Yiddish

“ Miss Frank has a keen sense of humor. How could she love Yiddish were it not so? She cites some of the Yiddishe Gazetten's answers to correspondents. This is funny: "The woman has the right to take her clothes and ornaments away with her when she leaves her husband. But it is a question if she ought to leave him." Then we have the following from an article by Dr. Goidorof. He compares the Yiddish language to persons whose passports are not in order—the one has no grammar, the others have no land. ”

“ They are remote from life and do not strive toward practical educational goals. The field of cultural education is handled for us by the daily press, which ponders over the question of whether Yiddish is a folk language, a national language, an ugly jargon or a cultural medium worthy or our use. The majority of the authors who deal with Yiddish are assimilationists, alien to the Jewish nation. In their scientific writings they continually seek to demonstrate that Yiddish is a bona fide German dialect and that the Jews are the bearers of German culture in the Slavic lands. ”

“ The paramount tasks of Yiddish philology can be formulated as the nationalization and humanization of the language. Nationalizing Yiddish entails purifying the language thoroughly and enriching it extensively, to the point where it can express all aspects of Jewish creativity. Humanizing Yiddish entails turning it into a means for incorporating into the Jewish nation all the cultural values of modern panhuman development. Our great writers saw the need to enrich and to cultivate the common folk language without even having recourse to the methods of scientific philology. ”

“ A reading of them, fifteen years after they were written, shows that they were a natural outgrowth of that movement of self-analysis and self-criticism of which American Yiddish literature stood so greatly in need. Although creative workers are never too numerous, Yiddish writers were plentiful. ”

“ A sweeping task of our philology entails the enrichment of the Yiddish language. The problem is not that Yiddish is poor. On the contrary, this language must be very rich in expressive capability, because it is fused from three exceedingly rich language families. This wealth, increased by the liveliness of Jewish temperament, in continually manifest in Yiddish. The poverty from which it suffers results from social and psychological causes. Wandering about on the streets for generations, dragging along at fairs, it was not privileged to be bred in chancelleries and refined in universities. ”

“ The extent of common intellectual pleasures was much greater than one would be inclined to admit without examination. In Germany we have the testimony of the first Judeo-German or Yiddish works printed in the sixteenth century that even at that late time the Jews were deriving pleasure from the stories belonging to the cycle of King Arthur and similar romances. ”

“ These words are used constantly; many of them have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish words. For example, ingel, meaning boy (it is a Slavic loan-word in Yiddish) , has been obliterated by the English word. A Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though strangely enough he calls his daughter his meidel. "Die boys mit die meidlach haben a good time" is excellent American Yiddish. ”

“ Whilst His Excellency is unable to offer a solution, he is keenly alive to the necessity of imparting instruction in our schools through the vernaculars. The Jews of Middle and Eastern Europe, who are scattered in all parts of the world, finding it necessary to have a common tongue for mutual intercourse, have raised Yiddish to the status of a language, and have succeeded in translating into Yiddish the best books to be found in the world's literature. ”

“ If one of us refused to kneel in prayer before the crucifix; if one of us refused to eat pork; if one of us was caught mumbling a Hebrew prayer or speaking Yiddish, he was sure to get a flogging. Twenty, thirty, forty, or even full fifty lashes were the punishment. But, then, is it conceivable that they could have treated us any other way? Why, hundreds of Jewish children that did not understand a word of Russian had been delivered into the hands of a Russian official that did not understand a word of Yiddish. ”

“ The Yiddish drama, before his time, had not been looked upon with great favor, and there was in this, as in other instances, an implication of the contempt that Americans not infrequently feel for the alien, and also a fear, on the part of members of the older Jewish communities, that the Yiddish theater might retard the Americanization of the immigrant. ”

“ Then he would curse them with all the rich curses of the Yiddish language, and rush away and hide himself; for days he would live in a state of gloom and dark oppression, feeling dimly aware of a difference between him and them which it was beyond his power to explain. ”

“ All they teach them in the school is English nonsense. The teachers are a pack of heathens, who eat forbidden things, but the good Yiddishkeit goes to the wall. I'm ashamed of thee, Méshe: thou dost not even send thy boys to a Hebrew class in the evening."
"I have no money, and they must do their English lessons. Else, perhaps, their clothes will be stopped. Besides, I teach them myself every Shabbos afternoon and Sunday. Solomon translates into Yiddish the whole Pentateuch with Rashi." ”

“ To those who visit “Charley’s Mount” for the first time all this is as Yiddish, but soon he or she, when initiated into the games of roulette and trente-et-quarante, quickly gets bitten by the fever and enters into the spirit of the discussions. ”

“ We do not know for sure the age of the Yiddish language, but Yiddish is no exception; it is impossible to determine with assuredness when any language is born. In any event, Yiddish is probably no younger than 600 or 700 years. ”

“ I turned my head and whispered to Jacob in Yiddish: "He is going to keep us here the whole day! When shall we have our hour's rest?" At that moment the sergeant passed between the lines, and overheard me speaking Yiddish. O yes, they have sharp ears, those drill-masters. As you know, speaking Yiddish was considered a great breach of discipline, which never passed unpunished. It always meant a whipping. So I had made myself guilty of two offenses. On that day I did not go home empty-handed: I got an order to report the next morning to receive my twenty lashes. ”

“ All the people of whom Yiddish is the mother tongue are given special recognition in our Immigration Bureau's classification of arriving immigrants under the term 'Hebrews.' The people thus designated do not constitute the only branch of the Hebrew race in the region above mentioned, nor is Yiddish the mother-tongue of them all, but where the modern Hebrew fails to show this distinctive tongue and has become so merged with the nation in which he lives as to be indistinguishable except by pedigree or religious creed, he is classified with the immigrants of the nationality he has assumed. ”

