_The Mendele Review_: Yiddish Literature and Language (A Companion to _MENDELE_) ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 05.015 16 December 2001 1) Ezra Lahad's Bibliography of Printed Yiddish Plays (ed.) 2) Yiddish and "Yidishkayt" in a British Provincial Town (ed.) 3) _shatkhen_ and "Shot Gun" (ed.) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 16 December 2001 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Ezra Lahad's Bibliography of Printed Yiddish Plays Ezra Lahad. _Hamakhazot beyidish bamakor uvetirgum: bibliografia_ / _dramatishe verk oyf yidish; originele un iberzetste, a biblyografye_ / kheyfa, n.d. [2001] The bibliography may be ordered from M.Lahad. email: lahadm@netvision.net.il; address: p.o.b 64 Rosh Pina, 12000 Israel; telephone: 972-4-680-1760; fax: 972-4-680-1797. Price per vol. $75 (includes postage and packing); airmail extra. ----- Introduction Ezra Lahad was an avid collector and student of Yiddish and Hebrew plays. An amateur actor as well as veteran theater-goer, he knew the theater from within. All his adult life he saw, read and wrote about Yiddish and Hebrew plays. He knew a great deal about the theater and this knowledge was enriched by and helped to shape a fine private library and archive, a mecca for scholars in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew theater. It was Ezra's ambition to record the entire corpus of Yiddish printed drama -- a large percentage of which he could examine from his own marvelous collection. He always tried, if possible, to see an item with his own eyes before listing it and he would go to great lengths to acquire an original work or at least a photographic copy. When a debilitating illness struck in his later years, his thousands of rough notes for his magnum opus were as yet not fully organized. nor were they quite legible to anyone but himself. In the course of almost three years of late Sunday mornings, Dr. Shalom Luria, Ezra's boyhood friend from Vilna, sat with Ezra over dense pages of bibliographical data and prepared a manuscript for final typing. The last months of this period saw Ezra's once-powerful memory and sharp mind steadily losing ground to his illness, yet these Sunday sessions helped somewhat to sustain everyone's morale. At the time, neither Ezra nor Shalom considered using computers -- pen and typewriter were their natural tools of work. As Ezra became progressively more ill, it fell upon Shalom to check spellings, dates, placenames -- far more than he could possibly find time for. Shalom nevertheless pressed on, aware of errors and omissions but preferring an imperfectly completed work to a lost treasure. When collaborative meetings with Ezra became impossible, Shalom transferred his handwritten copy-text to his wife Miriam for preparation of a typescript. Shalom's and Miriam's work were expressions of friendship and involved no monetary payment of any kind. Miriam, unfortunately, worked on a rather primitive Kibbutz Merhavia factory computer which somehow left one without a digitalized text or a disk of any sort, providing what any ordinary typewriter could, namely typed pages on a single side of an A4 sheet. The machine used was designed for Hebrew and thus could not vocalize where Standard Yiddish requires pointing. Moreover, there are subtle differences between a Hebrew and a Yiddish keyboard. The latter was needed; the former was employed. Shalom Luria manually entered _pasekh_, _komets_ and _khirik_ vowel points as well as superscripts over the letters _veyz_ and _pey_ throughout the typescript, a voluminous task. This laboriously -- indeed heroically -- produced typescript was meant to be further edited and prepared for publication by a university press. However, time passed and nothing seemed to be happening. The family was greatly frustrated by what it saw as procrastination and, reaching a point of deep disappointment with the proferred plans of others, decided to act on its own. Shalom Luria, who never had any pretensions to being a bibliographer and who in any event was fully engaged editing the annual _Khulyot_, had long been out of the picture. The Lahad family was determined to honor husband and father by bringing to fruition his lifetime dream of listing the entire printed Yiddish drama corpus. They submitted the typescript -- still lacking crucial editorial revisions and additions-- to a commercial body which, for no mean price, produced the bibliography that I am describing here. The Lahad bibliography (henceforth Lahad 2001) must