Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (12): Word treasure

Bloy vi a bliml tsvishn korn

 

Rather wonderfully, the literal meaning of the Yiddish word for thesaurus, אוצר (oytser), is treasure.  For someone who has been known to read a thesaurus for fun, discovering this was a rare moment of cultural resonance, when the name of an object captured not only its function but my emotional reaction to it.  Of course, there’s an echo of this in English, where a collection of literature can be called a treasury, but somehow אוצר is even more direct about the joy to be found in language and the building of meaning.

 

The אוצר I have is the one produced by Nahum Stutchkoff in 1950 and it’s a hearty breezeblock of a book.  Given the size of it I’m not surprised that there’s only ever been one reprint edition, since a 940-page exploration of what was then a fading language would have been a challenging sell.  Luckily, this book was built to last.  Mine is one of the 1950 ones and it’s printed on the type of heavy paper that has a lot to say for itself – there’s plenty of crackling and chatter when you turn the pages.  You know that sound, like when you flex a really fat telephone directory in your hands?  It’s that, as though the words are trying to speak themselves.  This אוצר is bound in heavy green book linen with gold lettering, and they even marbled the page edges for crying out loud.  It might be 67 years old, but this book still shows up almost everything else on the shelves.

  

The 1991 reprint edition of Stutchkoff's אוצר  

 

I bought my copy of Stutchkoff’s אוצר on eBay for $27, from some guy in West Virginia.  He might not have realised what a treasure he had but someone somewhere took mighty good care of this book.  I’ve not been able to find a single blemish on its pages, not one spot of foxing and not a single rip.  It’s the kind of volume you’d expect to see in a library, but this one has no labels or stamps, no inscriptions or marginalia.  The covers are worn where it’s been sitting on the shelf, but beyond that it looks like it’s gone unread for most of its life.  Happily, not anymore.

 

This אוצר was one of the very first Yiddish books I bought, almost two years ago, back when I was slowly piecing words together on the page.  I was still freaking out about the cost of the postage as I was unwrapping it, but this is one of those books that can silence all doubts.  I might have struggled to read it back then, but now this one volume is probably the most comprehensive representation of the Yiddish language that I could ever find.

 

Just like a Roget’s Thesaurus, Stutchkoff’s אוצר is organised according to categories, and like Roget’s it starts with the big existential ones, namely Being (zayn) and Not-Being (nit-zayn).  Clearly Stutchkoff wanted Yiddish to be represented with as much seriousness as all the other European languages, not as some inconsequential זשאַרגאָן (zshargon/jargon).  He divided the entire shprakh into 620 categories of concepts, everything from elements to wild animals to music to foods to emotions, then he absolutely went to town.  Now that I can read and understand great swathes of this book, I can see that there is real gold in the sheer linguistic variety that Stutchkoff recorded.

 

Officially, the אוצר contains over 150,000 words, concepts and phrases, making it almost twice as comprehensive as my largest Yiddish dictionary.  There are words in here that none of my Yiddish dictionaries have, and Stutchkoff has been careful to track the different variants of Yiddish across its full linguistic range.  To use the section on blue (בלױ) as an example, there’s a huge array of detail that would be impossible to find elsewhere.  Not only does it list the different ways of saying “blue”, depending on which version of Yiddish you are using (bloy, blo, blov, azur, lazur), it also gives a wonderful range of specific and recognisable blues, such as עלעקטריע בלױ (elektrie bloy), הימל בלױ (himl bloy) and אולטראַמאַרין (ultramarin).  Then there’s the more mysterious blues, such as קינדער בלױ (kinder bloy), which I can only guess would be pastel blue, or בערלינער בלױ (berliner bloy) and קאַדעט בלױ (kadet bloy), which sound rather more like heritage paint shades.

 

Berliner blue has to be in here somewhere

 

However, it’s the similes that really deliver the goods.  As well as the expected bloy vi der yam (blue as the sea) and bloy vi der himl (blue as the sky), we have bloy vi bliml tsvishn korn (blue as a little flower amongst rye, presumably a cornflower), bloy vi a milb (blue as a moth), bloy vi a milts (blue as a spleen), bloy vi a gehangener  (blue as a hanged man) and, my own personal favourite, bloy vi mayne gesheftn.  I’m not entirely sure, but I think that last one means “blue as my deals”.  I’m almost sure that it’s not obscene.

