The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and
Language
(A Companion to MENDELE)
---------------------------------------------------------
Contents
of Vol. 09.03 [Sequential No. 155]
Date: 1 March 2005
1) This issue (ed).
2) Next issue: Essay by Nathan
Cohen
3) Coming TMR issue: Menke
4) Coming book reviews.
5)
Yiddish Hasidic Children's Literature (Miriam Isaacs)
1)---------------------------------------------------
Date: 1
March 2005
From: Leonard Prager <lprager@research.haifa.ac.il>
Subject:
Editor's Note
This issue of TMR presents a paper read at an Oxford
conference in August 2003. It is included in the recently published Yiddish
After the Holocaust, edited by Joseph Sherman. We thank the editor and the
publisher for permission to reproduce it in TMR. The link http://www.babelguides.com/view/work/54901
leads to a mail-order source for the book.
2)-----------------------------------------------
Date: 1
March 2005
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: Coming essay by Nathan
Cohen
The next paper from Yiddish After the
Holocaust (ed. Joseph Sherman) to be given in TMR is Nathan Cohen's
"Association of Jewish Writers in Poland,1944-8."
3)--------------------------------------------------
Date:
1 March 2005 From: Leonard Prager
From: ed.
Subject: Coming Menke
issue.
An entire issue will be devoted to the compendious volume of
Menke Katz's Yiddish verse translated into English by the celebrated
translator-team Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Menke. The Complete Yiddish
Poems. Translated by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. Edited by Dovid
Katz and Harry Smith. Maps by Giedre Beconyte. Published by The Smith: New
York 2005, 914 pp. For ordering information: artsend@sover.net.
4)-----------------------------------------------------
Date:
1 March 2005
From: Leonard Prager
Subject: Book reviews to
come.
Dovid Katz's Lithuanian Jewish Culture (Vilna:
Baltos Lankos, 2004, 398 pp), will yet be reviewed in TMR, as will be
Nancy Sinkoff's Out of the Shtetl (Providence: Brown Judaic
Studies, 2004).
5)------------------------------------------------------
Date:
1 March 2005
From: Miriam Isaacs <misaacs@umd.edu>
Subject: Yiddish
Hasidic Children's Literature
Languages
Sometimes in Contact: Components in Yiddish Hasidic
Children's
Literature
by Miriam
Isaacs
Introduction
After Hitler, Yiddish lost its geographic core and, the
Yiddish- speaking world, in shreds, survived mainly in Displaced Persons camps.
There, for perhaps the last time, Yiddish was still a necessary, daily language
for a mixed Jewish population of adults and children. The full spectrum of
non-religious, religious, anti-religious and ultra-religious Jews used Yiddish
as their natural lingua franca. But soon these remaining Jews migrated
to their own spheres in America and Israel, in those places finding only
dwindling pockets of elderly Yiddish speakers. The cultural descendants of the
European Hasidim form a strange mixture of past and future. They are reactionary
in that they strive to recreate an imagined past, but they are also post- modern
urbanites and suburbanites. Many are computer literate and technologically and
politically savvy. Yet an imagined past, a sense of lost home, includes Yiddish,
the language of the sainted martyrs, of venerated rebbes. Does the Yiddish they
teach their children represent a revival of the language in future generations?
No one can pretend to predict.
The Hasidic world may well turn to English and Hebrew as
vernaculars and erhaps keep some token Yiddish words. But if
Yiddish does survive there, hen the character of what is presented
to children may well be the Yiddish of the ensuing decades or beyond. This
study focuses on the lexicon, on hat is being borrowed and
fused into Yiddish, on how English has entered Yiddish, on what has
happened to the older contact languages and their erman,
Slavic and Hebrew components. Does Hasidic Yiddish display languag shift in
adapting to new geographic and social contexts? Does the vocabulary reflect
points of contact between Yiddish and other languages? What do the writers of
children’s texts need to explain? What can they safely assume about the
children’s knowledge? To what extent do the choices of words reflect identity
issues? What are the influences of English, modern Hebrew and
internationalisms?
Because the major poplation centres for
Yiddish-speaking Hasidic children are in the United Stats and Israel, it is
hardly surprising that English and modern Hebew would be the new co-territorial
languages. Despite efforts to kee separate, there are many points of
intersection with the utside world. Even many insiders, be they modern Orthodox
or Hasdim in America or haredim (the Israeli term for the ultra-Orthodox in
Israel, use English or modern Hebrew as their dominant or onlylanguage.(1)
Will English simply supplant Yiddish or will the laguage spoken in America
diverge so significantly from that used in Israel that the two will be
mutually incomprehensible? Will that affect the future use of Yiddish as
a transnational lingua ranca?
