooted;  but their essayistic diction
isn't, or isn't always.

To quote almost at random, this is the beginning of a Glatshteyn essay
called, appropriately enough, "Mendele Moykher Sforim":

     Tsu mendeles hundertstn geboyrntog hot Shmuel Niger farendikt zayns
     an artikl mitn fayerlekhn oysruf, "lomir itst lkoved zayn hundertstn
     geboyrntog lernen a blat mendele moykhe sforim."  Az men darf
     mendelen nisht nor leyenen nor oykh lernen, hobn nokh zayne
     eyniklakh gevust un farshtanen mit yorn tsurik.  Zey hobn zikh
     glaykh batsoygn tsu zayne bikher vi tsu sfoyrim etc."

Now this passage does draw on terms like lernen, and on distinctions like
that between bikher and sfoyrim, but one doesn't, to understand such
matters, have to go very deeply into the world of Yidishkayt;  and the
passage feels, to me at least, at least as deeply rooted in a tradition
of Germanized academic Yiddish ("academic" not being used as an insult, I
should make clear).

Or, again:  the world of Yiddish-rooted-in-Hebrew is, insofar as I
can see the territory, not the only world of Yiddish there is.

Larry Rosenwald

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 10:44:02 -0500 (EST)
From: ptyaxel@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
Subject: Dialects and standards

I'm pleased that Eliyahu Juni (5.164), who identifies himself as one of
the "frimaks" [_frumakes_?] doesn't plan to give up on Mendele, despite
what he sees as the unfamiliarity of the modal Mendelyaner with the life
and largely loshnkoydesh-derived portion of the lexicon of the khsidish
world.   (I'm one of those who would fail his vocabulary test, with a
score of maybe 20%; even with Weinreich and Harkavy and a couple of
dictionaries of hebraisms in Yiddish, I probably won't get a passing
grade.)  But when he says "You can't divorce Yiddish from Yiddishkayt",
seeming to define Yiddishkayt as the result of living precisely that
style of life with precisely that lexicon, he comes close to sounding
like the exclusionists in the absurd and destructive "Who-is-a-Jew?"
controversy of a few years ago.  In any case, the statement is not
compelling; I can and easily do divorce Yiddish from that kind of
Yiddishkayt, though of course I wouldn't presume to banish its
practitioners from the ranks of users or lovers of the language.  As to
the suggestion that the author of the mock interview with Colin Powell
just "threw in" the reference to Yom Kippur in a failed attempt to
provide some authentic _yidisher tam_ to the joke, I would argue that the
_tam_ was provided by the perfectly idiomatic Yiddish in which the
interview was conducted.  (No surprise there, considering who the
reporter was.)

I'm grateful, khaver Eliyahu, to be able to learn from you about a
subculture that I'm almost totally ignorant of, and especially about its
variety of living Yiddish (which, incidentally, no one has ever suggested
that you give up; _punkt farkert_.)  And I admire your writing style.
But please, no more qualifying exams.

Shleyme Axelrod
Buffalo, New York

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 12:05:01 -0500
From: shirshan@aol.com
Subject: Dialects and standards

Topic: The Secular Jews, Sarah's Children Too

I have just returned from Chicago and, in one fell swoop, read  all of
Eliyahu Juni's recent postings (157, 163 and 4). A sheynem, reynem dank,
Eliyahu, for inviting us over your fence, but won't you spend a few
minutes in my secular, unfenced garden (much smaller and newer than your
vast plantation), yet here apples and oranges, pomegranates and even
dates grow. Here, all are welcome. Here, the plantings were tenderly and
carefully dug into fertile, beloved soil by our parents, secular Jews who
were deeply religious. Their sanctifications include learning (tzu zayn
gebildet), social justice, mentshlekhkayt, a Yiddish hartz, a sense of
community, and Yiddish, the same Mame Yidish that has brought us together
here, in the land of Mendele.

Never would the secular Jew deny that knowing religion and customs and
traditions make language (and life!) more meaningful, but one need not
live and breath every pintele that one studies. If words have been lost
in discarding the religion, much has been gained in their stead.

The secular Jews' pilpul was of politics, personalities, poetry or
newspapers. (The Forverts, the Frayhayt or the Tog (the Morgn Journal was
for my old, religious grandparents), right wing or left wing, Yoshe Kalb,
Maurice Schwartz, Jacob Adler, Norman Thomas or Earl Browder, Trotsky or
Karl Kautsky, and the Scottsboro Boys, Tom Mooney, Yehoash's Tenakh in
Yiddish.....

Like the Khasidim today, they indulged in passionate parenting aiming for
an unconditional love from us, aiming at contagion in attitudes (as John
Dewey said: attitudes must be caught, not taught). They carrried us on
their shoulders at May Day parades, wheeled us in strollers at Union
meetings (and immigrants did gain a living wage), took us to listen as
they created plans for medical benefits, funeral plots, summer camps, all
in their beloved Yiddish. They took us to see King Lear in Yiddish, read
Veblen to us in Yiddish. We learned to support everything Yiddish and
Jewish, for every Jew around the globe was a sister, a brother.

And they formed the shulas for us - in basements, in each other's homes.
Life was around the shula (Yiddish school) where in the late thirties,
they found the $2 monthly tuition for my sister and for me, girl-children
being educated, equal to the guys studying elsewhere for Bar Mitzvah. The
shula would create the goldene keyt of Yiddishkayt that they loved so
dearly. Here we celebrated holidays, held banquets like feasts to hear
children recite in Yiddish, to hear speakers tell of brave new worlds
where all men would be equal and clothed and fed through their right to
work.  And the singing, the hundreds of songs we learned and loved. My
father had a khush, a way of creating a feeling of yontef in our home
before every shula event. Dressing, haircombing, preparing were as
exciting as some of the celebrations and concerts.

They taught us to stand tall and how to be a minority within a minority;
their emphasis was peoplehood. "Nu Mirl," my mother always greeted me,
"vos hostu haynt oyfgeton far zikh? un vos hostu optgeton far undzer
Yidish folk?"

And so, today, I lead a Yidish Vinkl, a Yiddish Club, organize Holocaust
memorials, programs to partake of the goldene kayt or work for the
international Yiddish conference, etc.

So, Eliyahu, Reb Zellig scheduled an "interview" on Sucos and I learned
only today what asheryotsar means. To me the word Yiddishkayt always
meant more than the cold English word Judaism. Yiddishkayt is that
hartzik, love-filled totality, the entire culture around Yiddish - the
culture of the raggedy shtetl where my parents lived; the Yiddish
standardized or non-standardized speaker, writer, and lover; the scholar,
the linguist and the lover of Second Avenue ditties; the Jewish Labor
Committee; the concept of Tzedakah with its root in justice....

Together we must see to it, Eliyahu, that there's room for all of us, for
those who choose to 'whisper a prayer', and for those that choose to
'sing a song of peace with a great shout'.

Would that Yigal Amir (and all the fanatics who hate) had caught that
attitude at somebody's knee, that glorious lesson that each of us is free
to choose.

Marjorie Schonhaut Hirshan
Boynton Beach, Florida

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End of Mendele Vol. 5.167