 

What I love about these similes is that they call up a world in its own words, in the language that people spoke on the street and in their homes.  They add the fine detail that has often been lost in standardized Yiddish, where bloy is usually just bloy.  Stutchkoff’s אוצר is the only one of its kind, a lifetime’s work, and perhaps the closest we non-native speakers can get to understanding not only what we have already lost but also what there is to rediscover.

 

 

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (11): Translating and uncertainty

Leyb Kvitko's A tsig mit zivn tsigelekh

When you learn another language, you eventually get to the point where translating seems like a feasible idea.  In fact, translating has been central to my experience of Yiddish, because rather than do the sensible thing and work my way through one or more of the excellent Yiddish textbooks out there, for most of the last two years I’ve been learning by reading and translating (with varying success and with gradually increasing speed) a glorious selection of Yiddish literature.  This suits me perfectly, since knowing how to ask for more coffee or describe someone’s clothes is absolutely fine when you might need a language for holidays and polite travel chit-chat, but my love for Yiddish came from knowing that so much of its literature was out there to be discovered, as yet untranslated and completely unknown to me.

Having moved from I. L. Peretz and I. B. Singer short stories to Celia Dropkin’s poetry, my eternally patient reading partner and Yiddish mentor (take a bow, Stephen Ross) suggested that we read Sholem Aleichem’s novel Motl, peysi dem khazns (Motl, the Cantor’s Son).  Although on a completely different scale from our previous readings, what Motl has in common with those shorter texts is that it isn’t written in standard YIVO Yiddish.  The Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem is not the same as the Yiddish of Peretz, which in turn isn’t the same as the Yiddish of Singer or Dropkin.  Each author mixes in different degrees of loshn-koydesh and their work is shaped by the Yiddish that surrounded them in childhood.  These different Yiddishes vary in their spelling and their pronunciation, and are often scattered with untranslatable words that I can’t find in any of my five dictionaries.  But while these authors have all had their work translated into English by far more accomplished Yiddishists than me, there are plenty who have not.

Leyb Kvitko (1890-1952)

 

Leyb Kvitko (1890-1952) falls into the latter category.  Known primarily as a writer of extraordinarily popular children’s books, Kvitko also wrote poetry in Yiddish, becoming increasingly politically active until he was arrested and executed by Stalin’s regime.  And yet it’s one of Kvitko’s poems, “Shteyner eyntsike”, which has been the best illustration of the complexities involved in translating Yiddish, particularly since Kvitko’s particular version of Soviet Yiddish tests my translation abilities to a staggering degree.  It speaks volumes about the level of my Yiddish obsession that my first thought on reading Kvitko was, “I wonder how long it would take to translate one of these poems?”  The answer was hours and hours.  And hours.  But my volume of Kvitko’s poetry has voyaged from Moscow, where it was published in 1967, to Montreal and now it is here in Warwickshire sitting demurely on my desk.  A book that has travelled so far certainly deserves this attention, despite the considerable challenges that it presents to someone with limited Yiddish, and a newly heightened awareness of just how slippery translation can be.

The first challenge with this poem is the title.  Shteyner I know means “stones”, so that’s easy, but “eyntsike” can mean “rare”, “single”, “individual” and “only”, amongst other possibilities. Unluckily for me, almost all of these potential translations work in the context of the title, so from the outset the different possible versions of the poem start multiplying with abandon.



Leyb Kvitko, 1919

 

The second challenge was that there were several words that I couldn’t find in any of my dictionaries.  “Shteyner eyntsike” was written in 1917, so I assumed that my earlier, pre-standardised dictionaries would be my best bet.  Alas, Yiddish just isn’t that logical.  And if eyntsike gave me grief, it was nothing on stosnvayz.  Four of my dictionaries drew a blank, but the fifth noted that stos is, or was, a card game.  In the context of the line, could stosnvays refer to a pattern in which these stones are laid out, as part of a game?  Then there’s arbelekh, another word that I can’t find.  Arbl means sleeves, so could arbelekh mean “little sleeves”?  Or is it something to do with arb, meaning “inheritance”?  That word occurs in a line about a child’s smile, mit arbelekh farshart, so is that smile covered with little sleeves or is it being described as a “mischievous little inheritance”?  Either way, the grammar doesn’t work – there are plurals nestling up against singulars in a most indecisive way.

Then there’s the challenge presented by being the kind of lunatic who owns five Yiddish dictionaries, all of which want to argue amongst themselves about the best way to translate any given word.  This means that oysgebroyter could mean “curved” or “crooked”, but it could also mean “constructed”.  Since the stanza where it occurs follows imagery of building, that’s less troubling than it might have been, but should I translate troym as “dream” or “ideal”?