Sources
The data for this study is drawn from recent storybooks,
colouring and ctivity books, and especially the children’s sections
of a monthly magazine, Mallos.(2) All were
published during the last two decades in the New York area and are sold in
the many small gift and book stores that dot Hasidic concentrations
in the Brooklyn enclaves of Williamsburg, Boro Park and Crown
Heights, and in Hasidic suburbs just north of New York city, especially Monsey,
New Square and Kiryas Yoel. The bookstores that serve Hasidim mainly stock
serious religious texts but also have a range of books for the young, in
Yiddish, Hebrew and English.
Mallos, produced in Monsey, serves an ultra-Orthodox
readership by subscription, or through outlets that include distributors in
Canada, Israel and Europe. Yiddish materials appeal to the more exclusionary
of Hasidic sects, the Satmar, Belz, Viznitz and others. Sources in Yiddish
are didactic and moralistic, but are often entertaining as well and have
expanded in scope, even as older sources for children are linguistically and
contextually outdated. Thus a whole new market opens for Hasidim, who tend to
have very large families and more disposable income than most of their forebears
ever possessed.(3) What may be read is severely restricted, so Hasidim
provide their own carefully vetted reading materials, primers and
storybooks. Because of competition with what children see is available to
children outside their circles, the genres that Hasidim work in have been
expanding. It is relevant to note that what was dominantly an oral culture has
relatively recently blossomed into an array of forms adapting to American
society, a kind of hybrid that keeps the moralistic quality of Hasidic cultural
transmission but uses today’s forms and technology to include comic books,
activity books with mazes and puzzles, and cassette and
videotapes.
The materials I use are written sources, but they often fall
somewhere between the oral and written registers. Some are written versions of
stories originally told aloud, others come with accompanying cassettes; many
stories are available only on cassette. Written language tends to be more formal
than the spoken language, so it is safe to assume that oral language is more
varied and may rely more heavily on borrowings than the written. What is written
partly reflects the spoken language, but proficiencies differ.
Communities and Transmission of Yiddish
The post-Shoah Hasidic world is highly fragmented and
variable, thus instead of a single speech community, it is better to think of a
semi- connected array of communities in transition, communities that came to
America from mixed linguistic backgrounds and with mixed proficiencies in their
various languages. The community is complex linguistically, diglossic in its use
of Hebrew-Aramaic for liturgical purposes, learned in combination with Yiddish
and English, each having distinct functions. The mixed linguistic background of
writers, parents and teachers heightens a need to establish editorial norms and
school norms for the children to whom Yiddish is being
transmitted.
Yiddish-speaking Hasidim in America are a small minority,
living in scattered enclaves, mainly among English-speakers. Most American Jews,
Orthodox included, speak only English and pray mainly in Hebrew- Aramaic,
loshn koydesh, the ‘holy language’. Prior to World War 2, the
linguistic environment for Hasidim was radically different. Yiddish was not the
exclusive domain of the Hasidim, and the languages with which they were all in
contact were various, including Ukrainian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian and modern
German. Now, Hasidic children rarely come into contact with Yiddish speakers who
live outside their own communities so that the Yiddish language, along with the
distinctive clothing of each Hasidic sect that sets them apart from other
Orthodox Jews as well as from non-Jews, has become a significant marker for an
ultra-religious stance. Meanwhile their outside languages of contact are for the
most part English or modern Hebrew.(4)
Historically, Yiddish was not formally taught but was
transmitted through families. Yiddish is now usually taught at the same time as
Hebrew, one result being that much of what is written for school-age children
uses the pointing system used for Hebrew learners. The writing system for both
Hebrew and Yiddish, the latter being an adaptation of the Hebrew system, is
learned as a part of an integral whole. The use of pointing for young children
is more common in Israel.(5) Elders, the rabbinic ?lite, set the general
direction. Because the older Hasidim are deeply aware that secular Yiddish
culture was opposed to their religious lifestyle, Yiddish books from secular
sources are suspect and therefore not permitted. Their use of existing
resources in standardized Yiddish is limited, so far, to the small Harduf
dictionary.(6) Yiddish is used to socialize Hasidic children into community
norms, as the heymish traditional language. (7) Language maintenance
has traditionally been perpetuated in the home and in the school where parents
and teachers created educational environments and written texts. Language
policies are laid down by the rabbinic elders, and by publishers and editors,
who are local and close to their readership. Books, especially those on
religious subjects, often contain page after page of letters of approval by
rabbinic authorities. Publishers and editors are conservative and tend to write
Yiddish in the same way they learned it, except when change helps the reader’s
comprehension.(8)
Bilingualism and Shift
Yiddish is a fusion language traditionally open to outside
influences. This is still the case today so that interaction with English
speakers now affects the language. At the same time, continued contact with
textual Hebrew makes that language likely to remain a strong linguistic
influence. Components are not only added, but also leave languages when contact
is absent. Such is the case currently with respect to Slavic languages, and with
modern German. These have diminished influence except for those elements that
are deeply embedded.
The process of lexical choice, internal to the language, is
evident even for those young enough to be wielding crayons in colouring books.
