מענדעלע

With reference to Hugh Denman's reply to my query re Soviet Yiddish Writers in English: While I am aware of translations of Bergelson and Der Nister, I am aware of no translations of POETS, except here and there a poem or two. Are there any chapbooks, collections, works in progress of translation in English of any of the well known murdered poets, or other not murdered poets of that era?? (I am aware of Israel Emiot whom I am co-translating....) Thanks!!!

Leah Zazulyer

I had thought that this issue, that is the genesis of the nomene "kahane", "Cohen" etc., had been terminally put to rest by the publication, in 1927, of Roshandvidze's _Cultural Resonances of Translinguistic Phenomenon_, in which he demonstrated incontrovertibly that it was pellucidly of Proto-Altaic origin. It is cognate, for example, with the modern Japanese "kaigun" "navy".

John Biskupski

Having conferred with my two Mamaloshen mayvonim, a complete agreement was reached. Each of our mothers (unbeknowest to each other) having lived and brought us kids up in Nev Yok (New York to others) and chopped fish every Friday which was comprised of 1-Yellow Pike, 2- white fish and 3- Bufl and never knew another name aside from Bufl for that portion found ourselves, found each other after we were all relocated to a place actually called BUFFALO. Shopping at the fresh fish markets was an experience and learned that Bufl was another name for Carp which was an important part of home made gefilte fish. Carp is not carried by many fish markets but is still sold and is grown in healthy environments in fish farms. Zy gezundt and enjoy, & smile,

Cherna Wolpin Buffalo, New York

Miki Safadi asked if Yiddish was used as a code language for political or military purposes [07.159]. I am sure that it was on many occasions. The following two quotations provide both military and political examples and are taken from the books that happened to be on my desk at the moment.

First case is from one of the dramatic pages of Jewish resistance in Shventsyan (Svencionys) ghetto in Lithuania as described by Yitzhak Arad in "Neurim bi-lehimah", Tel-Aviv: Maarakhot, 1977 (pp.71-75, Russian translation in "Unichtozhenie evreev SSSR v gody nemetskoi okkupatsii", Ierusalim: Yad Vashem, 1991, pp. 355-358).

On April 13, 1942 two Jewish teenagers, members of the ghetto underground Grishka Bak and Reuven Miadzielsky were arrested by Lithuanian police as a result of an accidental shot from one of their handguns. The shot wounded Grishka and was heard by a policeman. After the arrest the remaining 10 members of the underground group faced an excruciating dilemma: escape from the ghetto to the forest leaving the entire ghetto hostage, or stay risking their own lives and cause, should their arrested comrades succumb to the torture and name the others.

A Jewish woman from the ghetto worked as a janitor in the police station. She has seen Reuven when he was escorted to his cell after interrogation. Covered with bruises and blood, with broken fingers he said to her in Yiddish: "Tell the guys that they should not worry - we will not say anything. Let they avenge our death".

Grishka Bak and Reuven Miadzielsky were executed by the police on April 16, 1942. The underground group continued its fight and in March 1943 joined one of the Soviet partisan brigades.

Second example comes from Yossi Beilin's "Israel: a consise political history", N.Y.: St Martin's Press, 1992 (p.231). It is an interesting book, although in describing the Orthodox Jews author demonstrates a bit more arrogance and a bit less knowledge than would suit his otherwise attractive image of a liberal intellectual.

"Almost all the current admorim were born in Eastern Europe and arrived in Israel in the 1940s with their parents. They speak Hebrew but prefer to converse in Yiddish; the meetings of the Council of Torah Sages which they attend together with several Lithuanian rabbis are generally conducted in Yiddish. This is one of the reasons - or excuses - why not a single Sephardi rabbi participates in these meetings. The Council is one of the only forums in Israel which can maintain secrecy, although even from here there are occasional leaks. Apart from the Council members, only its secretary is present at meetings, and it is he who issues its decisions. Since 1988, this forum - the official elite of ultra-Orthodox Jewry in Israel, most of whose members are totally divorced from Israeli life - has become one of the most influential bodies in Israel."

According to Beilin this Council routinely appoints and brings down the Israeli government, in which case this is perhaps the ultimate example of using Yiddish as a "political" secret language.

Yiddish has been widely used for secrecy purposes in private correspondence subjected to censorship. Here is a Soviet joke from 1970s (my apologies to those who remember Mendele posting of this joke several years ago).

Rabinovich is summoned to the local KGB headquarters and greeted by the officer:

[O.] Comrade Rabinovich, you have a brother in the US, don't you? [R. in a doomed voice] Ye-es... [O.] Then, why you did not send a single letter to him for twenty years? [R.] ... [O.] Don't be afraid, comrade Rabinovich! These days we don't mind if you write to your brother. Our capitalist foes slander us for preventing families from free communication. So, you can write freely to your brother about how you enjoy this wonderful life in our Motherland. Here is the paper, why don't you start right away.

Rabinovich takes a pen:

"Mayn tayerer brider! Plitsem ikh hob gefinen di tsayt un a plats tsu onshraybn dir a briv..."