Finally, Kvitko plays a really unexpected trick.  Many of his poems contain loshn-koydesh words that have been spelled out phonetically.  This means that mayse-bilder foxed me but good, until I realised that mayse (מײַסע) was the same word as mayse (מעשׂה), or “story”.  Oy, did I feel dumb.

Leyb Kvitko, Dos ketsele

This was when I realised that the various different incarnations of this poem weren’t going to resolve themselves into a single, final, coherent translation, at least, not for me.  All these crooked dreams and constructed ideals were going to continue to co-exist, implacably stubborn, no matter how many times I checked and rechecked every word in every dictionary.  Whether the narrator turns into a climbing frame or simply builds one, the outcome is the same: this poem is alive again after years spent stilled and silent, waiting for another Yiddish reader to come along.  I certainly never thought that I would love this linguistic uncertainty so much, or that seeing these competing narratives springing up from a single line of verse would produce such joy from such utter incomprehension.  I expect that as my Yiddish improves, these chimerical moments where the language squirms and flexes and resists being fixed into a single meaning will become fewer and fewer.  I will miss them.

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (10): Di gantse mishpokhe

When I started learning Yiddish, pretty much the first loshn-koydesh word I encountered was משפּחה (mishpokhe), which means “family”.  As you might expect, family is a pretty fundamental concept in Yiddish, and not just in the literal sense of your own blood relatives.  משפּחה has an additional meaning that is much broader and more inclusive, signifying a cultural and familial fellowship amongst Jews that transcends nationality, religious conviction, and pretty much any other means of categorising people.  

Yiddish used to be the key to this aspect of משפּחה since it was the language that all Ashkenazi held in common, but it is by no means essential.  In fact, long before I started to learn Yiddish I knew what משפּחה meant, even though I still find it difficult to put into words.  משפּחה was that unexpected connection when you realised that the person you were speaking to in the supermarket queue or at the bus stop was also Jewish, a rare experience for me when I was growing up, and so all the more wonderful when it did occur. It’s the sudden awareness of commonality, that our family histories may not intersect, but they are bound to be similar to one another.

For me, learning Yiddish has been a way of amplifying that connection, not because I encounter many other people who can speak it, but because it reveals those threads of the past that run through the fabric of the present.  It’s not just about continuity – being able to understand the language that my ancestors spoke – it’s also about being able to hear those ancestors in their own words.  Thanks to the generosity of my wider משפּחה, I can read my great, great-uncle’s first book in Yiddish, since it was preserved for di Gantze Mishpochah by the Elovitz family’s donation to the Yiddish Book Center.  However, although משפּחה has that more open, tribal meaning, learning Yiddish has illuminated elements of my own family in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.

One crucial person in this regard is a woman called Miriam Shumik.  She was my great, great-aunt, married to my mother’s crazy revolutionary great-uncle, Hersh-Mendel.  Actually, Hersh-Mendel was the reason that my grandfather’s family ended up in London: my great-grandfather got tired of the Warsaw police turning up on the doorstep in search of his brother.  Hersh-Mendel’s life was improbably adventurous and bleakly tragic, and his many unexpected exploits certainly deserve further discussion, but while I’ve known about him since I was a teenager, I knew absolutely nothing about Miriam.  This was at least partly because, unlike Hersh-Mendel, she didn’t survive the Nazi occupation.  Hersh-Mendel didn’t talk about Miriam and they had no children, so she was absent from the story of our family.  In fact, until recently I didn’t even know her name.  All we knew was that she and Hersh-Mendel had been betrayed by a neighbour in wartime Paris.  He escaped; she did not.  We didn’t even know what had happened to her.  Then I learnt Yiddish.  This meant that when my mum turned up a Yizkor book entry[1] for Miriam during one of her frequent family history Google searches, I was able to translate it.  Of all the gifts Yiddish has given me, this one remains the greatest.

