מענדעלע

"L'Chaim Theater Returns Jewish Song to the Stage" by Dan McKinney

Moscow's L'Chaim Jewish Musical Theater opened its first season since undergoing a major renovation with a dance and musical revue, which included songs in Yiddish, Russian and Hebrew. The production marks a new beginning for a theater that as little as four years ago was without heat and considering closing its doors permanently.

Zhanna Bialik, one of the few performers who is a native Yiddish speaker and a veteran of nearly 20 years in Jewish theater, helped to coach other actors who did not know much Yiddish before their work on the show began.

"Jews and Catholics: Beyond Apologies" by David Novak

We have known for a while that the Pope fondly remembers many of his Jewish childhood friends and classmates. It turned out that he has managed to learn Yiddish from them and still speaks it:

Indeed, the Pope speaks Yiddish. (I know that for a fact because in 1985, when twelve of us had a private audience with him during a conference to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, I briefly spoke with him in Yiddish.)

testifies David Novak in his his article "Jews and Catholics: Beyond Apologies". Mendele is considering sending a gift subscription to Vatican. Sponsors are welcome.

"A Fine Pickle" by Mimi Harrison

Mimi Harrison, who ocasionally entertains the Washington Post readers with stories about herself and her relatives, revealed a dark family secret she kept since her childhood:

My father would look at me from time to time and say: "You're not pretty... You're ba-tampte." I never knew what this meant, either; I didn't have to: I knew what it didn't. I knew he could resist me, that his road was the noncommittal middle path, one he traveled with amused indifference...

The ignorance could be persistent. Our author met many nice and smart people, "but no one ever knew that funny phrase ba-tampte." Years passed by, and:

I'm 50 now. I'm a mother, a wife, my father is gone, life holds me in a hundred different ways. On this particular day I'm pushing a grocery cart up and down the supermarket aisles... I run my eyes over every available label and whoa -- what's this!? Chubby glass jars of crisp-looking kosher pickles and sauerkraut and every lid inscribed: BA-TAMPTE, and underneath, "Ba-tampte means TASTY!!!"

I'm feeling dizzy, and I reel. Tasty?!? TASTY! My God, something slides off me like slime, and fizz pops from the top of my head...

The redemption was so close! A trip to the library or a note to Mendele could have saved years and years of agony. I am afraid to upset Mrs. Harrison, but may be her memory failed her, and her father used to call her _tamevote_ not _batamte_? On the other hand, how much do they pay for a 817 words column in the Washington Post?

"Oy vey? No way. Ex-spy Klingberg barred from speaking Yiddish"

A Beersheba District Court judge has forbidden 80-year-old convicted spy Marcus Klingberg from speaking Yiddish - because his secret service guards don't understand it, his defense lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, said yesterday. Klingberg, a former assistant director of the biological institute in Ness Ziona, was released four months ago after serving 15 years of his 20-year sentence for passing information on biological warfare to the Soviet Union.

Klingberg was released on grounds of ill-health, on condition that he employ two male housekeepers approved by the General Security Service, at his own expense. They were to listen to all his conversations and ensure that he spoke only to relatives and a few friends approved by the GSS. State prosecutor Devora Chen told the Beersheba District Court Wednesday that Klingberg provokes the housekeepers at every opportunity and speaks to his guests in Yiddish, or in Russian. His housekeepers understand neither language.

"Sandler misses heart of Zionist ideology" by Shawn Savage

"Forward" dedicated a prominent place on its editorial page to the letter of a reader, Shawn Savage. He explains (in a response to an earlier article by Boris Sandler) that the zionists' "heavy-handed tactics to eradicate the use of Yiddish" in Yishuv was justified and necessary. "In retrospect, it has all worked out for the best", asserts the author.

This contempt for Yiddish is substantiated by a strong argument: "While Yiddish today is cloaked in nostalgia, in the minds of early Zionists it was the language of suffering and oppression under tsar and Soviet."

