The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents of Vol. 10.002 [Sequential No. 167]
Date:
1) This issue of TMR (ed).
2) Artists' Portraits of Yiddish Writers, 1st Series (David Mazower)
3) Yitskhak Laor calls
Biblical Hebrew a foreign language to Israeli Youth (ed.)
4) Is "Mit ale zibn
finger" a Yiddish idiom? (ed.)
5) Adina Bar-El's Grininke
beymelekh (ed.)
Click here to enter: http://yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr10/tmr10002.htm
1)----------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: This issue of TMR.
*The iconography of Yiddish
writers generally remains to be studied. David Mazower
here launches a study of portraiture of Yiddish authors by recognized artists.
He does not deny that the members of the classic trinity Mendele/Sholem-Aleykhem/Perets
were much photographed and drawn, but that these graphic efforts were not part
of a self-conscious recording-in-plastic-form the face or head of a literary
artist by a brother artist in another medium.
*Linguists differ as to the
nature and scope of Yiddish influence on Modern Israeli Hebrew. An echo of Ghil'ad Zuckermann's recent TMR
article was heard in the leading serious Israeli daily, HaAretz,
a paper – incidentally -- that is peppered with
Yiddish more than its editors may think. Yitskhak Laor, a prominent intellectual, writes that high school students
cannot read Biblical Hebrew without a crutch. This past week an article in HaAretz announced that English had surpassed Yiddish
in the number of slang terms it had loaned to Hebrew. The headline somehow
implied that Yiddish had lost in a competition. But Yiddish permeates spoken
Hebrew not only in lexicon, but in phonology and syntax. Almost nobody says Petakh tikVA and "Nu" is repeated by countless individuals countlessly.
*In an informal note, Seth Wolitz writes: "Mit ale zibn finger" is an idiom, because Dina Halpern [of The Dybbuk
film etc] when I showed her the Chagall piece broke out into laughter and said,
'Of course: Mit ale zibn
finger!' So it is an idiom!" However, I am still not satisfied (and not
because the argument of an idiom-source lacks cogency and reason). I simply
want evidence! From the folklorists and linguists rather than the art
historians – but anything substantial is welcome. Dina Halpern
was a famous Yiddish actress and Seth Wolitz, a
professor of Jewish Studies at the
*Adina
Bar-El has centered her life around the writing, study and teaching of
literature for children, specializing in research on children's periodicals.
She has written over a dozen books for children, has taught education students
how to best use stories in their teaching and has brought together in periodic
symposia and seminars the authors of children's writing from all over Israel.
Her latest book is the last in a trilogy that examines periodicals for children
in Yiddish and Hebrew. She also has done preliminary work on Polish-Jewish
juvenile serials and is deep into a project to describe the ample field of Argentinian Yiddish children's periodicals.
2)----------------------------------------
Date:
From: David Mazower
Subject: Artists' Portraits of Yiddish Writers, 1st Series
Artists'
Portraits of Yiddish Writers
By
David Mazower
My interest in this subject
began with a casual inquiry. A journalist friend asked me to suggest a painting
of Sholem Aleykhem [Shalom Aleichem] to illustrate a magazine feature. I could think of plenty of photos but not a
single painting done while the great Yiddish writer was still alive. Nor could I recall ever having seen such a
portrait of Perets or Mendele,
or Goldfadn.
It’s as though we had no paintings by artist contemporaries of Tolstoy,
Dickens, Zola or Mark Twain. There will
almost certainly be one or two such portraits of Yiddish literature’s founding
fathers -- the exceptions that prove the rule -- but the comparison with other
world literatures is striking, as is the contrast with the interest shown in
later generations of Yiddish writers by their artist friends and peers.
Throughout my own childhood,
Sundays usually meant going to visit my grandparents at their flat in
There were at least a dozen
other paintings, drawings and sculptures made of Ash during his lifetime, and
several more of his wife Madzhe (Matilda). Many of
the artists were close friends of the writer, and others were no doubt
attracted by his celebrity and dramatic personality. But Ash was by no means
alone among contemporaries in being portrayed by some of the leading Jewish
artists of his day. Opatoshu, Sutskever,
Manger, Bashevis and many other lesser writers were
captured for posterity in a wide assortment of cartoons, sketches, silhouettes,
paintings and sculptures.