Miriam’s eulogy was written by one of her childhood friends, a woman listed only as M. P.  We will never know who she was but because of this unknown member of my extended Jewish משפּחה, Miriam’s actual משפּחה can remember her.  It’s thanks to M. P. that we know Miriam was tall and clever, that she organised the first Communist cell in her home town, and that she had a way with words.  It’s also thanks to M. P. that we know Miriam was the eldest of four sisters, and that the family home was three bare rooms with three beds, three chairs and a table.  We know that Miriam was אַ רױז צװישן געװײנלעכע בלומען (a rose amongst weeds), and that she loved to talk about books.  We know that Miriam had read the first volume of The Count of Monte Cristo and been captivated by it, but the library didn’t have the rest of the book.  We know that M. P. found the second volume and brought it to Miriam, causing her to dance for joy and immediately start reading it aloud.  And, of course, we now know that Miriam died in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, possibly in the uprising but equally possibly from the heart condition she developed after she was tortured whilst a political prisoner in the 1920s.

Miriam may not be my blood relative, but she is part of the משפּחה in both senses.  I can recognise in her my family’s obsession with reading books, talking about books and, of course, talking in general.  More importantly, perhaps, I can recognise that my admiration for her courage and her capacity to stand up for what she thought was right means something, whether we are related or not.  At least now I can remember her not just as my great, great-uncle’s wife but as a brave, principled woman who risked her own life trying to improve the lives of others.  Our משפּחה is the greater for her presence.  

---

[1] A Yizkor book is a record of a Jewish communities lost in the Holocaust, written by the survivors of that community.

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (9): CURSES!

 

No matter how little is generally known about Yiddish, there’s one aspect of the language that pretty much everyone can agree on: Yiddish really delivers on the swearing.  In fact, it has a startlingly vivid and at times highly specific array of insults, profanities and curses that bring joy to even the most jaded shouter of obscenities.  To be fair, Jews have had plenty to swear about, so the sheer variety of options should be no surprise.  What is surprising, though, given my own love of swearing, is that I’ve not chosen to talk about this before now.  You see, my desire to share as many appalling Yiddish curses as possible has been tempered by a growing awareness that there has been a tendency for popular culture to cast Yiddish as nothing more than an amusing series of dirty words.  In fact, on several occasions, people have told me that they themselves have considered learning Yiddish in order to swear better, which is a sentiment I can admire, albeit one which misses so much of what Yiddish actually has to offer.  So, in the spirit of having a good swear, it’s possible to look at what Yiddish curses are all about without just reducing the entire shprakh to this single register of meaning.

The problem is that the popular view of Yiddish is still dominated by its capacity for inventive insults.  A surprising proportion of recently published books on the language tend to focus on this aspect, which is undeniably entertaining, and does clear up the question of how a shlemiel differs from a shlemazel, but these all tend to break Yiddish down into a handful of individual words and phrases rather than discussing it as a full language.  This wouldn’t be a problem if there were other, more comprehensive representations of Yiddish, but without the backdrop of the wider culture, Yiddish is perceived as a zshargon rather than a shprakh.

 

This focus on swearing in Yiddish is so persistent that it’s worth asking where it could have come from.  I can’t remember ever hearing anyone tell me they were thinking of learning Russian or Italian purely for the cursing, although I did have a school friend who tried to learn French to impress girls, which was an unexpectedly enterprising, if ultimately doomed plan.  However, Yiddish has a long history of usage as “secret” communication, a way of speaking under the radar in the UK at least.  Alas, the growing prevalence of US comedy on UK television in the 1990s meant that I could no longer insult my university acquaintances with the same impunity I had enjoyed during secondary school.  As soon as everyone knows what putz and shmuck mean, you need to reinvent your code.  Part of the issue is that Yiddish has never been a language associated with power or authority.  Despite its millions of pre-WWII speakers it was never a national language, and since then it has needed to be flexible in order to survive.  Perhaps focusing on swearing is a way of engaging with a marginalized language, since this gives it “purpose” for a wider audience; or perhaps, given the turn of twentieth-century history, this is the least painful way of talking around all that has been lost.   

 

All this means that I am reluctant to go full-throttle on the Yiddish swearing here, at least in terms of just listing individual words.  However, proper curses in complete, grammatical sentences are another story.  These give a much clearer picture of how spoken Yiddish actually works; plus they have the advantage of being more difficult for non-speakers to actually follow.  My cursing sourcebook is The Dictionary of Yiddish Slang and Idioms by Fred Kogos, and while I might take issue with his transliteration, I can’t fault his dedication to the cause of profanity.  As well as the old standards, like Gey kakn aufn yam (“Go shit in the sea”) and Kush mir in tokhes (“Kiss my ass”), this collection reveals some unexpected trends in Yiddish insults.  For a start, onions are a curiously popular point of reference.  Er zol vaksn vi a tsibele, mit dem kop in drerd (“May he grow like an onion, with his head in the ground”) makes sense, since it taps into a recurring theme in Yiddish insults of effectively finding imaginative ways to wish your enemy dead.  I have more difficulty with Zol dir vaksn tsibeles fun pupik (“May onions grow in your bellybutton”), because it’s so random and yet so revoltingly corporeal.  It doesn’t take much imagination to picture all those little roots twining round your kishkes.  Geese are another common feature, with Gey strashen di gendz (“Go threaten the geese”) being a particular favourite.  Having witnessed numerous goose attacks on unwary students, I can say that this is an insult you wouldn’t take lightly.