be assessed oxymoronically -- its shortcomings are considerable, but it remains an immense achievement. Its sad publication history explains most of its weaknesses, but despite limitations it is monumental. Until such time as it is reissued in more presentable form, it will be indispensable to serious researchers in Yiddish theater and drama. Prehistory of Ezra Lahad's Magnum Opus In 1971 the Congress of Jewish Culture in New York published _Yidisher teater in eyrope tsvishn beyde velt-milkhomes; sovetn farband / mayrev-eyrope / baltishe lender_, the second volume of an important collection of essays on Yiddish theater in Europe. Ezra Lahad's contribution to this volume, in many respects its crowning feature, was "Undzer literarisher repertuar (biblyografye)" [pp. 325-381]. In the "hakdome" [Introduction], Lahad wrote: "es iz nit geven keyn gringe oyfgabe tsu fartseykhenen di yerushe fun dem literarishn dramatishn repertuar. kedey es tsu sumirn hobn mir zikh banutst mit di vayterdike mekoyres" ['It was no easy task to record the heritage of the literary dramatic repertoire. In order to summarize it we used the following sources']. Lahad then listed nine sources from which he drew for his bibliography: 1. 80 yor yidish teater in rumenye. bukarest 1956 2. Byalin, A.H., Moris Shvarts un der idisher kunst-teater, 1934 3. Gorin, B., di geshikhte fun idishe theater, 1918, b.2 reshime fun pyeses 4. Y. Grinvald, Mikhoels (rusish), moskve, 1948 5. vilner trupe -- 15 yor, lodzh, 1931 6. Turkov-Grudberg, Yitskhok, yidish teater in poyln, 1951 7. Mikhoels Shloyme, artiklen. shmuesn, redes, buenos-ayres, 1961 8. Mestl, Yankev, 70 yor teater-repertuar, 1954 9. mayne fartseykhungen in meshekh fun tsvantsik yor forsharbet oyfn gebit fun yidisher teater geshikhte ['My notations in the course of twenty years of research in Yiddish theater history'] Lahad 2001 does not fully reflect Ezra Lahad's own continuous effort of years of preparatory work as expressed in a number of his bibliographical publications. The References ["Reshima bibliografit"] at the end of Lahad 2001 omit almost all of the first eight items listed above. Mestel is cited but the important Gorin is given incorrectly and without mention of the play lists. B. Gorin, in the second volume of his pioneer history of Yiddish theater compiled two valuable lists. The first, "reshime fun di pyesen in idishen repertuar" [1923 ed. vol. 2, pp. 256-278], listed 2000 plays, indicating date of first performance and printed plays whose staging was not known. The second, "reshime fun di pyesn vos zaynen geshpilt gevorn fun 1918 bizn sof fun 1922" [pp. 279-282], gave a five-year performance survey. What Lahad was to do was to fill out these skeletal lists and add considerably to their number, but he did not create his magnum opus _ex nihilo_. It is strange, for instance, that his _Yiddish Folk Plays; Abraham Goldfaden's Works_ [AMLI Studies in Music Bibliography 4] (Haifa: Haifa Music Museum & Music Library, 1970) where he lists 89 folk plays and 114 Goldfaden items, is mentioned nowhere in Lahad 2001. Judging a Book by Its Cover Binding: We do judge a book by its cover (paper quality, binding, typeface, design) -- and in conjunction with its content. Ideally the physical features of a book are in harmony with its content. The Lahad bibliography has a spiral plastic binding which, while quite sturdy, seems makeshift. A book whose spine is not stitched and glued suggests report, catalogue, manual -- but not "book." Typeface: The Lahad 2001 typescript was photographed in a manner which left it unsympathetic to the eye. The page lacks clarity. The bottow parts of long letters are missing -- e.g. _kuf_ looks like a _hey_ and final _Khaf_ looks like a _reysh_. The pasekh tsvey yudn does not center the pasekh under the two yuds. The page is not well designed and there is much waste of space. (The space, however, can be used to mark corrections and additions.) Periodic titles are underlined but play titles are not emphasized in any way. The 18 Addenda pages at the end were produced with a proper word-processing program and are very legible. Language(s): Comments are exclusively in Hebrew. It would be desirable to prepare a glossary of the Hebrew terms employed in the brief comments. The short "Introduction" by Shalom Luria is in Hebrew only. The user is not provided with guidance of any kind. No attention is paid to the English speaker or to users who do not know Hebrew. In point of fact, one need know only a minimal amount of Hebrew