Iosif Vaisman

Yiddish could hardly be used as a 'secret' language, but the language barrier was sometimes useful as a defence: Albert Meltzer had a story about the police attempting to infiltrate the Yiddish Anarchist scene in London in the early years of the century, and so as not to send along an obvious 'anglo-saxon', sent a Welsh policeman instead - hardly inconspicous among recently arrived immigrants- with the immortal line of 'look you already, tovarish bach' (which is probably 'stage Welsh', but that's how i read it) Which may just be a tale - if i find the specific citation i'll send it alongbut does make the point that the movement had a certain amount of distance around it - social as well as linguistic- which made these sorts of approaches laughable. Apparently one officer did teach himself Yiddish, only to find that he was never promoted since that would take him away from the east end!

john Patten

Miki Safadi asks whether Yiddish has been used as a secret language (other than the common attempts by parents to "encode" their talk in Yiddish to keep the meaning of their conversations from their supposedly illiterate children).

I can't answer the question directly, though I doubt whether such use would have been very effective, in view of the close relationship between Yiddish and German and the relatively strong likelihood that someone overhearing it would be able to decipher it.

But I can testify to a rather strange escapade that took place shortly before the British gave up their mandate over Palestine.

The late Rabbi Baruch (Barry) Korff, who was my boss many years ago in Taunton, Massachusetts, and became rather famous during the Watergate era as Nixon's rabbi, hatched a lame-brained scheme designed to force the British out of Palestine by bombing London. (As Dave Barry often says, I'm not making this up.) He organized a small group of his Stern Gang colleagues in France, got access to a two-seater aircraft, and hoisted a single bomb onto the lap of one of his associates. They were about to take off from an obscure field in France, fly across the channel, and throw the bomb overboard as they flew over London. This act of terrorism was supposedly going to bring His Majesty's Government to its knees. Luckily for all concerned, the French authorities got wind of the plan, and were able to arrest the gang, including Korff, just before they took off.

Korff told me--and recorded in a book he later published--that during their long incarceration in a French prison, he and his khaverim were occasionally permitted to daven, especially on major Jewish holidays. They took these opportunities to communicate with one another by "davenen" messages in loshn koydesh--though I don't doubt that some of these secret messages might well have included some Yiddish words.

Korff was eventually released, thanks to U.S. diplomatic intervention. He was always ready to use his rabbinical title to his advantage, and this was one time when it was most advantageous. After Israel's war of independence, he returned to the U.S. and took positions as a congregational rabbi, serving for quite some time in Taunton, where he taught me whatever I know about the cynical uses of power and intelligence.

Burton (Berel) Leiser

There is a description in fiction at least indirectly related to Miki Safadi's query (07.159, 5) whether Yiddish was used as a secret language for military/political purposes. The passage is in Sholem Aleichem's Motl Peysi dem Khazns. Motl is about to be carted off by police when a crowd of Jewish men tell him in Yiddish to try to get away. They use a Yiddish enriched with Hebrew derivatives. Obviously, Yiddish serves as protection from the police, an arm of an essentially military government. See Motl Peysi dem Khazns, Book one, Volume XVIII in the Folksfond Oysgabe, pp. 103-104.

There is a passage in Tsu der Toyb (1894) where Sholem Aleichem implies that the use of Yiddish will keep the matter secret from others, that is, the gentiles who can't understand it. _mir redn dokh yidish, un keyn goy vet undz nit farshteyen_. This is not about military matters, but is related to social/political considerations: that is, how Jews comport themselves in a non-Jewish world. See Felyetonen, fun Sholem-Aleykhem, Tel Aviv: Beth ShalomAleichem, I.L. Peretz Publishing House, 1976, p. 27.

I suspect fiction (Motl) and a kind of editorial comment (Tsu der Toyb) reflect the real world of those times as Sholem Aleichem saw it.

Louis Fridhandler

Re M. Safadi's question [07.159] whether Yiddish has ever been used as a secret language for political or military purposes:

There are words and idioms in Yiddish which are used specifically when, for whatever reason, the speaker doesn't want a non-Yiddish-speaking (non-Jewish) audience to understand. Many of these are derived from Hebrew, since Hebrew-derived Yiddish is (presumed to be) not as understandable to non-Jews. For example, when referring to a policeman in public, instead of using "politzay," my (Poylishe) grandparents and mother will use "Lamnatzayekh."

Comedians Dzigan and Schumacher have a recorded skit of a telephone conversation from the USSR to Israel, in which they use a bunch of Yiddishized Biblical Hebrew, to avoid getting in trouble with the eavesdropping censor, some of it taken from the names the sedres and actual psikim, e.g. VaYaytsay, VaYise, VaYakhne, punning on "Yakhne" and the dozens of "VaYis'i VaYakhani" psikim at the beginning of parhses Masay.) I have heard this used on the street in Brooklyn, and my intuition is that using a Biblical Hebrew verb in (contemporary "haredi") Yiddish marks the subject as sensitive to non-Jewish ears, particularly official ones.

