מענדעלע

Professor Dov Noy, one of the world's foremost authorities on Jewish folklore and a long time Mendele subscriber has been awarded the 2004 Israel Prize.

Dov Noy came to Israel from his native Poland in 1938. He served in the British army during the WWII and after the war continued his education at Hebrew University, Yale, and Indiana University. In 1956 Dov Noy founded and until 1983 served as a director of the Haifa Ethnological Museum and Folklore Archives, including the Israel Folktale Archives. In 1968 he founded Hebrew University Folklore Research Center. Dov Noy taught at Hebrew University, where he was the chair of the Hebrew Literature Department and at Bar Ilan, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Yiddish. Dov Noy was a visiting professor at dozens of universities around the world, including Toronto, Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, Pennsylvania, Oxford, Boston, Sao Paulo, Melbourne. He wrote and edited more than 200 books and papers in several languages. In the last several years Dov Noy organized Yiddish summer courses and expeditions in Ukraine and Moldova.

I would like to congratulate Dov Noy on this occasion and wish him many more years of new achievements.

Iosif Vaisman

Before looking into some arcane definitions, can we rule out the benign term "fundraiser" - which is unquestionably one meaning for schnorer? Are you looking for something that is "severely negative," as you indicated?

David Grossman

We always translated it as "beggar."

Paul Shane

Maybe we should distinguish between a betler and a shnorer. The betler begs; the shnorer wheedles and manipulates. The betler's demands are backed by the positive commandment (mitsve) to help the poor; the shnorer goes for a gmilus khesed, an interest-free short-term loan which he will in all likelihood never repay. The betler's status is by definition lower than that of his patron; the shnorer's status can be and often is the same or higher (watch the verbs: men shenkt a nedove, men derlangt a gmilus khesed). Finally, the relation between betler and patron is brief and limited; the shnorer seeks to establish a more lasting set of ties.

In short, shnorers come in all shapes and sizes, from perhaps the world's most famous, Don Quixote de la Mancha, and his compatriot Menashe Da Costa, hero of Zangwill's delightful _The King of Schnorrers_, to the large assortment of scroungers, freeloaders and users in Shakespeare, Moliere, Dickens and Henry James.

Michael Meckler's remarks in 13.009 are right on target. Here's my definition: a shnorer is one who considers it perfectly proper to be supported by others with little or nothing offered in exchange, which claim in turn is rejected by others. Rebishe eyniklekh, for instance, or yeshive bokhurim--especially married ones--have their detractors. Who is not familiar with the old Yiddish vertl: farlost a bord un vil nit arbetn? (I grieve to report that even academics are thus labelled but that is obviously malicious slander and requires no further comment.)

We run across shnorers in Mendele Moykher Sforim and indeed throughout Yiddish literature (think of Sholem Aleykhem, I.J. Singer and Chaim Grade for instance) but the most perceptive literary portrait I know is of the sleazy gemore-melamed in Dovid Bergelson's great story, "Yosef Shur" http://shakti.trincoll.edu/%7Emendele/onkelos/shur.pdf though I'm always eager to read of other kandidatn.

Noyekh Miller

More about the Passover Haggadah published by the Jewish Bund in 1900 in Geneva, published by "Chulyot" Journal of Yiddish Research in the Universities of Haifa and Tel-Aviv, No. 2, Summer 1994, according to the abstract written by Haya Bar-Yitzchak: This Bund Passover Haggadah constitutes a rewriting of the traditional Seder in an ideologically secular and socialist mode.

It was published in this periodical in both the yiddish original and in a hebrew translation. It was emphasized that it was not an entirely fresh creation, since it was preceded by two similar attempts: a socialist Haggadah published in London in 1887, another that appeared in New York in 1896. The London Haggadah, apparently the first of its kind, was composed, according to Zalman Reizen's 1928-29 lexicon, by Leon Zolotkoff and Benjamin Feygnboym. The most acerbic of the three, it is openly hostile and contemptuous toward the "brutal oppression" of the captalist system.

The author of this hebrew article compares the texts of these three late-19th-century socialist Haggadahs, analyzes their diversions from the traditional liturgy, and comments on the ways in which they influenced the subsequent development of non-tradtional kibbutz Haggadahs in Palestine.

Ruben Frankenstein Freiburg

a short list of yiddish agodes: http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/library/agodes.html

Iosif Vaisman

In Mendele Vol. 13.018, George Katz asks for a source of recorded classics of yiddish literature. An excellent online source for quite a few yiddish stories is THE WORLD OF YIDDISH / DI VELT FUN YIDDISH: (http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/ ). You can read the text of the stories as well as listen to them being read.

Itsik Goldenberg