The
Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 09.11 [Sequential No. 163]
Date:
1) Yehoyesh
Project completed. (ed.)
2) On Leyb Rashkin (Dafna Sheinwald)
3) Di mentshn fun Godlbozhits by Leyb Rashkin, Chapter I
4) Publisher's Announcement: Dzhordzh der Naygeriker
Click here to
enter: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr09/tmr09011.htm
1)---------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: Yehoyesh Project completed.
SEE: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/texts/yehoyesh/welcome.htm
The monumental
task of digitizing and making searchable Yehoyesh's classic Yiddish translation
of the Tanakh, conforming its orthography wherever possible to the Takones of
Yivo (without altering the author's lexicon) has been a principal labor of this
editor and his industrious team of associate editors and helpers for five long
years. Without the basic work of Meyer
Wolf and Matthew Fisher at the outset of the project, without the magical
powers of Refoel Finkel's Yiddish Typewriter and Zsigri ("Ziggy")
Gyula's splendid keyboards and, in the past two years especially, without the
devotion of Robert ("Itsik") Goldenberg in Canada and Martin Doering
in Germany, this important contribution to Yiddish studies on the internet, our
electronic Yiddishland, would never have been completed.
Yehoyesh's
translation is conservative and in some degree archaic. But like the King James
Version of the Bible in the Anglophone world, it will continue to occupy a
central place in Yiddish letters even if
Yiddish-lovers are brave enough to attempt more modern renditions – as
was suggested at a World Jewish Congress session in London a half century ago
by the alphabet scholar David Diringer. Jews have been translating the Tanakh
into Yiddish for centuries, all the major Yiddish writers (Mendele Moykher-Sforim,
Y.-L. Perets and Sholem-Aleykhem, etc.) having attempted a translation of one
book or another. There is no reason to halt this practice, one that could draw
upon the untapped vigor latent in
present-day Yiddish.
The Yehoyesh
Tanakh received the stamp of approval of Orthodox rabbis and was also hailed
and has been loved by secular Jews the world over. It belongs to all Jews as no
other work does – it is not only a religious text, a source of ceremony and
ritual, a liturgical compendium and encyclopaedia of law, it is also a
storehouse of myth and legend and a great work of literature. It is also
central for much of Jewish literature.
Simkhes Toyre
[Simkhat Tora] is a good time to celebrate Yehoyesh, reading in the traditional
manner but from his translation the end of Dvorim [Deuteronomy] and the
beginning of Breyshis [Genesis], symbolizing the continuity of Judaism
(howsoever defined), the enduring relevance of its principal biblical
values. To enact this ritual in Yiddish is to memorialize the millions of
Yiddish-speakers for whom Yehoyesh executed his mighty years-long labor of
scholarship, art and piety, but who were cut off from taking pleasure in its
beautiful Yiddish. Such a reading would normally supplement the traditional
Hebrew one.
The traditional
reading is from Dvorim (Deuteronomy) 33:1- 34:12 followed by Breyshis (Genesis)
1:1-2:3. These passages can be found at
the following urls.
http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/texts/yehoyesh/rev2004/dvorim.pdf
http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/texts/yehoyesh/rev2004/breyshis.pdf
2)------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: Dafna Shenwald (author's grandniece)
Subject: On
Leyb Rashkin.
Leyb Rashkin
(ne Shoyl Frydman) was born in 1905 in Kazimierz Dolny, called Kuzmir by its
Jewish habitants, near
Leyb
Rashkin with his wife Feyge
3)-----------------------------------------------
Date: 16 October 2005
From: Dafna Sheinwald
Subject: Di mentshn fun Godlbozhits by Leyb Rashkin, Chapter I
Click below
for the text of this chapter. Words in red are glossed.
Chapter I of Novel formatted in HTML
4)--------------------------------------------------
Date: 16 October 2005
From: Zachary Sholem Berger
Subject: Publisher's Announcement: Dzhordzh der Naygeriker
H. A. Rey. Dzhordzh der Naygeriker. Translated by Sholem Berger. New York: Yiddish House
LLC, 2005. 57 pp. ISBN 0-9726939-2-0. Available at www.yiddishcat.com.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of The
Mendele Review Vol. 09.11
Editor,
Leonard Prager
Subscribers to
Mendele (see below) automatically receive The Mendele Review and the Yiddish
Theatre Forum.
Send "to
subscribe" or change-of-status messages to: listproc@lists.yale.edu
1.
For a temporary stop: set mendele mail postpone
2.
To resume delivery: set mendele mail ack
3.
To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name
4.
To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele
****Getting
back issues****
The
Mendele Review archives can be
reached at: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr.htm
Yiddish
Theatre Forum archives can be reached
at: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/ytf/ytf.htm