While choices from outside Yiddish are available, the Hasidic writer must at
times reach across linguistic lines. To illustrate, some bilingual
Yiddish-English colouring books produced in Monsey illustrate the complexity of
Yiddish, liturgical Hebrew, and English code-switching. Language mixing occurs
within the language so that the captions to the drawings, consistently given in
two languages, offer Yiddish, using the alef bet above the drawings, and
parallel captions in English, in Latin script, below them. While both languages
teach the same basic religious principles, interestingly the captions are by no
means straight translations of one another. An examination of where they diverge
proves revealing.At times the differences are minimal, as in:
Y: Mir shpiln zikh tsuzamen.
Men tor nisht redn loshn hore.(9)
E: We play together
nicely. We must not speak loshn hora.
The lesson is against loshn hore, literally meaning
‘bad speech’, but also roughly against gossip and slander. This is but one of
many central ethical ideas taught to children early, and kept in the original
liturgical Hebrew. The English caption only adds the adjective ‘nicely’. Also
close in meaning and form are the pair of captions below, where the child is
told to fulfill the commandment of charity, mitzvah and
tzedaka.(10) The difference is that the Yiddish adds an additional
Hebrew term, mekayem in the periphrastic form, common in Hasidic
Yiddish.
Y: Mir zenen mekayem di mitzva fun
tsedaka yedn tog.
E: We observe the mitzvah of
tzedokoh every day.
(spelling as printed Di yidishe
tokhter, p.12).
This pair above is still basically parallel. Below, by
contrast, the child who reads, or is read to, in English needs to be told what
blessing to say, while the child functioning in Yiddish would already know. Does
this mean that the child speaking English is more likely to need remedial help?
Y:
Men vasht di hent farn esn.
E: We wash our hands before eating and
make the ‘brokhoh’ ‘al n’tilas yodoyim’.
(Di Yidishe tokhter, p.7.)
Sometimes the Hebrew origin words in English are in quotes,
but this usage is inconsistent).Again, in the pair below, the English caption
gives more information, while the Yiddish caption is very simple:
Y: Mir davenen
erlikh.
E: We daven nicely with kavonoh. (Di Yidishe
tokhter, p.13)
English has to add the concept of kavonoh
(kavone, fervour) which is very different from Yiddish erlikh,
a culturally loaded word which, to secularists, signifies ‘honest’ and to the
very religious, ‘observant’. This word keys into a whole value system. The idea
of kavone, found in the English, conveys a different meaning of
intensity of belief.(11) Again erlikh is not translated in the
pair below. Notice how much more the English version has to throw in to
encapsulate the concept:
Y: Di eltern betn az er zol oysvaksen
an erlikher yid.
E: The parents daven that their children should
be Chachomim and Yirei Hashem. (Ikh bin alt dray yor, p.10)
In another colouring book, about a boy turning three, we find
different words for skullcap: kapel in Yiddish and ‘yarmulke’ in
English, not the Modern Hebrew equivalent kipah. (12)
In the captions below, the English is simpler than the
Yiddish equivalent:
Y:
es zenen do vos firn zikh tsu makhn di peyes nebn dem kever fun r’ shimen
bar yokhai.
E: Some travel to Miron to cut their child’s hair.
The Yiddish version says, ‘There are some whose habit it is
to make [lit.] the earlocks near the grave of Rabbi Shimen Bar Yochai.’ Perhaps
the English-dominant child is less likely to have earlocks. The expectations of
a child’s knowledge and behaviour clearly diverge according to language. It
appears that the writer knows how to accommodate to differences within a
bilingual community. While no such dual language books were seen for older
children, there are entirely separate series of sanctioned publications, some
for modern Hebrew readers, others for English speakers, and these are especially
plentiful for the rapidly expanding Chabad/Lubavitch Hasidim who have a large
English language readership, and for the non-Hasidic Orthodox.
The parameters of language contact are partly a function of
geography, but mainly of religiously-based exclusiveness. The colouring books
demonstrate how the Hasidic child, from the earliest years, learns how to use
liturgical Hebrew in combination with other languages. Function in liturgical
Hebrew is needed for all, but is especially essential for boys. A regular
feature in Mallos features two little boys, Burukh and Berl,.drawn with
peyes, imitating a learned conversation. They usually discuss a subject in the
learned style employed by their elders, a kind of proto-Torah talk. For
instance, they will introduce a citation with the Yiddish term,
s’shteyt [...] followed by a quotation from the holy books, and usually
this citation is immediately translated into Yiddish. On many occasions the
Hebrew term or phrase needs no translation. There are also set forms, like the
phrases er vet mekayem zayn di mitzve fun […] (He will
realize/accomplish the commandment of […]).
