מענדעלע

It was wonderful to read the article from the Birobidzshaner Shtern. I used to look at it in the early 1970's in the University of Chicago library. In those days they occasionally had an obituary of someone identified as having been a Yiddish writer, but other than that, if you had translated the whole newspaper into Russian, you wouldn't have been able to tell it was supposed to be a Jewish newspaper. It's gratifying to know that interest there in Yiddish and Jewish culture were merely submerged, not dead, and that it has re-emerged.

Bob

Steven Jacobson's question -- why does American Hebrew School Ashkenazic pronounce the Hebrew vowel kholem (vav with a dot on top, or just a dot) as [ow] (as in English "ROW your boat"), when Yiddish has [oy] or [ey] -- is very interesting, and I suspect Michael Shimshoni is on the right track in mentioning the German-Jewish pronunciation. In fact, German-Jewish [aw] (as in German Haus, English house) is a relatively recent, modernizing feature. A more traditional German-Jewish pronunciation of holem is [ow], almost exactly as in AHSA. I have heard this pronunciation, along with some other features that differ from the most stereotypically German Hebrew pronunctiation, in Jackson Heights, Queens. Since [ow] doesn't exist in German itself, [aw] represents a bit of assimilation to the phonetics of the German language. I suspect the American Hebrew school educational system, and AHSA pronunciation, had their roots in the German Jewish immigration to the US in the 19th century, before the mass of Eastern European immigrants came. If that's true, then in the early 20th century there might have existed side-by-side "high class" Hebrew schools with AHSA and a newer type based on Eastern European kheyders, which probably used Yiddish as the medium of communication and Eastern European styles of pronouncing Hebrew. Nowadays the latter survives only in what are known as "right-wing Orthodox" yeshivas, AHSA mostly in "Modern Orthodox" schools and shuls, while Conservative and Reform institutions mostly use American Hebrew School Sephardic pronunciation. Does anyone know whether this guess about the history is valid?

Bob Hoberman

Undzer balebos, Reb Noyekh beitn mir tsu farshteln zikh. Ikh heis Iosif Vaisman, ikh bin ein un draisik. Ikh bin a Research Assistant Professor of Computational Chemistry (ver volt iberzetsn??) in der University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ikh bin gekumen fun Czernowitz (oder Chernovtsy, ober ir veist dos nomen!) tsvei yur tsurik. Ikh lernt yidish fun mane bobes und zeides. Ikh fershtei gor nishkoshe, ober ikh ken red a sakh erger.

Iosif ben Yitzhok-Leizer

My name is David Connor, a Gentile, and translator since 1971. I work full-time as a translator of Eurropean languages and translations coordinator for Telecom Australia. As a hobby I delve into minor languages such as Icelandic, Armenian and Yiddish. I decided to join this list to become more informed about the current situation relating to Yiddish. I'm a bit of a collector. Apart from American Yiddish textbooks, I've subscribed for years to Sovietish Heimland and have collected all the Teach Yourself Yiddish booklets (and serialized lessons by Semen Sandler). I dropped the subscription to it when the rates shot up after the collapse of the Soviet empire. I'll follow the info on this list with interest. The sort of thing I'd like to learn about is what is happening with Yiddish in Birobidzhan. Do we have any e-mailers there?

Regards,

David Connor.