 

While geese and onions paint a charmingly pastoral picture of Yiddish life, there are several insults that speak to a less wholesome existence, like Er krikht vi a vantz (“He crawls like a bedbug”); while there is also a disturbingly precise set of physical curses, like Zol er tsebrekhen a fus (“He should break a leg”) and Zol dikh khapn beym boykh (“May you get a stomach cramp”).  Others are more random, such as Zolst geshvollen veren vi a berg (“May you swell up like a mountain”) or Gey fayfn aufn yam (“Go whistle in the ocean”).  The more insults I read, the clearer the picture of the world in which they were coined, full of unexpected ailments, market gardening and angry wildfowl.  As wonderful as it is to translate English swearwords into Yiddish, the unpredictable inventiveness of these “home-grown” insults is where the real pleasure lies.  Calling someone a momser is a good start (especially if they don't speak Yiddish), but even the most inveterate swearer will recognise that this doesn’t even come close to the glory of Ikh vel makhn fun dayne kishkes a telefon (“I will make a telephone out of your guts”).  It would appear that sometimes the old ways really are the best.

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (8): YIVO, Yivo and the challenge of standardized Yiddish

Shmerke Kaczerginski sorts through Jewish books in the YIVO building in Vilna during World War II.
Courtesy of YIVO

 

Futurama has long been one of my favourite shows, but despite my profound love of sociopathic robots and animated swearing, there is one problem.  Whenever I hear the name YIVO, I don’t think of YIVO, the incredible Yiddish academic organisation, I think of Yivo, the many-tentacled “Beast with a Billion Backs” (at least I’m not the only one).  While this is clearly a personal failing on my part, my defence is that Futurama Yivo was the one I encountered first, and a planet-sized purple space pervert is a pretty memorable association to have with a name.  I fear that Max Weinreich would not be impressed.

 

The wrong Yivo

This post isn’t an attempt to reclaim the name of YIVO, because they really don’t need any help from cartoon-obsessed נאַר like me.  However, my YIVO/Yivo confusion made me realise that space monster Yivo highlights one of the most difficult aspects of research institution YIVO, namely the standardization of the Yiddish language.

 

Before I say anything else, I should point out that YIVO is arguably the most important Yiddish organisation in existence.  These guys have saved a huge amount of Yiddish language and culture, and they continue to share that language and culture with overwhelming generosity.  The institution was founded in 1925 in Vilna but relocated to the US after WWII, taking with it all the materials its members and their friends had risked their lives to conceal during the Nazi occupation.  This is a collection founded on books, documents and other treasures that saw out the war hidden under floorboards and inside walls, saved by people who, in many cases, did not survive the war themselves. You can see now why I feel so bad about the whole Futurama association.

 

YIVO didn’t stop there, though.  They produced Yiddish dictionaries, created research archives and sustained Yiddish through decades of popular decline.  Now they provide a huge array of digital resources to the student of Yiddish, including the Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, online classes in Yiddish culture, and immense databases of archival materials.  They run summer language schools and fellowships, exhibitions and live events, all to share and preserve Yiddish language and heritage.

 

 

As grateful as I am that YIVO exists, that last sentence carries a hint of the challenge they have inadvertently created.  In seeking to preserve Yiddish in its pre-WWII state, YIVO has standardized that language.  This made sense in many ways, since any language that stretches across such a huge range of countries is bound to have variations, dialectical differences, and all kinds of idiosyncrasies that would make it difficult to teach to new learners.  In the absence of the majority of its native speakers, Yiddish had to switch from being a multitude of different variations into a single language that could be defined and recorded, in order to save it from being lost altogether.