This kind of setting creates a proto-lomdish
register. Some forms are also used in the stories more appropriate for girls,
who use less Hebrew but who also need key concepts and terms in their original
terminology for culturally central values. The linguistic patterns are more
greatly divided along gender lines later in life, since women are expected to
use more English or outside languages to work and function outside the community
boundaries.(13)
Elements of Bilingualism and Language
Proficiency
Given their mixed population and variable skills, how do
Hasidim establish a workable Yiddish for their young, who are by now third or
fourth generation Americans? In many families, Yiddish was not transmitted
continuously. In the speech communities, marked by movement and fluidity, uses
of languages frequently overlap: Yiddish and Hebrew, modern and liturgical
Hebrew, internationalisms and English. In this complex linguistic community,
adaptation of vocabulary to local languages means that Yiddish texts produced in
Israel are somewhat alien to readers in America, while the inverse is true for
Israeli Yiddish speakers. The former travels on a bos (bus) driven by a
drayver (driver) on the hayvey; the latter on kvish
in an eged.(14) The use of the components varies by gender and by sect.
Even the most exclusionary sects, in New Square and Williamsburg, require some
English.
The nature of glossing reveals much about the child’s
language proficiency. In the books (some with cassettes) we find a substantial
amount of English and almost no Slavic words. They are set in surroundings
familiar to the young readers. The basic Yiddish proper is straightforward and
fairly sophisticated. A small paperback-tape set,Der leyb hot im
gehitn,(15) provides an example of many professional looking, colourful
products, enlivened with pictures and songs. It contains a fair amount of
English, bits of modern Hebrew and, of course, liturgical Hebrew. The author,
Zusha Schmeltzer, from New Square, is also a teacher and so knows his students.
Right away, the first sentence of the story contains an English borrowing,
teyp, that is not translated. Soon we learn that the characters are
going on a trip, which is translated into Hebrew as nesiye, in
parentheses, but not on a rayze, the Yiddish word. Once an English word
is glossed with the Yiddish or Hebrew, its subsequent uses are no longer
translated, being thereafter presumed to be in Yiddish use. In this book, a
teacher and boys visit Russian immigrant children who attend a separate
kheyder. In the story, the Russian children they visit use no Slavic
words in their very fragmented Yiddish. They are met in the lontsh-rum
(lunch room), glossed in Yiddish as (es zal) . The one Slavic word in
this encounter occurs in a long speech by an older Russian, the emphatic
particle zhe, usually found after questions and commands in Yiddish. This
Russian explains the role of the evil komunistn, untranslated. He also uses an
alien word, sinagog (synagogue), translated into shul.
Ironically these children do not attend a synagogue and so need translation for
words like ortodoksish and religye, which must be taught. They
use the more homespun Yiddish equivalents: shul, frum and
gloybn.
Yiddish in a post-Holocaust context is variable because
normal patterns of language transmission have been disrupted. Like the author of
the story above, Yiddish writers are drawn from within the community. Often they
are themselves teachers or parents so they are aware of what words the children
already know in their Yiddish and what would be alien; they possess a functional
sense of the range of their children’s linguistic skills. Choices with respect
to language use are based on a combination of what the writers presume the child
knows and what they desire the child to learn, linguistically and
conceptually.
However, Hasidic educators themselves often have mixed or
limited proficiency in Yiddish. Ayala Fader notes that teachers in the school
she observed had trouble speaking in Yiddish, and I observed the same in Israel.
The writers of the instruction books come from mixed linguistic and national
backgrounds but often know more Yiddish than the teachers and parents of the
children. Women will know less liturgical Hebrew than their male counterparts.
Therefore there is a tendency to borrow heavily from the local language, while
at the same time raising children’s vocabulary to a higher level. Children are
learning new concepts as they learn new words.
Old Contact Languages
Although liturgical Hebrew is necessary for religious and
social functions, it is not a language of daily discourse for Hasidim in New
York, unlike their counterparts in Israel. Hebrew terms rarely require
explanation, but do function in the process of taytshn, a time-honoured
process for teaching texts by translating the sacred into the vernacular. As
Chaim Weiser has pointed out, English is replacing Yiddish in the yeshivas as
the vernacular for translation. (16) Still, the taytsh format into
Yiddish is still used for little ones, as even a pamphlet-sized activity book
called Nuts dayn moyekh (Use Your Head)(17) teaches children
blessings by having them taytsh.
Words of Hebrew origin, well integrated into day-to-day
Yiddish, often represent a higher register. To say nifter zayn is more
refined than to say shtarbn (to die). Everyday school words like
kheyder, talmud tora are Yiddishized words of Hebrew origin,
as are social activities and most life cycle events. Hebraic words provide the
logical or temporal structure, a function undoubtedly born from Talmud study and
deeply infused into day-to-day language through the use of words like
mistome (apparently), efsher (perhaps),
koydem/l’khatkhila,(at first), kdey (in order to),
kimat (approximately); these are all words that need no
glossing or explanation. One story describes someone as praying from
shakhris to mayrev (as, very remotely, dawn to dusk).
