-4;

28 Friday, February 21, 1986

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

PURELY COMMENTARY

Translating In An Era Of Declining Interest

Continued from Page 2

bowdlerized Hebrew, a good luck
wish that found its way into
standard German via Yiddish.
Some Yiddish terms found
their way into German in an even
more roundabout manner, via the
language of the underworld, the
Rotwelsch of trampti and hawkers.
One can imagine medieval
and
merchants
Jewish
moneychangers meeting members
of the criminal fraternity "on the
road."
The jargon of thieves and vag-
to
abonds later found its way in
conversational German via
fellow-travellers, soldiers and stu-
dents.
Meshugge, meaning mad, is
originally Hebrew and borrowed
from Yidish. So is in ies, meaning
bad, tinnef, meaning rubbish, and
Schlamassel, meaning a mess, a fix
or a tricky situation.
The root word of Schlamossel is
mazzel (as in mazeltov), while
pleite, meaning broke or bankrupt,
originally meant doing a moon-
light flit to avoid being imprisoned
for debt.
Schakern, meaning to flirt, is
derived from the Hebrew world for
a woman's lamp.

Unter aller Sau, wo Bartel seinen
Most holt and Saure-GurkenZeit are

Liptzin's Anthologies

Continued from Page 2

ter emphasizing "Biblical Traditions of
Democracy." He makes the interesting
point that democratic idealism always
influenced Jewish life, that "Jewish
neighborhood, ghettoes, townlets were
Jewish national enclaves in non-Jewish
states." This ideal was perpetuated while
Jews "retained the laws of the Torah and
poured over the Talmud interpretations of
the Torah as their guide to individual and
communal behavior, not only in the dark
days of the Middle Ages but also in modern
times." The dominant factors in Jewish de-
votions to democratic living are defined by
Liptzin in these related practices:
Any ten Jews could form a mi-
nyan and conduct public religious
services, and they did not need a
rabbi or religious officer to call
them together or to lead them. Any
individual man or woman who felt
aggrieved by 'a fellow-Jew and
who failed to get justice in any
other way could stop holy services
by mounting the rostrum before
the ark of the Torah scrolls and in-
sist on being heard before permit-
ting the Torah to be read.
When pogroms threatened and
catastrophes loomed, the Jewish
people united in defense of its
•unique way of life and rushed to
save the imperiled sectors or •or-.
gans of the Jewish national or-
ganism. In the early decades of the
present century, Jewish unity was
displayed in the worldwide relief
activities for the victims of tsarist
pogroms and of the revolutionary ,
and counter-revolutionary Rus-
sian hordes. In the Nazi decades,
Jewish efforts on a worldwide
scale were directed to lessen the
impact of the decrees promulgated
for the annihilation of Jews and to
rescue survivors of concentration
camps and ruined ghettos.
Since the mid-century decades
Israel has been at the center of '
Jewish concern everywhere. Jews

Yiddish expressions of Hebrew de-
rivation that have been
bowdlerized beyond recognition.
Unter aller Sau is not a refer-
ence to pigs of any description; it
means "beneath measure," hence
appallingly bad, in Hebrew.
Bartel is not a person and he
has nothing whatever to with Most
(mustard). The one word originally
meant a jemmy, the other money or
valuables.
As for theSaure-Gurken-Zeit, or
silly season, it has nothing to do
with our gherkins; it is a time of
zores and jokers, or trials and
tribulations.
Schickse to this day is a de-
rogatory term for a dumb and fire-
some woman in German dialect.
The original Hebrew was a brazen
image of the Old Testament, an ob-
ject of distaste to devout Jews.
In Yiddish it came to mean a
Christian girl, someone a good
Jewish boy cannot possibly marry
because their children would then
not be Jews.
En route from Yiddish to Ger-
man via the _Rotwelsch jargon of
thieves it came to mean a Jewish
girl, not a Gentile.
Two well-known Yiddish
proverbs can be transcribed as fol-
lows: A mentsch lernt sich redn sejer

fri, schwajgn sejer spet, and: As ale
zejn soln dir arojssfaln, nur ejn zon sol
dir blajbn far zejnwejtog.

The one means we learn to talk
at an early age but to be quiet only
late in life. The other is a curse
wishing someone's teeth to fall out:
all but one that will continue to
ache.
Both can so easily be translit-
erated into German that readers
will be tempted to wonder whether
Yiddish is not just a medieval Ger-
man dialect.
This essay is a noteworthy tracing of
Jewish migrations, the wandering of Yid-
dish as they traveled from European coun-
try to country. The author indicates how
the language gained influence, and how in
such transmissions, Yiddish began to ac-
quire literary might.
While Moses Mendelssohn is quoted
judging Yiddish as German gone wrong,
and dismissed it as slang, and in the middle
of the 19th Century "enlightened Jewish
intellectuals began to campaign against
Yiddish, especially in Lithuania," there
was a countermovement in the second half
of the century. Supporting adherents
"praised the beauty of the Yiddish lan-
gauge." Barrey also counters the frequent
claims that Yiddish was a bowdlerized
German. His accounting of the emergence
of the classical school of Yiddish writers,
those who have led to the current status
marked by notable achievements is like a
history of a language, defined as follows in
this immensely effective essay:
Mendele Abramowitsch,
1836-1917, a Lithuanian Jew, is
generally acknowledged to have
been the founding father of
classical Yiddish literature. He
wrote realistically about life in the
shtetl, the Jewish ghettoes of old
Russia.
Younger writers modelled
themselves on Jizchak Leib Perez,
1851-1915, a Polish socialist,
Zionist and admirer of Hasidism
who stood for a special kind of
Romanticism.
But the best-known Yiddish
writer was Sholem Aleichem
Rabinowitsch, 1859-1916, a Ukrai-
nian Jew with a keen eye for the
idiosyncracies of his co-
religionists in Eastern Europe.
Classical Yiddish literature
provides the answer to the ques-
tion whether Yiddish is a language
in its own right or merely a
bowdlerized form of German.
"The assumption that Yiddish
is derived from German is as in-
accurate as the frequent assump-
tion that man is derived from the
ape," writes Uriel Weinreich in his