 

This is where my irrepressible recollection of Yivo the Futurama space-vert becomes unexpectedly relevant.  The whole experience of language is that words evolve.  They shift and merge in response to cultural change, so as some become archaic and fall out of currency, others appear to replace them.  A language is an organic process of growth and renewal, but YIVO standardized Yiddish has struggled, understandably, to achieve that.

 

The result is that the Yiddish I speak is not the Yiddish of my great-grandparents.  We could have understood one another, just about, in the way that a Londoner can understand a Geordie, but there would be a lot of contested vowel sounds and general confusion on both sides.  Perhaps that is to be expected, since my whole point is that language needs to evolve over the generations.  However, a more significant problem is that the Yiddish I speak is not the Yiddish of contemporary native speakers either.  Hassidic Yiddish is now the living Yiddish, the language that has had to incorporate terms for jet-skiing and fusion cuisine and desktop publishing.  This is the Yiddish that is growing as a language, and it’s not as simple as me needing to shift my vowel sounds to match.  If it were just a case of “You say shayne, I say sheyne”, it wouldn’t be a problem, but standardized Yiddish has frozen its entire vocabulary.  It’s a little like learning English using only the works of Jane Austen.  It’d get you through, right up until the point that you need to change a car tyre or really rip into someone for queue-jumping, but it just wouldn’t sound right.  That is how a speaker of standardized or “classroom” Yiddish sounds to a native speaker – we’re speaking a fossilized language.

 

 

While there were still communities of native speakers from the pre-WWII generations, Yiddish retained its living fullness, as Nahum Stutchkoff’s work demonstrates.  I love finding Yiddish words that my standardized dictionaries don’t have, because they represent the language at its most vital.  And yet that’s what makes this whole issue so poignant: we don’t have to go back very far to find that living Yiddish with its regional variations and localised slang terms, where “gravy” can be “tunk” rather than just “zuze” or “sos”.

 

Learning Yiddish now, I can see that the language is changing right before my eyes.  The most recent Yiddish dictionary seems designed to counteract that sense of Yiddish being preserved under glass, and there are increasing efforts being made to allow the language to keep up with twentieth-century life, as well as to reflect the full variety of its pre-standardized existence.  Yiddish is slowly unfreezing after its period of stasis and is regaining its plasticity.  This increasing flexibility should allow new learners to appreciate not just the difference between sheyne and shayne but also between fentster and vinde, as Yiddish begins to create new hybridized words from English just as it previously did from Polish, Russian and Lithuanian.  Yiddish now has the strength to diversify again, so that there is room for both YIVO and Yivo, which makes my life easier at least.  

 

!האָב ליב דאָס טאַפּ־הערנערל

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (7): Nahum Stutchkoff, hero of Yiddish

 

One of the many joys of learning a new language is encountering new writers you’ve never even heard of before.  Until two years ago I knew spectacularly little about Yiddish literature, so most of these discoveries are just long overdue, but occasionally a writer turns up who is of such significance that I can’t believe I missed them for this long.  Nahum Stutchkoff (1893-1965) fits that category.  I’m calling him a writer, but that’s not really an accurate description of his achievements.  He did write radio plays and advertisements, but he was also an actor; he was a radio presenter but he was also, and most importantly for me, an exceptional linguist and lexicographer.  Without him, our understanding of Yiddish today would be considerably impoverished.

 

Stutchkoff’s two great Yiddish publications are his 1931 Gramen-lexicon (Yiddish rhyming dictionary) and his incredible 1950 Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh (Yiddish thesaurus).  These two deserve blog posts of their own (and will be getting them), because each illuminates a different aspect of why Yiddish kicks ass. The Oytser is the most beautiful of all my dictionaries (that’ll be dictionary number seven), and the one that best encapsulates the flexibility and variety of the Yiddish language.  The Gramen-lexicon (dictionary number eight – yes, I have a problem) is a wonderful creation, made even more appealing by the fact that Stutchkoff used it to help him write advertising jingles for his radio shows.

 

 

From 1932, Stutchkoff worked as a presenter at the Forverts radio station WEVD in New York, but of all his broadcasts it’s Mame-loshn that really stands out to a Yiddish learner.  This show ran for over 600 episodes from 1948, and was all about sharing the richness and adaptability of the Yiddish language.  Although I’ve not been able to uncover any recordings of it, in 2014 Forverts published a collection of segments from Mame-loshn, all of which are based on Stutchkoff suggesting English words for Yiddish terms, and visa versa.  He might have been a scholar of language but this dude was interested in how Yiddish was used in the everyday and, as such, his writing is way past some of the restrictions imposed by the standardized YIVO version of Yiddish that I’m learning.  I’ve no wish to undermine YIVO Yiddish – without YIVO it’s doubtful I’d be in any position to learn the language at all – but standardization always comes at the cost of regional variety and other linguistic idiosyncrasies.