Moreover, words from Hebrew are visibly different in that they are plainly
distinct in spelling. The demarcation between sacred and profane distinguishes
everything, including spelling rules, so Hebrew words used in Yiddish writing
follow standard Hebrew orthography. Interestingly, when fused with Germanic
affixes, there is a trend to separate out stems of Hebraic origin from affixes
or compounds from other sources: in the following examples, I omit the vowels
from the stem to demonstrate what each word looks like in the original:
iberge’khzr’t (repeated), dvd’z (David’s),
khsid’ishe, (Hasidic).(18) Not every Hebrew word is potentially a
Yiddish word. Ashkenazi-style Hebraic words and phrases follow Yiddish
phonology, variable by dialect.(19)
Religious Yiddish speakers still possess a distinct level of
usage that involves vocatives to address the deity or to ward off evil, words
like kholile, got zol ophitn or khas ve sholem (may God
forbid), barukh hashem (thanking or blessing God),
alevhasholem (rest in peace). Yiddish and Hebrew share sanctity, as
seen in verbal pairs like shabes koydesh and its equivalent,
heyliger shabes ( holy Sabbath). Ritual objects are usually Hebraic,
like talis, khumesh, tfiln, but there is also the
negel vaser, ‘nail water’, both parts of the term being of Germanic
origin. The word for the deity can be either Hebraic or Germanic in origin: in
Hebrew, reboyne shel oylem (Lord of the universe) or in Yiddish,
bashefer (the Creator). An interesting phenomenon is the tendency to
combine words of the same meaning drawn respectively from Hebrew and German to
serve as intensifiers, as in mazl un glik, ‘great luck’, emes un
vur ‘very true’.(20)
The basic core vocabulary of Yiddish is still Germanic, but
occasionally as modified by centuries of language contact. To varying degrees,
the effects of contact with later forms of German appear, especially a silent
[h] where its appearence in written German depends on the background of the
writer, though this practice seems to be on the wane. The use of modern
Germanisms, known as daytshmerish, at one time signified a higher
register. Many Hasidim stem from families that lived under Austro-Hungarian
rule, where German represented the language of upward mobility. Daytshmerisms
found include bite (please), file (a lot) where standard
Yiddish would use a sakh, and zofort (immediately).(21)
If Germanic is still at the core, the once ever-present Slavic component has all
but disappeared, since only very few words deeply rooted in Yiddish remain in
the children’s literature. In all likelihood the speakers are not aware that the
words that remain are indeed of Slavic origin, like murashke (ant),
yagedes (strawberries), katshke (duck). (22) The phrase
koyles fun di katshkes (the noise of ducks), combines all three
traditional components – Hebraic, in koyles; fun di, from
Germanic, and katshkes, as Slavic.(23) An unhappy twelve-year old girl
correspondent to Mallos (#44) writes, ikh tshepe mayn zibn-yerige
shvester, ‘I pick on my seven-year old sister.’ The word tshepe is
of Slavic origin, meaning ‘to annoy’. Indeed the Slavic component may well be in
the process of being replaced by English. The system is not static, and new
lexical choices abound for old concepts and for new ones. An example of a
Yiddish word of Slavic origin is petrishke. Without contact with Slavic
languages, the word seems to have taken on variety of meanings for something to
put into soup, variably denoting ‘parsley’, ‘parsnips’ and even
‘celery’. New Contact Languages: English, and
Internationalisms
Modern Hebrew is accessible to children, who often have
relatives in Israel. Some may have travelled or even emigrated themselves. Many
Israeli Hasidim speak only modern Hebrew, and others include much of it in their
Yiddish.(24) There is still discomfort at making the holy tongue into a
vernacular, and in New York they do not need to in the same way they do in
Israel. Instead, English is the major source in America and Canada. Where
English is connected with events in the child’s life, borrowings are triggered
by domains of function. As mentioned above, public transportation is a domain in
which the children must function in English, so we find the words kar
(car), bos (bus) driven by a drayver in which the children sit
on a sit; these are commonplace as they describe daily events that
occur outside the bounds of Jewish life. So too are medical visits, generating
Yiddish borrowings like eksident, ambulans, sayrens,
and so on. (25) Some English borrowings are Yiddishized easily, since
Yiddish and English share a plural suffix, s/z. The Yiddish plural of
kar is at times karn, not kars. Also Yiddishized is a
phrase used while children wait for a hurt child biz m’tshekt im oys
(until they check him out). The separable prefix structure again easily permits
this English and Yiddish switch. The new construction is then explained in pure
Yiddish as m’zukht im unter (he is examined). Specific topics often
prompt the degree of borrowings where Hasidic life permits interaction with
outside societal systems. A story in Mallos concerns a child in a
wheelchair who receives therapy: the therapist, terapist,speaks English
so the child says bay bay, tenk yu, and the word for
wheelchair is calqued as rod-shtul. One young correspondent, in the
‘cute’ Small Treasures ( kleyne oytsres) section, writes about
something a younger brother has said:
Y:
Az moshiakh vet kumen vet nokh zayn royt layts?
E: When Messiah comes will
there still be red lights?