to navigate in this work, but not knowing Hebrew and Yiddish well makes the poor printing even more of a problem for many users. For the experienced Yiddish student, deciphering the text where printing is not altogether clear should not pose difficulties. Organization: A positive feature is the numeration, a numeration of plays, not of bibliographical items. The work is organized alphabetically by author's name and under each author by play title. Each play is numbered consecutively; various editions are indicated by alphabetic letters. Under each author, plays are arranged chronologically in ascending order, though plays published in periodicals precede all others regardless of date. There are 2710 + 86 plays numbered, the total figure of items must be twice that amount. There is no Index of Authors, no Index of Play Titles, no Index of Translators, no Chronological Index, no Index of Publishers, no Index of Places of Publication. Shalom Luria did prepare an Index of Play Titles after Ezra's death, but it somehow never caught up with the typescript. The very last section of the work, entitled "Hashlamat pratim khaserim" ['Missing Items'] lists plays published in periodicals; these plays are also listed in the main body of the bibliography and no new information is provided. The alphabetic organization by title of periodical is useful simply as a list of periodicals that published Yiddish plays. Under the periodical title are playwright's names arranged alphabetically. Accuracy and Completeness: In addition to the shortcomings of the "Reshima bibliografit", there are minor errors such as one finds in all reference works. There are omitted details such as publisher's name in a number of entries -- in how many I have not estimated. These errors and omissions of course detract somewhat from the work's usefulness, but the great bulk of the entries appear to be accurate. Lahad 2001 is a census of printed works -- one can only guess at the number of unpublished Yiddish plays there have been and how many ms. texts we possess. Some of the plays given in the Lahad work were purely literary works in dramatic form -- closet dramas, which may however have been played in dramatic societies. In a spot check, I found few omissions of printed Yiddish plays. Conclusion Despite shortcomings,largely the product of its sad pre-publication history, this bibliography, I repeat, is an indispensable tool for serious Yiddish researchers in the field of Yiddish theater and drama. Hopefully, a corrected edition will some day be issued, one which follows the principles of scientific bibliography and includes information such as the performance history of the plays listed and comprehensive indices. Needless to say, this revised version should be prepared with the latest computer programs. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 16 December 2001 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Yiddish and "Yidishkayt" in a British Provincial Town Yiddish and "Yidishkayt" in a British Provincial Town The Jews of Sunderland in the north-east of England from the 1870s on were almost all emigrants from the small town of Kretinga(1), near Memel, Lithuania. Like many shtetls in Eastern Europe, Kretinga's history is one of a series of devastating fires. There were fires in 1855, 1889 and 1908. In the period 1869-1871 there was famine. There were also varied forms of discrimination at all times. Many of the residents of Kretinga emigrated and many of these immigrants settled in SUnderland. These litvakes [Lithuanians] were all Yiddish-speakers who continued to speak Yiddish for many years in their new home; their children understood Yiddish and spoke English; their grandchildren generally were monolingual. Arnold Levy's _History of the Sunderland Jewish Community 1755-1955_ (London: Macdonald, 1956), the principal work on the Jews of Sunderland, makes almost no mention of Yiddish. This taking of Yiddish for granted to the degree of maintaining almost total silence about the language is not unusual. Readers with a sharp linguistic sense will, however, find numerous traces in the Levy volume of the seemingly unmentionable fact that Sunderland's Jewish community for many years spoke Yiddish. Appendix VI of Levy's work, entitled "Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms" (pp. 318-319), appears to break the silence regarding Yiddish. Yet even here not a single term is explicitly identified as "Yiddish." Those words which are obviously Yiddish -- "blatt" [blat], "daven," "layen" [leyenen], "shool" [shul] are described as "colloquial." This follows the unfortunate practice of Hebrew lexicographers from Ben-Yehuda onward and especiallly of Even-Shoshan. Levy's list illustrates the widespread confusion, even among Judaically knowledgeable persons, regarding the merged _loshn-koydesh_ in Yiddish. We see an effort, probably unconscious, to present perfectly good Yiddish words (of Hebrew-Aramaic origin) as Hebrew words, often dressing the latter in the so-called "Sephardic" pronunciation favored by German maskilim and their heirs on the one hand and Zionists on the other. We frequently encounter _pinkes_ instead of Hebrew _pinkas_. We meet the distinctly Yiddish name of Yudel [Yudl] and Mr. Davidson is called "Rebbele Davidson." In a discussion (p. 60) of "Mitzvot" we suddenly find "The Tariff of Prices for Mitzvos." "Mishe-Berach" (p. 62) [= _mishebeyrekh_] reveals its true Ashkenazic flavor. We learn that "the newcomers...were known as "Greeners" (p, 102) -- the Yiddish spelling would of course be _griners_ and anglicizing the spelling makes it a Jewish-English coinage. In 1904 "[the Chief Rabbi] visited the Beth Hamedrash... Preached a Sermon, half in English and half in Yiddish." [cited from JC 18.05.1904]. The "Kaminitzer Maggid (Chaim Zundel Maccoby)" is mentioned, but not that his famous sermons were in Yiddish. We read that "his son...had lectured and 'said the Blatt' in the Beth Hamedrash...." (p. 201) One need not be a linguistic sleuth to unfold the Yiddish in the following anecdote: (p. 209): "The Talmud Torah committee reports to the Beth Hamedrash Council, in whose minutes these reports are recorded. In these reports the initials 'K.I.H.' frequently occur; they proved rather puzzling until it was noticed that these initials only occur when the number of children, either of classes, or in the Talmud Torah as a whole, is mentioned. The secretary, no doubt inclined to innocent superstition, used 'K.I.H.' in place of the Hebrew letters "Koof, A-yin, Hay", meaning of course, "Kein A-Yin Horah", No Evil Eye." Yiddish _kinehore_ remained in the vocabulary of Sunderland Jews for generations. Typically, "Yidishkayt" in Sunderland meant the traditional rituals, customs and texts of Judaism and was only marginally related to Yiddish-language culture. Yiddish continued to be the language of instruction in the yeshiva of Sunderland between the two world wars. Gradually this yeshiva ceased to function and Jewish education became the once-a-week lessons of the average present-day synagogue or temple. Interestingly, in 1946 a yeshiva was established in Sunderland where -- unique for the yeshiva world -- Ivrit was the official language (Levy, p. 271). Students from Prague who had been in concentration camps or in Siberia joined the yeshiva, followed by groups from Morocco. Most of the 700 or so Jews who remained in Kretinga on the eve of the Shoa were murdered by the Nazis -- several hundred males were shot by Nazi troops in 1941. The organized Jewish community of Sunderland -- 2000 strong in the 1930s -- has more or less ceased to exist, but by no means because of oppression of any sort -- quite the opposite. Because of dwindling numbers -- loss of sons and daughters to the larger cities of the United Kingdom or, in over 130 instances, to Israel -- the one remaining synagogue of Sunderland, which the ultra-Orthodox Beth Hamidrash always called "di englishe shul," can no longer be supported by its few members. However, this United Synagogue edifice will be preserved as a national heritage building, though no longer owned or used by Jews. In retrospect we see that the spiritual heritage of Kretinga was alive for several generations in Great Britain, but that eventually the social forces that cause small Jewish communities to disappear operated in their unfailing manner. Yet very close to Sunderland geographically, on the south side of the Tyne River, is the ultra-Orthodox Gateshead Yeshiva, which has survived as an island of traditional Talmudic study -- held in Yiddish until recently and perhaps still held in Yiddish -- in the midst of a modern and fast-changing post-industrial society. Yiddish-language culture, creativity in Yiddish, was never important in Sunderland and towns like it. In these communities acculturation and finally assimilation left the rhythms of Mame-Loshn far behind, though they continued for some time to follow the religious practices and precepts of their forebears. As early as 1911 there existed in Sunderland a "Jewish