“ Thus the intelligent reader will have remarked how the somewhat anti-Semitic Irish servant of the first act talks Yiddish herself in the fourth. Even as to the ultimate language of the United States, it is unreasonable to suppose that American, though fortunately protected by English literature, will not bear traces of the fifty languages now being spoken side by side with it, and of which this play alone presents scraps in German, French, Russian, Yiddish, Irish, Hebrew, and Italian. ”

“ More speak Yiddish, called in Europe “Judeo-German,” than any other language, since the largest modern population of Jews borders on eastern Germany and has been longest under German influence.
Physically the Hebrew is a mixed race. In every country, however, they are found to approach in type the people among whom they have long resided. The two chief divisions of the Jewish people are the northern type, and the Spanish or southern type. The latter are now found mainly in the countries southeast of Austria. ”

“ For some time past there has been an active movement among the New York Jews for the purification of Yiddish. This movement is an offshoot of Zionism, and has resulted in the establishment of a number of Yiddish schools. Its adherents do not propose, of course, that English be abandoned, but simply that the two languages be kept separate, and that Jewish children be taught Yiddish as well as English. The Yiddishists insist that it is more dignified to say a gooten tog than good-bye, and billet instead of ticket. But the movement makes very poor progress. ”

“ He moved aside, and then suddenly asked: "By the way, I suppose you do not by any chance understand Yiddish?"
"Why do you ask?" the newcomer demanded gruffly.
"Because I have just had these two photographs of lettering given to me. One is in Greek, I think, and one in Yiddish, but I have forgotten which is which." He held out the two cards to the stranger, who took them from him, and looked at them with scowling curiosity. ”

“ The ideas and relations of life are generally derived from German. The phenomena that arose in the realm of intimate Jewish existence are for the most part derived from Hebrew, while the forms and feelings of daily life in the narrow family environment, as well as many uncouth personal characterizations, are Slavic in origin. A single concept may acquire divergent nuances depending on the genetic descent of the word used to express it. Let us take, as an example, three of the words for "God" in Yiddish. ”

“ In these brief essays, filled with intimate observations on the lives and work of representative Yiddish writers, we are brought into contact with a mind that has been at all times keenly responsive to the creative forces in Jewish life, helpfully proud of the best impulses, intellectual and spiritual, in the Jewish community. For here, set down at a time when reputations were still in the balance, are judgments which time has sustained and insights which are no less pointed because they have won general acceptance. ”

“ That our lord, master and rebbe, Moharan, memory of the righteous and holy bring blessing, told the stories in the Yiddish that was customary in our country, and our master the rav Rabbi Nathan ztz"l the chief of his dear disciples z"l copied them in the holy tongue [Hebrew] and brought himself down intentionally into simple language in order that the concepts not deviate, for those who read them in the holy tongue, away from what he z"l told in the Yiddish that was customary among us. ”

“ Let science too have a part in its heritage. Mendele discovered the language, so let us explore it. Peretz brought it new nations, so let us create an order among them. Philology must excavate the homeless layers of folk creativity by searching out the treasures of our national creativeness scattered across the libraries of Western Europe. Old Yiddish literature had its classical works such as the Shmuel-bukh, the Mayse-buke, and the Seyfer Mides, which served as models for long generations and were even translated into other languages. ”

“ This all looks so Yiddish.’ Up to that time we had very few Jews, because there was, as you may know, a restriction against having Jews in Petrograd; but after the revolution they swarmed in there, and most of the agitators happened to be Jews. I do not want to be unfair to them, but I usually know a Jew when I see one. ”

“ They are essentially a non-European people. The language they speak, Jüdisch, or Yiddish, is a corrupt German of the Franconian dialect mixed with Slavic and Hebrew elements, which fact strengthens the tradition of a large migration of German Jews into Poland in the Middle Ages. It may be that the strain of these German Jews has died out, leaving only their language behind, but in any event the Polish Jews are now distinctly Alpine—a mixture of Slavs and of Asiatic invaders of Russia. ”

“ There is something restful and inspiring when an old man—long past the biblical three score and ten—places his hand on your shoulder and murmurs in Yiddish, “It is God’s will.” I have envied the profound peace of many of these aged students living in the past and undisturbed by thoughts of the future. Their Jewish view of life is as beautiful as it is simple. It disregards neither earth nor heaven. I looks to earth and observes the evil prevailing among men ”

“ The Yiddish that the Jews from Russia bring in is German debased with Russian, Polish and [Pg155] Hebrew; in America, it quickly absorbs hundreds of words and idioms from the speech of the streets. Various conflicting German dialects, among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and in the German areas of the Northwest, combine in a patois that, in its end forms, shows almost as much English as German. ”

“ The Russian Jew of culture when he comes to New York carries with him Russian ideals of literature. The best Yiddish work produced in America is Russian in principle. Many of the writers who publish literary sketches in the newspapers of the Ghetto have written originally in the Russian language, and know the Russian Jewish life better than the life of the Yiddish east side ”

“ As long as a nation lacks a national philology it remains far from modern national culture.
Unlike general linguistics, which is a general science, philology is a national science. It presupposes that its object-language entails cultural and historical value at least with respect to the past. Usually philology transcends this limitation and operates on the premise that its object-language has a national significance for the future. Whoever does not believe in the survival of the Yiddish language can be a Yiddish linguist, but not a Yiddish philologist. ”

“ For an artist has conceived it, nurtured it, loved it, named it with his own light, strengthened it with his blood. It has existence because an artist has created it."
One must conclude that the magazine "East and West," which was the occasion of excellent pioneer work in the presentation of Yiddish writing to American readers, was the occasion also of presenting to Yiddish writers a critic who spoke for them with sympathy, courage, and discernment. ”