 

  

This is where Mame-loshn really delivers.  Stutchkoff’s responses to his audience reflect the diversity of Yiddish terms, acknowledging the different linguistic branches to a level of detail that even my eight dictionaries are hard-pressed to match.  A personal favourite is his reply to a woman who asked about the Yiddish word for “gravy” or גרײװי. Stutchkoff advises those his listeners from Warsaw that they would have said “brotyoykh” and “gebrotene”, while “zuze” and “zshuzshe” were also popular in other Polish areas.  However, Stutchkoff continues, in Lithuania the term was “tunk” (a word I’ve never seen in any of my main dictionaries), and he thought that this was the most pleasing option because it suggests “a sauce that isn’t for eating and isn’t for drinking, but rather is for dunking”. [1]

 

 

It’s this love of language for its own sake that makes Stutchkoff such a hero of Yiddish.  Mame-loshn shows Yiddish in the process of adapting to life in the US, creating neologisms and adopting Americanisms as it went.  Not that Stutchkoff was unaware of the threat to Yiddish: he wrote the Oytser fun der yidisher shprakh in the hope of preserving Yiddish after the Holocaust.  However, what is clear from Mame-loshn is that Stutchkoff was very much against preserving Yiddish in stasis.  His love of the language was always dependent upon it being alive and therefore capable of evolution, and despite his desire to see Yiddish survive, he was remarkably pragmatic about the challenges it would face.  The best way of seeing this is for me to translate the segment on “Gosh” in full, in the hope that some of Stutchkoff’s inherent cheekiness and conversational wit come through: [2]

A Jewish Woman from the Bronx pours her bitter heart out to me: ‘I have,’ she writes, ‘a little boy who goes to a Jewish school and studies very hard, but it is becoming very difficult to persuade him that he should speak Yiddish at home.  What does he claim?  That it’s too difficult for him.  Recently I shouted at him: “You should listen to me, every minute with your “Gee” and with your “Gosh”!”  He raised up to me a pair of innocent eyes and said, “How do you say “Gee” and “Gosh” in Yiddish?”  I didn’t know how to answer him.  Truly, can you help me, Mr. Stutchkoff?  I have told him that I will ask you.’

I can help you.  I can tell you how Jewish children in the old country used to express their surprise when they didn’t know “Gee” or “Gosh”, but they spoke Yiddish and so their sayings sounded right.  Perhaps they wanted to fit in with the other little Jewish boys, I don’t know.  When a little Jewish boy felt really surprised, he used to shout: “OY! Mamelekh! Tatelekh!” or (in Lithuania): “Maminke!  Tatinke!”.  Or he used to say: “Really?! What are you talking about? Ze! Ova! Oy-oy-oy!”  And so, he would fit in with all the other little boys.

 

In that one response, Stutchkoff highlights not just the fact that there is rarely only one way to translate any word into Yiddish, but also acknowledges that for the next generation of American Jews, Yiddish was always going to play second fiddle to English.  However, thanks to his epic efforts to capture the Yiddish he knew as a living, breathing language, those of us in the generations that followed can still experience Yiddish in all its messy, non-standardized glory.  Despite his understandable fears for Yiddish’s future, Stutchkoff created some of the best resources for ensuring its continuing survival not only as a point of historical or literary interest, but also as a language of gossipy backchat.  In Stutchkoff’s view of Yiddish, bedspreads and window blinds are just as relevant as matzo and gefilte fish to American Jewish life.  Thanks to him, I can write Yiddish limericks and understand phrases that no longer appear in any modern Yiddish dictionary.  If he were still alive I’d buy him a pint, but in lieu of that I’ll just have to say, װאָס אַ מענטש.

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[1] No surprise that the Yiddish word for “dunking” is “tunken”.

[2] The initial paragraph is the listener’s letter, while the section in bold is Stutchkoff’s response, or as close as I can render it.  Even with eight dictionaries, there are words here that I can’t find.