Mr. Savage, who signed his letter as a "Ph.D. Student, CUNY Graduate Center", is pursuing a degree in history. The letter shows that he can benefit from some fairly basic history classes. "In the minds of early Zionists" Yiddish could have been hardly related to "Soviet oppression" for one simple reason: there was no "Soviet oppression" (in fact nothing Soviet at all) in the times of early Zionism in the end of the last and beginning of this century. Furthermore, for more than 20 years after 1917, when "Soviet" had acquired power, Yiddish language and culture flourished in the Soviet Union with state supported schools, publishers, academic institututions, theaters, periodicals. Mr. Savage can afford such errors -afterall he is still a historian in training. Forward's editors should have known better.

Readers of the Shawn Savage's letter might be also interested in the list of "important Jewish languages" compiled by the author. It includes German, Arabic, French, Persian, and Polish (in this order). Mr. Savage beleives, that the Hebrew intelligentsia is not "to be held responsible for the disappearance of the use" of these languages. And here he is definitely right.

Attached is an excerpt from the article relating to new songs translated into Yiddish by Sylvia Schildt. It describes Jerry Lapides [myself] writer of the English lyrics and music. One of the songs -- Mayn Tatns Nigun -won third prize this past August 1998 in the International Yiddish Folk Song Competition of the Charlotte Yiddish Institute in North Carolina.Jerry sings and plays chromatic harmonica with the Baltimore Klezmer Orchestra an affiliate of tyhe Baltimore Hebrew University. The band often announces itself as being the only klezmer band in the world that contains a chromatic harmonica player.

Jerry Lapides

"Unorthodox Klezmer" by Carl Schoettler

Jerry Lapides plays a few bars of the old klezmer wedding dance "Frailach Fun Der Chuppa," "happiness of the nuptial canopy," his harmonica infusing the festive song with an undertone of nostalgic sadness...

Lapides is one Baltimore musician who has found a living heritage with klezmer. He plays with the Baltimore Klezmer Orchestra, a nonprofit band affiliated with the Baltimore Hebrew University...

[Lapides is] 70 and he's been knocking about the Baltimore scenesince Martick's Lower Tyson Street Cafe was a beat generation hangout and No Fish Today was a way station on the road to the post-modern millennium. "But I don't think I was a character then, like I am now," Lapides says. "I'm a Fells Point character. Ask anyone in Fells Point. Fells Point is my shtetl."

Here's an excerpt from the article in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin that may be of interest to people interested in Yiddish and/or the Holocaust. It is about my mother, Rajzel Zychlinsky, one of few living Yiddish poets of her generation. She has been writing since the 1920's and is interviewed in this article. The article also contains excerpts from her last book "God Hid His Face".

Marek Kanter

"Yiddish poet, 88, crafts beauty from Shoah horror" by Leslie Katz

Yiddish poet and Holocaust refugee Rajzel Zychlinsky created hauntingly beautiful poems from the ashes of war.

Now 88 and living in a Walnut Creek nursing home, she still manages to find poetry in even the most confining circumstances...

One of relatively few living Yiddish poets, the widely published Zychlinsky has been writing since the 1920s. She says she hasn't penned a poem since moving to California from Brooklyn just over a year ago. Still, nothing excites her more than talking about poetry -other's or her own...

Es iz do an artikl vegn yidish iner frantseyzisher tsaytung "Le Monde" (funem 3-stn februar), fun Gilles Rozier un Yitskhok Niborski (ikh trakht, az zey seyen mendelyaner). Ir titl iz: "La culture yiddish au futur".

In the February 3 issue of the French daily newspaper "Le Monde", there is an article entitled "La culture yiddish au futur" (the future of Yiddish culture), by Gilles Rozier and Yitskhok Niborski (who, as far as I know, both are Mendele subscribers).