Oddly, the child keeps the Yiddish word for ‘red’,
royt, but uses the English word, lights. The editor offers the gloss
lompn (lamps), a Yiddish word which, if not specific, gets the idea
across. A glitsher is a slide fun plestik. Danger comes in the
form of poyzn ayvi, a plant which grows in ready abundance in Monsey,
New York. A new-born child is a beybi, never an
eyfele.(26)
When an immigrant language merges with the host language, one
gets an ‘interlanguage’, a mix of the two, marked by frequent seamless code-
switching across languages. Often perfectly ordinary Yiddish words are replaced
with their English equivalents in much the same way as older immigrant Yiddish
was replete with English. The extent of lexical depletion,the degree to which
English has entered everyday talk, can be seen in the ‘Help Wanted’
advertisements in the weekly Satmar newspaper, Der Yid, published in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, To counter this influx requires effort and education in
Yiddish, both of which are given to adults and to children alike in
Mallos. A regular section for adults on mameloshn, mother
tongue, gives vocabulary, with Yiddish explanations of meaning and even
etymology.
Editors also give many internationalisms, which provide a
sort of general education for those whose studies have been mainly in holy
texts. The gradient between worldly and religious is illustrated in a story
(Mallos #37) about a little girl whose family became religiously
observant. She changes her name from Mary to Miriam, moves from Newburgh to
Monsey, and the vocabulary follows her transition. At the beginning she is on a
field trip with her parents in the realm of English, so we find stetyu af
liberti, ‘Statue of Liberty’, trok, ‘truck’, muzeyums,
‘museums’, and hotel, ‘hotel’. One cute touch is a phoneticized
mispronounced word, khasidiks, meaning Hasidim, designed to show the
ignorance of the secular speaker. The story teaches the child new words for
alien concepts such as religyez for ‘religious’, not a term a Hasidic
child would run into, nor ortodoksish, ‘Orthodox’. When Miriam/ Mary’s
family kitchen is made kosher, the words associated with the ritual process
enter, and they are of Hebrew origin: tayvlen (soak), kashern
(render kosher), and keylim (implements), among others. (27) In terms
of language agenda and language awareness, there seems to be a new drift. The
editors and publishers of Mallos seem to promote the Yiddish language
and try to improve it. Mallos, meaning ‘to arise’, each month carries a
series of children’s items in a section at the back, entitled Shtayg
hekher (Ascend Higher). Each edition features stories with what might be
difficult or unfamiliar vocabulary explained in simpler Yiddish at the end
of the readings. These pieces also insert explanations into the text proper.
Mostly, the new words learned are the more unusual Yiddish words, or borrowings
from English and internationalisms. The following are some typical
examples of alteration:
tsapl to tsiter (quiver)
tsinish to khoyzedik
(cynical)
geshildert to forgeshtelt
(presented)
aristokratish to geboyrn bay a khosheve
mishpokhe (aristocratic, born to an important family)(28)
hafn (harbour) to breg fun yam vu di shifn
onkern (the shore where ships come in)
ortodoksishe to [yidn] vos firn zikh al pi toyre
(Jews who conduct themselves according to the precepts of the
Torah)
statue to a geshtalt fun shteyn oder ander
materialn (a figure made of stone or other materials)
volknkratzers(skyscrapers) or zeyer hoykhe
gebaydes (very tall buildings)(29)
Children are taught language awareness. For example, a story
has a character described as a Litvak from Lithuan ia, but the children already
know that this term usually refers not only to the dialect associated with
Lithuanian Jews but also to an ultra-Orthodox man who is not a Hasid.(30)
In a section following the story, entitled Baraykher dayn verter oytser
(enrich your vocabulary), synonyms are taught in glossary form using the
divergent forms contained in the narrative: the synonyms are
berzl / tayster (purse,
wallet)
nisht / nit (not)
tash / keshene (pocket)
Pedagogically, this offers the child a review of the new
vocabulary, which is reinforced as the writer explains what a dialekt
is. An analogy for the relationships between dialects of Yiddish is drawn
between British and American English differences. They explain that Yiddish
originated from German, and about the goyish (non-Jewish) sounds and
words deriving from the many countries Jews inhabited. Notably, this explanation
wholly omits any mention of the Hebrew component of Yiddish. The writer goes on
to explain that each dialect has its own aktsent (accent). Familiar
examples are given: the letter [r] as pronounced by Hungarian, Russian,
Polish, Galitzianer and American Jews, variants the children have presumably
heard. The children are encouraged in word-play. The word breyzl (dried
bread crumbs) is mixed up with berzl (purse), a metathesis made by an
incompetent caller. More examples of the richness of Yiddish include the many
ways to say gesheft, ‘store’ or ‘shop’: in Israel kleyt, in
Russia krom, and in Poland gevelb. One finds, too, that word
boundaries are quite often different in Hasidic Yiddish. Funderheym is
one word (from the home), rather than the three words, fun der
heym.