felt new fire in their veins as they
sensed the opportunity to renew
and to consolidate Jewish sover-
eignty in their historic land. With
unbroken unity ; the Jewish mas-
ses throughout the Diaspora have
been unwavering in the defense of
Israel's right to its national.resur-
rection. Though governments of
hostile and at times even friendly
states sought to splinter this unity
because of their national interests,
such efforts have met with little
success and will undoubtedly con-
tinue to fail.
Individual Jewish intellectu-
als, alienated from the traditions
rooted in the Bible, might decry the
unswerving unity which often sets
the little, heroic biblical people in
opposition to non-Jewish world
opinion. But this unity has been an
historic fact ever since the Jews
were constituted as' a people, one
people, with democratic ideals and
individual responsibility for the
preservation of these ideals as em-
bodied , in their freely accepted•
covenants since Sinai and last re-
newed on Israel's sovereign soil in
Israel's covenant of 1948.
For the preservation and secu-
rity of the Jewish national entity,
the Jewish masses are closing
ranks today, as in all earlier gener-
ations when his entity was im-
periled, and are again reaffirming
• by their sacrifices in war and
peace their adherence to their mil-
lennial covenant by which they
' have lived since their national
birth in the days of Moses.
There is a frequent Jewish an-
ta onism that may negate a portion of this
sense of pride in Jewish unity. Often such
negation represents a measure of self-
hatred, Sol,Liptzin herein is the dedicated
Zionist who has made aliyah and prospers
in lirael culturally, as evidenced in his
latest works, especially Biblical Themes in

World Literature.

College Yiddish.

In both cases there were com-
mon ancestors.
In the 18th, 19th and 20th cen-
turies many Jews wandered west-
ward again, forced to leave East-
ern Europe by the pogroms, the
poor economic prospects and their
inability to make social headway.
They moved to Western
Europe, and from there to North
and South America, South Africa
and Australia.
In the early 1930s Yiddish was
spoken by an estimated 11-12 mil-
lion of the world's 14-15 million
Jews.
At a more conservative esti-
mate seven million Jews lived in
Eastern and Central Europe,
nearly three million in North
America, 300,000 in Western

Europe and Palestine, about
250,000 in South and Central
America, over 55,000 in Africa,
14,000 in Asia (excluding Palestine)
and 9,000 in Australia.
The new languages in their
host countries and the process of
assimilation led to a steady decline
in the number of Yiddish speakers.
The Nazi holocaust, which cost
the lives of six million Jews, includ-
ing about five •million Yiddish
speakers (according to Salomon
Birnbaum in his Grammar of the
Yiddish Language), had a further,
devastating effect on Yiddish cul-
ture.
Weinrecih says Yiddish used to
be the native language of most of
the world's Jews. "For nearly 1,000
years Yiddish was the language of
the largest and most creative part
of the Jewish people," he writes.
SalciaLandmann in Jiddisch -
Das Abenteuer einer Sprache, fore-
casts the demise of Yiddish as a
spoken language.
She doesn't feel it is doomed
primarily as a result of the
holocaust. It is mainly a conse-
quence of assimilation: voluntary
or, as in the Soviet Union,
rced.
enfo
In both cases assimilation cuts
Jews off from their roots. "Let
there be no mistake," she writes,
"Yiddish needs the constantly re-
surging and enriching stimulus of
the Hebrew-Aramaic scriptures if
it is to stay alive."
This is in no way disproved by
a recent article in the Jerusalem
Post headlined "Yiddish with an
Oxford accent" and dealing with
Yiddish studies at Oxford Univer-
sity.
Yiddish is taught at many
American universities. There is
even a chair of Yiddish studies in
Israel. But that alone is no guaran-
tee of its survival as a spoken lan-
gauge.
For generations Yiddish
should continue to stand wchance
of survival among the chosen few
ultra-orthodox Jews. They feel
Hebrew is a holy language and
prefer to discuss everyday matters
in Yiddish.
Yiddish is still spoon in Israel,
aifa
especially in Tel Aviv and Han
where elderly Jewish migrants
from Germany congregate.
"Josef," one may hear thee'
ask in a cafe,- "hoste geganwet
majn mantl?" ("Josef, have you
nicked my coat?").
Jews of German extraction are
still known as Jeckes — beCause
even in Palestine- they staunchly
refused to take off their jackets.On
taking leave of each other they fre-
quently say: "Blejb gerund!"
("Keep well").
Oriental Jews are nicknamed
Chachach because of how they
pronounce Hebrew. To get their
own back they nicknamed Euro-
pean Jews Wuswus — because
their every other word seemed to
be "wus?" ("what?").
Yiddish attimes has a late and
rather- touching revival in Israel
when elderly Israelis converse
with Jewish visitors from America,
England, Brazil, Argentina and
Australia.
They talk Yiddish, and Ger-
man speakers can understand al-
most every word.
Most turn out not to have spo-