Zayt gezunt,

Estelle Souche

"La culture yiddish au futur" by Yitskhok Niborski and Gilles Rozier

De toute l'Europe, c'est en France, et a Paris particulierement, que ce phenomene est le plus manifeste, du fait, entre autres, de l'importance numerique de la communaute juive. Et c'est sans doute de Paris que les efforts de preservation et de diffusion de la culture yiddish peuvent prendre de l'ampleur. Le yiddish est enseigne dans quatre universites parisiennes et plusieurs centres culturels, dont le Centre Medem, qui abrite une bibliotheque de vingt-cinq mille volumes en yiddish. Des structures existent donc en France mais elles sont encore trop fragiles pour repondre a toutes les demandes et pour permettre d'elaborer une politique culturelle d'envergure. Le desir d'une grande maison de la culture yiddish est trop grand pour qu'il ne se realise pas. Cette realisation depend des acteurs du monde yiddish, a condition qu'ils puissent trouver des relais institutionnels...

Zoff und Tacheles

Sie wurden verspottet, belaechelt und verfolgt - das war jahrhundertelang das Schicksal vieler Jiddisch sprechender Menschen in Europa. Die eigenwillige Sprache, oft als Jargon, Mauscheln oder Kauderwelsch belacht, identifizierte den Sprecher sofort als Juden. Vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg sprachen zwoelf Millionen Menschen auf der ganzen Welt die eng mit dem Deutschen verwandte Sprache. Heute sind es nach Schaetzungen von Sprachwissenschaftlern noch zwischen vier und fuenf Millionen Menschen. "Die rund 1000 Jahre alte Sprache ist vom Aussterben bedroht", sagt Professor Erika Timm an der Universitaet Trier, die den ersten Jiddistik-Lehrstuhl in Deutschland innehat...

"Mir gefaellt der Klang der Sprache sehr gut", sagt Ane Kleine, die eigens aus Muenchen nach Trier zum Jiddistik-Studium kam. Die Sprache klinge manchmal Deutsch, enthalte aber viele Kehllaute, die man nicht ohne weiteres verstehen koenne. "Und das entscheidende Wort eines Satzes ist oft hebraeisch", sagt die dreissig Jahre alte Frau. Etwa zehn Prozent der 200000 Worte stammen aus dem Hebraeischen. Viele Woerter, die heute noch im Deutschen benutzt werden, haben ihren Ursprung im Jiddischen: So etwa "Zoff", "Pleite" und "Tacheles"...

Doch neuerdings besinnen sich nach Beobachtung von Timm wieder viele junge Menschen auf die jiddische Sprache. In den Vereinigten Staaten und Israel werde Jiddisch inzwischen an zahlreichen Universitaeten und einigen Schulen angeboten. Auch in Deutschland gibt es an mehreren Universitaeten Grundkurse. In einem Computerprojekt an der Universitaet Bochum sollen ein Sprachatlas digitalisiert und tausend Stunden Tonbaender in jiddischer Sprache ins Internet gestellt werden. Doktorandin Kleine glaubt nicht, dass ihre Lieblingssprache aussterben wird. "Jiddisch sprechen oft sehr fromme Menschen in New York oder Jerusalem - und die haben meistens auch viele Kinder", sagt sie mit einem Lachen.

10)---------------------------------------------------Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 17:52:00 -0500 (EST) From: Iosif Vaisman <iiv@mmlds1.pha.unc.edu> Subject: other articles

"Jiddisch surrealisme Verhalen van Abraham Sutzkever" by Hilde Pach NRC Handelsblad, January 29, 1999; Pg. 38

"Birobidzjan: hoe Stalin de Russische joden bedroog" by Door Peter d'Hamecourt Algemeen Dagblad, January 9, 1999; Pg. Z7

"Ed ecco Moni Ovadia con l'apocalisse della "mamma ricatto" by Guerrieri Osvaldo La Stampa, February 7, 1999 SPETTACOLI; Pg. 43

"Viejo amor Isaac Bashevis Singer" Cronica, January 17, 1999