Yiddish is used as secret langauge politically in "haredi" society in public speeches and announcements: it allows the speaker to throw in a Yiddish comment in a Hebrew or English speech that only the "in" group will understand, if there's some reason they don't want the press or the authorities to catch a detail or a point. I imagine that when Rav Shach (roshyeshive of Ponevitsh in Bnay Brak) was giving his yearly "yarkhay kale" shmiis in front of live TV cameras, he made use of this quite a bit.

Bloc voting by haredim is implemented by announcements in Yiddish--it's not PC, and we know it. Electoral monkey business in Israel (e.g. campaigning within polling stations) has occasionally been covered up by carrying it out in Yiddish, but the authorities have been wise to it for a long time, and have been employing haredi staff to prevent it.

Yiddish is also used for crowd control at demonstrations: it allows the organizers to run the show without being understood by the onlookers and/or authorities. A couple of years ago there was a big flap in upstate N.Y. over a local "constable" in a haredi community who was supposed to have been helping the police keep a demonstration under control, who was making markedly different announcements in Yiddish and English.

Of course, any language spoken by only some of the people, some of the time, can be used to keep secrets from those who don't speak it. I don't know of any specifically political or military cases, unless what I mentioned above qualifies; I think it's much more commonly used in business and other day-to-day contact betwenn yiiden and goyim.

Eliyahu Juni

[English follows] Leyenendik Shaya Mitelman's fonetishe shures (7.157, 5) dos ershte mol hob ikh zey vintsik vos farshtanen. Nor ven ikh hob zey geleyent nokhamol hob ikh zey geleyent hoykh af a kol un zikh tsugehert mit kop. Nu, hobn zey mir tsurikgebrakht in zikorn di reyd fun Kesheniver lantslayt. A mekhaye.

Ken dos zayn benkshaft? Efsher yo. Di lingvistishe meyvinim ober hobn faynt, bashaymperlekh, dos vos me redt aroys af English, _nostalgia_, oder af yidish azamin benkshaft. Far lingvistishe forshungen iz dos, bashaymperlekh, samhamoves. Ober me darf nisht hobn keyn moyre. Me ken zikh bashitsn mit distsiplin.

Far visnshaftlekhn progres, zeyt oys, darf men amol tsenemen a loshn un batrakhtn di shtikelekh bazunder. Me darf amol, zeyt oys, aroystraybn mentshlekhe gefiln ven me iz arayngetift in visnshaftlekhe forshungen. Un fun dos makht men a leybn? Dafke yo, fun zeyer a nutslekher arbet. Me darf makhn a leybn, ober me darf oykh leybn a leybn. A loshn leybt nit az me batrakht nor di shtikelekh. Far der yidisher literatur nutst a guter shrayber dos zelbe loshn un brengt undz a rirevdike zakh, a bild, a gefil. Bekitser, leybn. Mendele farnemt beyde temes: literatur un loshn.

S'iz mir arayngefloygn in kop dos bavuste lid: _a khazn oyf shabes_ vi azoy me shildert epes loytn fakh funem moler, funem eygenem kukvinkl. A shnayder, a balegole, a shuster hobn gemolt vi a khazn zingt. Farn shnayder iz es geven azoy sheyn un fayn un kuntsik vi a shnayder git a shtokh mit a nodl. Farn balegole vi a knak mit a baytsh. Farn shuster vi a zets mit a hamer. Iz take nisht keyn khidesh az af Mendele, yeder eyner fun di spetsialistn zeyt Mendele funem eygenem kukvinkl. Ober me darf amol batrakhtn Mendele af breytere yesoydes.

Subject: Is nostalgia harmul?

Reading Shaya Mitelman's phonetic lines (7.157, 5) the first time, I hardly understood them. However, when I read them again I read them aloud and listened carefully. Well they brought back memories of people from Kishinev. A pleasure.

Is this nostalgia? Perhaps. Linguists don't respect nostalgia, it seems. For some linguistic research this seems to be deadly poison. But there is no reason to fear it. One defends against it with discipline.

It seems that for scientific progress, one must sometimes take apart a language and examine each part individually. It seems that one must drive out, at times, human feeling when deeply involved in scientific research. And from this you can make a living? Actually, yes, from a very useful enterprise. One must make a living, but one must also live a life. A language is not alive when seen only piece by piece. A good writer uses the same language for literature and brings us something moving, a picture, a feeling. In short, life. Mendele incorporates both literature and language.

That well-known Yiddish song, a cantor for the Sabbath, popped into my head. It is about how each one judging a cantor describes the singing in the language of his own specialty. A tailor, a drayman and a shoemaker described the singing. For the tailor, it was as lovely, fine and artistic as a tailor wielding a needle. For the drayman, like the crack of a whip. For the shoemaker, like the whack of a hammer. It is really no wonder that on Mendele, each specialist sees Mendele from an individual viewpoint. However, sometimes Mendele must be seen on broader foundations.

Louis Fridhandler