These artists’ portraits of
the second and third generation of modern Yiddish writers were produced for a
variety of reasons and served various functions. One of their primary uses was
as frontispiece or cover illustrations in books, commissioned by major
publishers of Yiddish literature such as Israel London in
The production of such
portraits, and their multiple uses, raises some interesting questions about the
changing status of Yiddish literature, and its changing image within the Jewish
world and beyond. It seems to me that the absence of such portraits of the
first generation of Yiddish writers is a reflection of two things mainly: the
ambivalence and snobbery that greeted the emergence of the new literature even
within the Jewish community, and presumably helped to persuade artists that the
early Yiddish masters were not profitable or fitting subjects for them to
paint; and secondly, a reflection of the fledging literature’s precarious
economy - the absence of networks of patronage, of proper means of support for
writers, established publishers and journals, and its own literary
institutions.
Within twenty or thirty years
much had changed, not least the emergence of a generation of artists who
admired and respected the Yiddish writers of their acquaintance, shared a
common language with them, and were only too happy to paint their portraits and
illustrate their works. In coming editions of The Mendele
Review, I hope to present some of the most striking of these Yiddish
writers portraits, and in the process to examine what their production and use
tell us about the emerging relationship between artist and writer in the
Yiddish world.
One further point worth
mentioning: many artists’ portraits of Yiddish writers have disappeared from
public view, some have survived only as reproductions in obscure publications,
while others have vanished entirely without trace except perhaps for a passing
mention in an autobiography or
memoir. It would be nice to think that the combined
sleuthing skills of the Mendele community could
unearth some of these precious artefacts of our
Yiddish cultural heritage, allowing them to be reproduced in future
installments of this series.
Gallery:
Jakob Eisenscher / Yankev Ayznsher (1896 - 1980)
Eisenscher was born in
Portrait of Itsik Manger
By Jakob
Eisenscher
Woodcut, 19 x 14 cm
signed and inscribed A.P. [nd, c.1926]
Private Collection,
Chana Orloff (1888 - 1968)
Orloff was born in a small Ukrainian village. Her family settled in
Among her sitters were the
Hebrew writer Bialik, the Habimah
actress Khana Rovina, and Sholem Ash. The Yiddish dramatist Perets
Hirshbeyn and his wife, the poet Ester Shumyatsher, commissioned Orloff
to make a pair of matching busts. And in 1921 Orloff
exhibited this bust of the popular short story writer Avrom
Reyzn at the Salon des Independants.
It’s an exceptional piece, full of sensuous curves offset by the occasional
touch of Art Deco angularity, and it captures both the pathos of the author and
of his work. (Frequently exhibited and reproduced, for some reason it’s always
wrongly labelled as ‘the Jewish painter Reisen’ even in major exhibitions, such as ‘L’ecole de Paris 1904-1929 at the Musee
d’art Moderne in Paris in 2000-01.) Orloff remained in
occupied
Bust of Avrom
Reyzn
By Chana
Orloff
Bronze, 38.2 x 21.3 x 26.2 cm
1920
Jewish Museum,
Maurice Minkovski [Maurycy Minkowski] (1881 - 1931)
Born in
Moyshe Oyved was a well-known figure in
More on Minkowski,
see http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/shofar/v019/19.3baker.html
Portrait of Moyshe Oved [Edward Good]
(click here for higher resolution)
By Maurice Minkovski
Watercolour, 30 x 37.5 cm
signed and dated 1924
Ben
Uri Gallery - The
(See Zachary M. Baker's
excellent essay at
http://www.benuri.org.uk/Index-1.htm)
Artur
Kolnik (1890 - 1972)
Kolnik’s lyrical paintings and finely-detailed expressionist woodcuts drew
their inspiration from Jewish life in
Portrait of Avrom Sutskever
By Artur
Kolnik
Woodcut, illustration for the frontispiece of Avrom Sutskever, Gaystike erd (Spiritual
Earth)
3)---------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Yitskhak Laor
calls Biblical Hebrew a foreign language to Israeli youth
The central issue raised by Ghil‘ad Zuckermann in his recent essay "The Israeli
Language" [see TMR
vol 9, no 13 (29 December 2005)] is that of the
origins of Modern Israeli Hebrew, which he insists on calling
"Israeli". "Israeli", he maintains, is only very partially
a direct descendant of Biblical Hebrew. In various of his books and essays, Zuckermann argues that the average Israeli youth cannot
understand the Hebrew Bible without the help of commentaries, special
dictionaries and, in fact, 11 years of training. It now looks as if other
scholars agree with him. Such a view was recently clearly enunciated by one of
ìèòîé,
àçã ä÷ùééí áìîåã äúð"ê àéðå îöåé áñúéøä áéï ãú ìçéìåðéåú, àìà áàé-éëåìú
ìäëéø áëê ùäúð"ê ëúåá áìùåï æøä.