Conclusions
The level of Yiddish use towards which the writers, editors
and parents are working, the Yiddish of tomorrow, may not ultimately come into
being. One cannot predict the future, as the pedagogues of the Workmen’s Circle
schools finally learned. Despite noble efforts, they did not produce future
generations of native Yiddish speakers in the face of larger social forces. But
the movement toward restoring Yiddish vocabulary in Hasidic circles may well
have a stronger chance among the Hasidim than in any other movement, simply
because the community has integrated Yiddish functions into the home and school,
into everyday life. The effort still has to counter the influences of the street
and the playground and mixed speech communities. Yiddish has strangely become a
contact language to itself.
If we imagine that the Yiddish of Mallos represents
a trend in American Yiddish, it has also taken a different tack in language
retention from the one taken by secular Yiddishists. Mallos is not
prescriptive, but deals instead with an entire language environment, one that
does not forbid the use of English borrowings, but does explicitly teach the
Yiddish equivalents. This magazine provides children with a wealth of Yiddish
vocabulary by introducing words in the context of engaging stories, in the
target language, using mainly Yiddish explanations of the words. The appropriate
uses of English and Hebrew in Yiddish are set within stories that mirror the
lives of the children who read them, set within a Yiddish milieu and value
system. New Yiddish words are not coined, but English words and phrases are
adapted. The writers attempt to provide the children with mastery over a range
of registers, from plain to lomdish.
What can these linguistic sources for juveniles tell us about
the future of Yiddish? The texts suggest the presence of a great deal of English
that has not yet seeped deeply into Yiddish. Modern Hebrew borrowings are few
and far between, but there is much textual Hebrew with correct Yiddish settings.
This process is the inverse of what the Soviets strove for when they insisted
that Hebrew words be spelled phonetically, and actively discouraged the Hebrew
component of Yiddish. If the Russians imbued the language with lots of Russian,
the Hasidim have taken it out.(31) The child reader of Mallos would
have a terrible time reading Sholem Aleichem in the original because of the
Slavisms, and an even more difficult time with Soviet children’s stories.
English and internationalisms are taught as useful for broadening the reader’s
knowledge of worldly things in an educational system that does not teach much
about the outside world. In the gradient between the interlanguages of Judaized
English and Anglicized Yiddish, we find a competition of forms available, an
overlapping vocabulary.
Joshua Fishman, in an article in the Forverts, once
called this the Yiddish of the twenty-first century. His article rightly
defended the correctness of Hasidic usage against those who find it poor.(32)
Indeed, while many in the world of Yiddish literature decry the poor quality of
Hasidic Yiddish writing, it is not poor consistently. While it is often enough
sloppy, its quality is also often sophisticated. Moreover, some of what seems
like sloppy writing may actually reflect variation in norms and grammatical
usage and not necessarily deterioration. What may ultimately emerge is unclear.
For the moment, Hasidic Yiddish is the vital Yiddish of the present. Whether it
may simply be an intermediate phenomenon, or whether it may perhaps truly mark
the future of Yiddish, only time can tell.
NOTES
1. Baumel, Shlomo. ‘Language Policies of Ethnic Minorities as
Influenced by Social, Economic, Religious and Political Contraints’. Unpublished
dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2002. This study examines four haredi
(ultra-Orthodox) groups in Israel, including the Lubavitch and Ger Hasidim, who
use Hebrew pervasively, and Yiddish to a lesser extent. The other two groups
included in the study are not Hasidic.
2. The series of game-activity books Nutz Dayn
Moyakh Series: Game and Activity Books is conveniently marked for age
appropriateness: see Lomir Forn (Shevet Akhim: Brooklyn, 1995);
Megiles Ester (Beis Rokhl: New York, 1981).
3 Along with books and tapes, there are also games in Yiddish
to inculcate values, some mirroring secular games. Thus Monopoly in
Hasidic garb is Handl Erlikh, and teaches charity instead of
accumulation of wealth.
4 This varies by location. In the Montreal area they have
French, in New York, Spanish, and in Antwerp, Flemish and French as co-
territorials as well, but with very limited social contacts in those
environments.
5 In Yiddish, words of Hebrew origin are generally spelled
according to their Hebrew spelling. A new development in Hasidic writing is that
an apostrophe separates affixes, all but the plural marker –im, derived
from profane source languages. This apostrophe creates a visible separation
between the sacred part of Yiddish from the profane. See Weinreich, Max. History of the
Yiddish Language (New York: YIVO, 1985) for a discussion of Yiddish as the
language of a religious way of life, and of the role of diglossia and co-
territorial languages. The use of apostrophe in this way is an ancient custom,
dating back to medieval times. For Hasidim in particular see Dan, Joseph. ‘The
Ashkenazi Hasidic Concept of Language’, in Glinert, Lewis (ed.), Hebrew in
Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993).
6 Harduf, D.M. English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English
Dictionary (Canada, 1983).
7 Isaacs, Miriam. ‘Haredi, Haymish and Frim’, in Pious
Voices: Languages Among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, ed.Miriam Isaacs and Lewis
Glinert, International Journal of the Sociology of Language (IJSL #138,
1999), pp. 9-30.
