מענדעלע

According to Marvin Caplan ("Raisins and almonds" - Goldfaden's glory. in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, Spring 1993, v42, n2, p193-200):

The white kid is surely kin to the kid of the final seder song, Had Gadya. That kid is the embodiment of Israel, whom God the Father buys for two zuzim -- which stand for the two tablets of the covenant, or, in other interpretations, for Moses and Aaron.

Interestingly, Caplan's article starts from:

... Yet it is hard to imagine a song whose words are more likely to offend contemporary Jewish sensibilities than that beloved and quintessential Yiddish lullaby, "Rozhinkes mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds)."

Do the people who clamor for it at bar mizvahs and weddings and other Jewish social functions know of what they are singing as they join in on its melting, lovely chorus? Are they aware of what comes after the chorus? Most likely not. Do the artists who sing the song at these affairs know all the words? Perhaps they do. And, if they do, you may be sure that they generally have the good sense not to sing more than the first verse. Even the first and best known verse may sound a little strange to Jewish ears today...

(Cited from the electronic version of journal in Expanded Academic ASAP, InfoTrac EF Family of Databases)

Iosif Vaisman Chapel Hill, NC

I am surprised that in all of the discussion that I've read on Mendele, over the years, regarding Yiddish fonts and word processors, I don't recall ever seeing mention made of the Nota Bene word processing program, which includes Yiddish on its Lingua add-on program. The default Yiddish keyboard is the one familiar to users of the old Royal manual typewriters, and characters can be added to the keyboard, representing (for example) the YIVO diacritics for letters such as "fe" and "veyz."

As a word processor, Nota Bene is far from perfect -- no spell check, some directionality problems when using Latin and Hebrew alphabets together, etc. The program "feels" like an English word processor, to which Hebrew and Yiddish have been added as options. Still, it does the trick for me, and that includes producing indexable bibliographies in Yiddish (with the help of an experienced Nota Bene programmer).

Nota Bene has reached version 4.2. Users know that it's not easy to learn, and the company that created and markets it has gone through various gilgulim (including near bankruptcy). In addition to Hebrew and Yiddish, NB Lingua also handles Cyrillic and Greek.

Zachary Baker

I have been reading with great interest the commentary on "mock yiddish" and would like to make the following observation.

What ever happened to our ability to laugh at ourselves and with ourselves? There was a time, not to long ago, when dialectic humor of any kind was just that, humor. It would appear as if we must all be "politically correct" and take offense at everything that doesn't seem to be the correct usage. Must everything we say be taken as a racial slur to someone?

It is wrong to be cruel to people through ethnicity, but we all need to retain our sense of humor and balance. If Buddy Hackett can do a Yiddish commercial for Dannon Yogurt, in New York City, it is humor not a racial slur or a mocking of things Jewish. Even Uncle Sam recognizes that we have to answer to a "Higher Authority".

Art Sheppard

I thank Shleyme once more for his comments. I missed the "button" distinction completely. I think the problem (for me) with that line is not only the "a" but the "s'iz a" phrase as a whole. Ruth Whitman ignored this verb construction in her translation and chose instead to focus on "flist" as the verb for the entire last part of the poem. I admire her translation, though it does raise a few questions for me.

She uses "but" for "nor", when I would prefer "only". For me this is more in keeping with the difference that I percieve as the lower intensity of "nor" compared with "ob er", which I find closer to the English "but". I also would prefer to translate each of Korn's "un" conjunctions at the begining of the 2nd and 3rd lines in the 2nd stanza. The repetition in English, as in the original, adds something -- certainly lengthening the 2nd, line is preferable imo. Finally (the poem is so beautifully simple that it is worth this discussion), the last line: "farshteynert un shver" has a finality and weight in the Yiddish, esp. following the 3 preceding lines, that is not quite captured by Whitman's translation -- "heavy as a stone" -- though she comes very close to it. I would prefer the more literal translation: "petrified and heavy".

Bernard Katz Guelph, Ontario

I so very much enjoyed the story that Andrew Cassel told of the Dr. and the Feldsher who prescribed opposite treatments, one suggesting warm compresses and the other cold. I had a vision of the final line based on an old Yiddish joke that deals exactly with such a case, but Andrew did not come out with that line. Actually, it was a straight ending.

But here is the joke:

A man goes to the doctor with pains in his stomach. The doctor tells him to put warm compresses on it. The patient goes home and does just that. The pain gets worse. After several hours he can hardly stand it any longer. His wife is so sick of him complaining that she tells him to put cold compresses on it. He does. He gets better almost at once.

Angry, he goes back to the Dr. who gave him the advice of warm compresses, explains what happened and states that only cold compresses made him feel better.

"Cold compresses??? Who told you cold compresses," said the Dr.

"My wife to me cold compresses, that's who!!!"

The Dr. then said, "That's funny, my wife told me warm compresses!!"

Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California

In answer to Marti Krow-Lucal (Mendel 5.083), I have always felt that the best way to get the "feel" of a foreign language is to read bi-lingual versions with the foreign language and English on facing pages. To this end I have accumulated a fair number of dual language books in various foreign languages such as Spanish, French, German, Russian, etc. In the Yiddish classes which I have taught, all readings were in Yiddish with facing English translations - some of which I had to do myself. There are a number of dual language, Yiddish-English books which I have in my library such as: "Peretz" (Sol Liptzin, YIVO); "I.L.Peretz, Selected Stories" (Eli Katz, Zhitlowsky Foundation); "An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry" (Ruth Whitman, October House); "Onions and cucumbers and plums - 46 Yiddish Poems" (Sarah Zweig Betsky, Wayne University Press); "The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse" (Howe, Wisse and Shmeruk, Viking); "Words Like Arrows" (Shirley Kumove, Warner Books). Also, of course, there are separate English translations which can be held side by side with the Yiddish versions. I don't believe in "making Yiddish a kind of holy tongue that must not be translated", I just would like to see the Yiddish along with the translation.

Morrie Feller Phoenix

M'hot amol farlangt baym shames az er zol medie zayn dem oylem eyder er farlozt di redaktsye, kdey m'zol zikh nisht ergern umzist. Nu, zayt visn, tayere fraynt, az er fort avek af a 3-4 teg. Mir'n zikh zeyen mirtseshem dem 18ten.

Noyekh Miller