àéï ìáåâø úéëåï éùøàìé äéëåìú ìâùú ìôø÷ ùìà ìîã, áìé ôéøåù öîåã, áìé
îéìåï î÷øàé-òáøé. äàé-äëøä äæàú äéà çì÷ îï ääëçùä ä÷øåé 'ðöç éùøàì'.
éöç÷
ìàåø. "ùîùåï çéâø áùúé øâìéå äéä", äàøõ (20 éðåàø 2006), ä1.
4)---------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Is "Mit ale zibn finger" a Yiddish idiom?
See Chagall painting at: http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Chagal4.html
In an informal note, Seth Wolitz writes:
"Mit ale zibn
finger" is an idiom, because Dina Halpern
[of The Dybbuk film etc] when I showed her the
Chagall piece broke out into laughter and said, "Of course: Mit ale zibn finger!" So it
is an idiom!
I am still not satisfied (and
not because the argument of an idiom-source lacks cogency and reason). I simply
want evidence! From the folklorists and linguists rather than the art
historians – but anything substantial is welcome. Dina Halpern
was a famous Yiddish actress and Seth Wolitz, a
professor of Jewish Studies at the
There are apparently multiple
interpretations of the seven fingers in the Chagall self-portrait. There
is no end of explicatory possibilities in the number seven. The origin has
been traced by at least one critic to a Yiddish expression "mit ale zibn finger" --
which I confess I do not know and which I have not found in any of the standard
handbooks of idioms or of proverbial expressions or in dictionaries.
Art historian Sandor Kuthy suggests that the
Yiddish folk expression Mit alle [sic- lp] zibn finger, "used to indicate the entirety of
energy expended in completion of a task, explains this strange physical anomaly
in the painting." Kuthy is cited by a number of
writers on this painting. Kuthy apparently was the
curator of a Chagall exhibition and is a Chagall specialist. On Kuthy and the symbolism of the number 7, see: http://www.jhom.com/topics/trees/seven/index.html.
"In Study for Self
Portrait with Seven Fingers 1911, Chagall presents us with the Jewish
fascination with numbers. Mit alle
[sic- lp] zibn finger, a
Yiddish folk expression… An enriched reading is gained in knowing that the
number seven is heavy with mystical overtones in Jewish expression, figuring
strongly with the concept of creation. G-d created the world in seven days. The
Kabbalah states that G-d created seven parallel
universes to our physical one. The three fathers and the four mothers in the
Bible gave birth to the Jewish nation. With his seven fingers, Chagall creates
new worlds with paint on canvas."
["Searching for the
Second Soul: The Hasidic Etymology of the Early Visual Language of Marc
Chagall" by Marleene Rubenstein]
Ellen McBreen
tells us – as do others – that [Chagall's] 'Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers'
(1912-13) … is emblematic of [the] expatriate condition. (According to a
Yiddish expression, to do something with seven fingers is to do it very well,
and very fast). See: http://www.paris-expat.com/guide/4-03_alchemy.html.
5)--------------------------------------------------------
Date:
From: ed.
Subject: Adina Bar-El's Grininke
beymelekh
---------------------------------------------------------
End
of The Mendele Review Vol. 10.02
Editor,
Leonard Prager
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