Rochelle Sibley – Adventures in Yiddish (6): Sounds like Yiddish to me

 

 

Learning another language usually involves moments when you encounter other people speaking that language.  I live and work in an environment where I hear multiple languages every day (one of my two university departments has upwards of 75 nationalities in its undergraduate community), but I’m yet to overhear a Yiddish conversation on the bus to campus or in the coffee queue.  Part of this is geographical context – I’m reliably informed that in certain areas of Montreal you can overhear Hassidic kids talking about their radio controlled cars in Yiddish, but in the Midlands that’s less than likely.  In fact, the only time I’ve heard Yiddish spoken in the street is when I’m already involved in the conversation.  The upside of this situation is that I get to indulge my linguistic path-finding fantasies by using Yiddish in locations where it might never have been heard before.  I’m not sure if it’s cultural pride or just straight up contrariness that means I’ve learnt Yiddish grammar on a beach in Suffolk, shouted Yiddish threats on the East Sussex marshes and written Yiddish greetings in the sand of North Norfolk, but it’s great fun either way.

 

What this lack of casually overheard Yiddish means is that I’m hyper-alert to those moments when it turns up in films and on television.  As previously discussed, the internet means that I can go online and find the most wonderful examples of spoken Yiddish, but it’s these chance encounters that I really love.  Even before I started learning Yiddish properly, every time a Yiddish word showed up on screen it made me happy.  Historically, the huge majority of these random snippets were jokes and insults, which I usually understood but which expanded my vocabulary nonetheless.  A special shout-out here to The Goonies (both Yiddish and Hebrew there, thanks to the inimitable Chunk) and The Simpsons, which has done more for the cause of sharing Yiddish than any other show I know.
 

 

Now that my Yiddish has improved I can recognize it even in the most unexpected places, like, for example, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when an overly appreciative Marvin Acme tells Jessica Rabbit that she “farshmaysned” (slaughtered) her adoring audience.  This example gets extra points for the wonderfully cavalier mash-up of a Yiddish verb (farshmaysn) with English verb ending (-ed); Yiddish is great for this kind of multi-lingual grammatical construction.  After all, what’s the point of a diasporic language if you can’t combine a Hebrew word with a Slavic prefix and then pluralize it according to Germanic grammar?  But my absolute favourite unexpected Yiddish moment comes in Robert Hamer’s beautifully bleak post-war noir The Long Memory (1953), when John Slater calls Fred Johnson ”You shiker old shnorer” (that is, “You drunken old beggar”).  What’s most amusing about this example is that the subtitles on the DVD don’t even try to work out the Yiddish, instead rather imaginatively transforming Slater’s line into “You old slurry”.  That does have a certain estuarine suitability, what with the scene taking place on a Thames riverboat, but someone, somewhere, really dropped the ball on that one.

 

Of course, the problem with these examples is that they’re nowhere near conversational Yiddish, which is completely understandable but still disappointing for an obsessive like myself.  There are some contemporary Yiddish treasures out there, but you do need to look for them.  The opening scene of the Cohen brothers’ A Serious Man is a very good effort, introducing me as it did to the concept of a דיבוק (dybbuk) courtesy of the legendary and much lamented Fyvush Finkel.  If all dybbuks were this adorable, who’d be scared of them?

 

 

And yet despite its atmospheric heft, this scene doesn’t really represent conversational Yiddish, at least, not as my family would have spoken it.  There’s nothing wrong with the grammar or anything technical like that, it’s more that the language feels a little stagey, as though the characters are talking in proverbs.  In fact, once this scene is over there’s no other Yiddish in the film, so it tends to perpetuate the misconception that Yiddish is simply part of that lost other world of European Jewry.  That’s not the Yiddish I know, which is resolutely here and now rather than still languishing in some freezing shtetl, but it has been surprisingly difficult to find modern, conversational Yiddish represented in popular culture.

 

This is why we should all be thankful for the existence of Yidlife Crisis AKA Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion, two absolute reprobates and unrepentant gannets who have managed to capture Yiddish in all its filthy, food-centric glory.  Discovering their web series was cause for much rejoicing, not least because at last I could hear Yiddish being spoken like any other living language, full of word-play and silliness as well as some Grade-A swearing.

 

 

These guys learnt Yiddish at High School in Montreal (there’s a pattern developing here) so have something of a linguistic head-start, but listening to them rip on each other and the world at large in the language I love most is an emesdike mekhaye (true delight).  The only problem is, whenever I watch an episode I end up ravenously hungry.  Damn, those guys can eat.  But in the absence of Yiddish that I can overhear in the street, this is enough to remind me that the mame-loshn is alive and well, if a little overly obsessed with poutine.