Why Yiddish will Never Die

The entire text of an email from my friend Nancy:

Feh.

And "feh" is why Yiddish will never die. :)

It would still have been true even if she had skipped the emoticon.

Harshav's Yiddish

My faithful commentator Anon rags me for dismissing Benjaimin  Harshav's Meaning of Yiddish.  Anon might have waited until I finished it.  I have now finished it and I think--I'm not quite sure what I think.  It's an absorbing read, a serious attempt to make sense out of as language and a culture, none of the chattery jokiness that you get from so many books about the language.  I learned a lot from it about the culture of the shtetl at the turn of the 19th-20th Century, and its successor communities in Israel and New York (oddly, less about London).  I learned a bit of narrowly technical stuff I did not know about the language itself.

Yet it remains far from clear to me whether or to what extent the language is a factor in creating the culture as distinct from, say, merely its instrument or vehicle.  Indeed, I suspect that to frame the question that way is to answer it: Yiddish is indeed interesting, but in large part for its role in service to the larger culture.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the discussion of the long tradition of Jewish religious learning that imbued the shtetl culture.  As  Harshav suggests, only God speaks in declarative sentences, speaks narrative.  Others may question or comment--and questioning or commenting turns into a way of life; the students even learn to argue with God, though he retains the last word, does not seem to take offense.

It is right here, I think, that we locate the idea (not specified by Harshav) that the key to shtetl religious life is not knowing Torah but the study of Torah: study is a kind of worship that you practice every day.  I think of Gotthold Lessing (who, so far as I can tell, was not Jewish):

[N]ot by the possession but by the pursuit of truth are [a man's] powers expanded, wherein alone his ever-growing perfection consists. Possession makes us easy, indolent proud.

[I see I quoted this earlier: link.]  Yiddish certainly is a vehicle for this culture, even if it is not its creator (--Why do you people always answer a question with a question?  --Do we?).

There is no doubt some point to be found in the sketch I was offering the other day--of Yiddish as one competitive voice in a noisy and fractious set of triplets, i.e., along with Hebrew and Aramaic.  I could extend the point--Yiddish in its heyday was not merely part of a trilingual culture at home:  it was virtually always working in confrontation with neighbor-languages: German of course, but also Russian or Polish or Ukranian--later English.

On a slightly different note, Harshav also offers insight into the process whereby Yiddish (well: a small group of talented Yiddish writers) promotes itself from the status of folk tongue to the role of a full-blown literary language.  Many have remarked on how Yiddish as it grew was not a "court language"--no central  bureaucracy to set standards or make roles.  Harshav points out that also it was not a "bourgeois language" and so was not in a position merely to imitate the novel-writing tradition of the West.  It was the Yiddish writers--Sholem Aleichem is the name best known to Americans--who figured out a way to define and occupy a "cultural space" in which the language could operate.

In the end, I suspect it was this very flexibility that killed Yiddish.  A language that could come to terms with Biblical Hebrew and Manhattan English at last could live without itself at all.    I think it is Wallace Stevens who said that all French words are part of English; only some we put in italics.  Harshav offers a telling example, although I am not sure he sees its full  importance: is Philip Roth (or Saul Bellow) a Jewish writer working in America, or an American working with Jewish themes?  In the end, it tells you something about Yiddish to say that the distinction doesn't matter all that much.

Yiddish for You, Too

In The Meaning of Yiddish (1990) Benjamin Harshav undertakes to describe the  relationship between Yiddish and other languages.  It wasn't just a "folk language," he argues: it was deeply rooted into the complex of languages (Yiddish, plus Hebrew of course, but also Aramaic) in the religious life of the community. But even though deeply rooted, Yiddish was a sort of "retail language;" the one used when explaining religious matters to the unschooled.  And since religious life was largely reserved for men, Yiddish became, in a sense, feminized.   Harshaw says:

Yiddish was the language of home, family events, intimacy.   It was the "mama-language," with all possible connotations, negative and positive, which the division implied.

In a footnote, he adds:

Title pages of Yiddish texts would make this humble point.  Often, however, the dedication in the book itself was expanded to read: "for women and men" or "for women and men and men who are like women, that is, uneducated."

Id., aat 13.

The Thing about Yiddish

Benjamin Harshav catches and undertakes to explain a paradox of Yiddish: for such a rich language, it has a curiously limited vocabulary. But Harhav says:

Yiddish speakers speak not so much with individual referring words as with such clusters of relations, ready-made idioms, quotations and situational responses. Since each word may belong to several heterogeneous or contradictory knots, ironies are always at hand. It is precisely the small vocabulary of the language that makes the words more repetitive and more dependent on their habitual contexts, hence weightier in their impact (like the words in the limited vocabulary of the Bible). It is not the range of denotations that the languages covers but the emotive snd semantic direcctions of the hearer's empathy. In this mode of discourse, the overt clash, ironic or clever, between words of different stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact and delight.

Quoted by Harold Bloom in his review of Max Weinreich, Hitory of the Yiddish Language, a steal from Yale UP at $300. He's quoting Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (1990). See "The Glories of Yiddish," New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2008 (I am gleaning the old newspapers).

Yiddish for Bankruptcy Lawyers

(Cross-posted from CreditSlips)

In a previous post I discussed "blivik" which I understood, perhaps erroneously, to be Yiddish. The discussion triggered memories of all sorts of specialized argot I got familiar with only in the bankruptcy court. Yiddish words or phrases were still fairly common around there when I showed up in the 70s. I was a latecomer: I didn't grow up with this stuff and I found it highly entertaining to try to learn to deal with it. Some of it was hardly specific to bankruptcy, and some barely even Yiddish any more: schmuck, for example, is more or less universal (but what of "guarantor"= "schmuck with a fountain pen"--?). Schnorrer and gonif may not be universal, but we wouldn't want to claim them. And what of

Rachmunis, as in "writ of rachmunis," as in "judge, we got nothin', and we are throwing ourselves on your mercy."

Schmatta, rag, as in "the schmatta business," aka "the rag trade," textiles--the industry in which (in the lower east side of Manhattan) so much of old Chapter XI was crafted (aka, perhaps, The Pajama Game?).

Schlepperman, for the hewer of wood or drawer of water who did the hard work while somebody else got the big bucks, as in "we sent our schlepperman over to clean out the warehouse." Not a made guy, only a connected guy (yeh, sorry, wrong argot).

Chazeri, as in one of the things that drove me out of law practice back to teaching--all that stuff on my desk that I never seemed to get to the bottom of, all those phone messages, all those screwed-up orders, all those headaches, all those--oy, I'm thinking of them all over again.

Are there other candidates?