Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ____________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 15.056 April 24, 2006 SPACE here Contents of Vol. 15.056 April 24, 2006 1) Call It Sleep (Bernard Cooperman) 2) bashert (Bert Silver) 3) yots and zhlob (Lynda) 4) mispalel zany (Felicitas Payk) 5) Fagin (Goldie Morgentaler) 6) Fagin (Sol Steinmetz) 7) farfl (Antonio Della Valle) 8) Macaronic couplet (Al Grand) 9) mayn yingele (Hershl Hartman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 8 Subject: Call it Sleep Thank you to Goldie Morgentaler for her note on the title of Henry Roth's "Call it Sleep" but my question remains. The freighted metaphorical meaning of the phrase at the end of the book is clear, but the phrase itself is odd. What I am asking is whether anyone can think of a Yiddish phrase that might have suggested this non-English locution to Roth. Bernard Dov Cooperman 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 9 Subject: bashert I recently attended an excellent production of the "Dybbuk" at the District of Columbia JCC. The director of the play changed the locale to the country of Georgia and the actors who portrayed Georgian Jews wore Cossack-like clothing. However, the actors portraying Georgian Jews kept using the word "bashert," which was used in the original play. "Bashert" of course means fated or "meant to be" in Yiddish. To the best of my knowledge the Georgian Jews did not speak Yiddish, so I wondered if the Yiddish word might have been derived from Hebrew and may have thus entered the vocabulary of Georgian Jews. Checking a Hebrew-English dictionary and asking several knowledgeable Hebrew speakers convinced me that the word did not enter Yiddish from Hebrew. In German "scheren" means to shear, and in Yiddish "basheren" refers to an Orthodox boy's first haircut. That, however, seems to me to be a stretch to "bashert" meaning fated. Can anyone on the Mendele listserve enlighten me as to the derivation of "bashert"? Am I wrong in thinking that Georgian Jews did not speak Yiddish? Is there an explanation for the use of the word in the context of a play located in Georgia or did the director use the word simply because it appeared in the original play? Bert Silver [Moderator's Note: Georgian Jews - who are not Ashkenazic - traditionally speak a type of Georgian, not Yiddish. "Bashert" is a word of Germanic origin, cf. NHG bescheren.] 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 10 Subject: yots and zhlob etymology There is a controversy raging in the National Scrabble Association. With a recent infusion of 3,300 new words to the Scrabble dictionary, around 200 have been added to the existing list of nearly 900 Yiddish/Hebrew/Yinglish words which are "kosher" for tournament play. This has set us scrambling to update our Jewish word list. One of our Scrabble mavens notes that "schlub" is a new word, but asks why not the preferred Rosten-ized spelling of "zhlub" or "zhlob." We already have eight ways to spell "gonif." Same goes for "yutz." It is not in the Joys of Yiddish. Is it Yiddish? I've heard it but no one in our crowd seems to know. I know it from my Israeli circles as "yotzmach." I have always heard it as a derogatory word and figured it stemmed from its root, tzemach, describing a person as a "vegetable" and thanks to technology, also as a computer geek. But I don't know if the dog wagged the tail -- if it was Yiddish that became Hebraicized, or the other way around! The question is, how did we end up with these words in "undzer" lexicon, and what is the etymology? Lynda 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 9 Subject: mispalel zayn I often heard the term "mispalel zayn" when referred to praying. What surprises me, though, is that I did not find anything about it in the net. That is why I am not sure whether I am writing this term correctly, and whether it even exists in this form - maybe I have heard something wrong. So my questions are: 1. Does this term exist in the way I have rendered it, and if not, does a similar term exist? 2. If I did not hear it completely wrong, in which context is it used as opposed to davenen? If this glides off into too religious matters, please stop me! Felicitas Payk 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 12 Subject: Fagin Yes, I know that Fagin can also be a Jewish name, although I think it is more commonly spelled Feigen or Fajgen when it is Jewish. However, it is also a non-Jewish name (Irish rather than Anglo-Saxon--sorry for the mistake). And the fact remains that Dickens took this name for the Jewish villain of Oliver Twist because it belonged to Bob Fagin, a gentile boy he knew when he was a child. If anyone would like chapter and verse on this, I would suggest looking, most recently, into Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens (p. 78 in the Harper/Collins edition), or Christopher Hibbert's The Making of Charles Dickens (p. 77 in the Penguin edition), among numerous other sources, the names of which I will be happy to supply if anyone would like to get in touch with me. Dickens's knowledge of Jewish names (or of Jews for that matter) does not seem to have been very extensive. The other major Jewish figure in his novels is named Mr. Riah--a name that sounds like it should be Jewish, but I am not sure that it is, at least not as a family name. Goldie Morgentaler 6)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 21 Subject: Fagin Allow me to make this suggestion to everyone who has responded or intends to respond to my message about David L. Gold's article on Dickens's Fagin: it would be good to read the article first, because most of those who have responded have given either information already in the article or misinformation which the article corrects. The article, titled "Despite Popular Belief, the name Fagin in Charles Dickens's The Adventures of Oliver Twist Has No Jewish Connection," appeared in Beitrge zur Namenforschung, new series, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 385-423, Winter, 2005, Universittsverlag, Heidelberg, Germany. It would be better to build on the article by correcting any mistakes one can find there or by adding new information. Sol Steinmetz 7)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 12 Subject: farfl The first meaning of "farfalla" (pl. farfalle) in Italian is "butterfly." The bow tie and the pasta are called "farfalla" or "farfalle" because they are butterfly-shaped. Antonio Della Valle 8)---------------------------------------------------- Date: April 12 Subject: Macaronic couplet On page 536 of Max Weinreich's English edition of "History of the Yiddish Language" and on page 51 of Benjamin Harshav's "The Meaning of Yiddish" is this Russian/Hebrew couplet: "Mi piom, mi gulyayem / veato meylekh khay vekayem!" I'm enthralled by the very Yiddish sounding rhythm of that miniature couplet - despite its having not one Yiddish word (except arguably "meylekh"). Neither Weinreich nor Harshav explain about the origin of the couplet. I'm therefore wondering if anyone can tell me how, when and where this rhyme was (or is) used. And (as they say at presidential press conferences) I have a follow up question: Does the Russian word "gulyayem" have have any relation to the Yiddish "hulyen" (as, for instance, in "Hulyet, hulyet kinderlekh...")? Al Grand 9)---------------------------------------------------- From: April 14 Subject: mayn yingele Many singers and groups have recorded Morris Rosenfeld's moving poem/song, but the most original and heartfelt version is found on The Bluestein Family's LP, "fun vanen heybt zikh on a libe -- where does love come from?", Greenhays Recordings GR716, marketed by Flying Fish, Inc. The song is rendered as a bilingual duet, with the late Prof. Gene Bluestein singing in Yiddish and daughter Frayda singing Aaron Kramer's sensitive English translation. Tellingly, Gene's liner notes state: "The predicament of this father who only sees his child sleeping was shared by many other immigrants and continues to this day." Hershl Hartman ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 15.056 Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead, choose one of these two: Messages for posting on Mendele Personal and other messages to the shamosim