Literary Circle." It was apparently totally English-speaking and indicated no interest in Yiddish. In the years that Yiddish theater thrived in London, and regularly visited Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, individual Sunderlanders may have attended performances. They may have been among the relatively small numbers that subscribed to Yiddish journals from London, Paris, New York, Warsaw or Moscow, but they had little interest in cultivating the Yiddish language as such. Their Zionist groups were conducted in Yiddish until most of the members became English-speaking. Nor do they seem to have maintained any of the vitality of the Hebrew-language movement that was so strong in Lithuania in the early twentieth century. They maintained a religious communal life and a social life -- until these fabrics dissolved because of dwindling numbers, an estimated thirty families today. "Yidishkayt" shows itself to have been stronger than Yiddish. Neither, however, has been able to survive in Sunderland and towns like it. ----------- *) Krottingen was the German name and I have also seen it given in the spelling "Krettingen." It was near the Prussian border and German influence was great. In Berl Kagan's _Yidishe shtet in lite_ (New York, 1990, pp. 511-517 and passim), you will not find the German name for this town. It is listed under the Lithuanian name Kretinga (but in Yiddish letters: Kretinge), which is also the Russian form; the Polish name is quite similar = Kretynga. The town name is preserved in family names of Jews who lived there: in a Jerusalem cemetery we find a "Kratinga" and we also know of a "R' Arn Kratinger" (Kagan, p. 512). Yiddish-speakers and their chilren in Sunderland called the town "Kretinge," as does Berl Kagan. 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 16 December 2001 From: Leonard Prager Subject: _shatkhen_ and "Shot Gun" In _Learning Yiddish in Easy Stages_ (3rd edition) by Marvin Zukerman and Marion Herbst (Amherst: National Yiddish Book Center, 2000), there is a photo of a scene in a 1949 film starring Leo Fuchs which touches on one of the hoariest of bilingual (Yiddish-English) puns, one which is even known to people who know only a few Yiddish expressions. On p. 95 we see three characters carrying placards in English and Yiddish. A Yiddish one reads: "Natan Gold brekht unz [undz] fun broyt! Un aykh fun a basherten [bashertn] ('Nathan Gold deprives us of bread and you of your destined one.' An English placard reads: "Better a SHADCHAN than a SHOT GUN. Nathan Gold IS UNFAIR to organized SHADCHOONIM." (I wonder how many of those who know the pun could use the plural _shatkhonim_ as correctly as this 1949 placard does -- one is more likely to hear the Jewish-English "shadkhens." The pun has made its way into American writing and I can provide at least one citation -- there are surely many more. In Scott Turow's _The Laws of Our Fathers_ (New York: Warner Books, 1996, [pb 1997], pp. 57-58: "Listen here," says Hobie. He stops again in the midst of his rumbling forward movement. "You know, you have got the wrong picture. You got the wrong idea. You know what you are here? You're like the _matchmaker_. What's that word? The shotgun?" "In Yiddish? The _shadkin_?" "That's it. You're the _shadkin_." Now the _shadkin_ don't get in bed with the bride and the groom. You want me to represent this young man. Okay, I'm gonna do it. But I can't be discussin every detail with you." The Y. _shatkhen_ has here voiced the /t/ to become /d/ (also a spelling pronuncuation since the word is spelled with a daled) and altered the guttural /x/ to /k/. The spelling fails to tell us how americanized the word has become in other respects -- e.g., what is the quality of the initial stressed vowel /a/. But the true source of the pronunciation is the well known bilingual pun Y. shatkhen > E. shotgun, semantically -- though not logically -- strengthened by the American expression "shotgun wedding." ______________________ End of _The Mendele Review_ 05.015 Leonard Prager, editor Subscribers to _Mendele_ (see below) automatically receive _The Mendele Review_. Send "to subscribe" or change-of-status messages to: listproc@lists.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele mail postpone b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail ack c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele ****Getting back issues**** _The Mendele Review_ archives can be reached at: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrarc.htm