8 Kerler,
Dov-Ber. The Emergence of Modern Literary Yiddish (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1999), describes the role of editors of religious books in
accommodating change while remaining conservative as Yiddish publications
shifted from Central to Eastern Europe in the 17th century. When the
population moved into Slavic lands, it meant adding Slavicisms to Yiddish.
Hasidic Yiddish now displays the reverse process, in which Slavic words have
left the language.
9 I have romanized the Yiddish according to the YIVO
transcription system.
10 Benor, Sarah. ‘Loan Words in the English of Modern
Orthodox Jews: Yiddish or Hebrew?’ in S. Chang et al. (eds.) Proceedings of
the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2000, pp.
287-298. Sarah Benor has explored the interesting question of whether the
English is indeed taking the words from Yiddish, from liturgical Hebrew or
modern Hebrew.
11 Isaacs, op.cit. ‘Haredi, Haymish and Frim’, in Pious
Voices: Languages Among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, International Journal of
the Sociology of Language (IJSL #138), ed. Miriam Isaacs and Lewis
Glinert., pp.9-30.
12 Brandwein, R. M. Coloring Books: I am Three Years Old
/ Ikh Bin Alt Dray Yor (3rd ed.); and Blessings/ Brokhes
Hanehnin (Coloring and Fun Book, 3rd ed.)
13 Boguch, Bryna (1999) ‘Gender, Literacy and Religiosity:
Dimensions of Yiddish education in Israeli government-supported schools’, in
Pious Voices: Languages Among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, ed.Miriam Isaacs and
Lewis Glinert. (IJSL #138), pp.123-160. For a treatment of gender in an American
setting, see Fader, Ayala. ‘Literacy, Bilingualism and Gender in a Hasidic
Community’, Linguistics and Education 12(3) 2001:
261-83.
14 See Ayala Fader’s study of the Bobov, op. cit., which
suggests that for women, Yiddish has become a baby language used with all the
pre-school children to socialize them into the ways of their
ancestors.
15 Schmeltzer, Zusha. Der layb hot im gehitn (New York: New
Square, 1995).
16 Weiser, Chaim. Frumspeak: The First Dictionary of
Yeshivish (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1995)
17 Samet, H.S. Nitz dayn moyekh, Part Bet, ages 5-11.
Basheftigung mit khinukh tsu shtaygn gor hoykh, a series, (Brooklyn, NY:
Roebling Distributors, 1998).
18 This practice, dating from medieval times, has not been
the practice generally. Lexically, marking off the Hebrew Aramaic roots and
affixes makes the Hebrew component apparent by physical separating the sacred
from the profane within Yiddish.
19 Mark, Yudl. ‘Yidish-Hebraish, Hebraish-Yidish
Nayshafungen’, YIVO Bleter: Journal of the Yiddish Scientific
Institute, 1957-58, pp.124- 57; Weinreich, Max. ‘Vos Volt Yidish Geven on
Hebraish’, Di Tsukunft, Vol. 36 ( 1931):.194-205 [reprinted in The
Mendele Review].
20 Lomir Dertseyln/ Let’s Tell, author not given
(New York: Shevet akhim publishers, 1998).
21 The most evident influence of modern German is
orthographic, in spellings that retain a silent h where that is written in
German. But since some of the writers do not know German, the silent h
appears at times when it does not occur in German. More often, however, that
h is simply absent.
22 Zilberman, Miriam, Mides hoyz (The House of Good
Behavior) published by Makhon l’hotsat sifrei khinukh, for Beit Hannah l’banot
(The House of Hannah for Girls). No other details given.
23 Nutz Dayn
Moyekh, op. cit.
24 Isaacs, Miriam. 1999. ‘Contentious Partners: Yiddish and
Hebrew in Haredi Israel’, in Pious Voices: Languages among Ultra-Orthodox
Jews, International Journal of the Sociology of Language (IJSL #
138), ed. Miriam Isaacs and Lewis Glinert, pp. 101-22.
25 Fader, Ayala., op.cit.
26 Mallos Vol. # 60 (2001): 62.
27 Mallos Vol. #37 (2000): 4, in Shtayg
hekher: ‘Shver ober gut / Difficult but good’.
28 Mallos, # 60 (2001): 58, Dayn verter
oytser /Enrich your vocabulary.
29 Mallos # 37: 2- 4, Shtayg hekher Section
2 of volume.
30 Mallos # 44 (2000): 48-54, Shtayg Hekher
section: Farloyrn dos berzl /Story of a lost purse.
31 Estraikh, Gennady. Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning
and Linguistic Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
32 Fishman, Joshua. Forverts ‘Dos khsidishe yidish — gut tsi
shlekht?’ Forverts, 29 Aug.1997, pp.13, 15; Fishman, Joshua. ‘The
Sociology of Jewish Languages from a General Sociolinguistic Point of View’, in
Fishman, Joshua, (ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), pp. 3-21.