Something for Every Palate
(Jan
/ Feb 2006)
Books discussed in this review:
Wex, Michael. Born to Kvetch.. New York: St. Martins, 2005.
Schaechter, Mordkhe. Di geviksn-velt in yidish., New York: YIVO, 2005.
(Available from www.yivo.org)
Jacobs, Neil. Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction. . New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Margolin, Anna. Drunk From the Bitter Truth. . Trans. Shirley Kumove.
New York: SUNY Press, 2005.
Proletpen. Trans. Amelia Glaser. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2005.
Bergelson, Dovid. Shadows of Berlin. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. San Francisco:
City Lights, 2005.
Estraikh, Gennady. In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance With Communism.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005.
Shandler, Jeffrey. Adventures in Yiddishland. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005.
Schwarz, Jan. Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
Rey, H.A. Dzhorzh der Naygeriker. Trans. Sholem Berger. New York: 24th
Street Books, 2005. (Available from www.yiddishcat.com)
Early Yiddish Texts, 1100-1750. Ed. Jerold Frakes. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
Baumgarten, Jean. Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature. Trans. Jerold
Frakes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
and the blog: inmolaraan.blogspot.com
(Where not otherwise noted, books are available through Amazon or at your local bookseller.)
If Yiddish had vintages, 2005 would be considered balanced, earthy, and
mellow, with a clean finish.
Whether we're talking translations, linguistics, literary criticism, or culture and folklore, the year brought long-awaited books to completion, filling lacunae which have long been bemoaned by practitioners in the field.
By far the most high-profile Yiddish-related book last year was Born to Kvetch, written by Toronto's own Michael Wex. Wex is adored in the Yiddish world for his so-called "classes" (actually more like extended stream-of-consciousness riffs) at KlezKamp, Klez Canada, Ashkenaz, and other cultural venues. Wex's popularity is partly due to his ability to explain Yiddish language and its sociological framework via mainstream popular culture (he invokes Courtney Love to explain the nuances of the term klipe ) and partly because he's just so funny.
He's also, it should be noted, impressively knowledgeable about language,
perhaps even a genius. I believe that several of the etymologies he presents
are original contributions to linguistic knowledge. It must be said that
most of these occur in the chapter called "Too Good for the Goyim,"
which is all about sex. On a certain page (252, to be exact), he calmly
detours from a litany of fabulously obscene metaphors to examine etymology,
neatly demolishing the received wisdom by explaining why "schmuck"
has nothing to do with the similar-sounding German word for "jewellery"
and "putz" is in no way related to the German "to polish."
And while we're on the topic of demolishing previously-held convictions,
let's discuss plant names. If you, like me, thought Yiddish poor in vocabulary
for nature, think again. Mordkhe Schaechter, the world's leading Yiddish
linguist, has specialized for some years in collecting detailed vocabulary
from European-born speakers. The resulting card file (I am told it really
is on index cards in an old wooden card file in the Bronx) has yielded
several subject-specific dictionaries, all of them rich in localisms and
dialect variations. 2005 saw the completion of Plant Names in Yiddish/Di
geviksn velt in yidish. Forget the bulbe-kartofl debate: Schaechter identifies
eleven other words for "potato" that have long since been forgotten
on this side of the world. And while North American Jews usually call
sorrel "schav" (from the Yiddish shtshav), it turns out there
are fifteen other words for "rather bitter green leafy thing."
If you want an excuse to use some of them, see the recipes on Eve Jochnowitz's
bilingual food-related blog, inmolaraan.blogspot.com, another entry in
2005's Yiddish publishing, albeit digital. (The name of it means "down
the hatch"). Jochnowitz is a culinary ethnographer studying at NYU,
and it's hard to tell which she loves better, food or Yiddish. Her observations
of them, together and separate, are always lively, engaged, and spot-on.
If, after reading Wex, Schaechter, and Jochnowitz, your desire to be thoroughly linguistically educated and divested of all Yiddish Urban Legends has not been sated, there is still another 2005 book to get you the rest of the way there. Neil Jacobs' admirable Yiddish: A Linguistic Introduction is scholarly and specialized, but clear, careful, and a good read. Unlike a few books we could mention but won't, he isn't promoting any particular hobby-horse. It was something of a relief, part way through reading this book, to realize I did not have to be on my guard for crackpot theories. For some reason, Yiddish has been plagued by scholars and pseudo-scholars whose accumulated outpourings of wisdom finally reached their zenith in a now-defunct web site claiming that Yiddish was descended from Basque. (To be fair, the web site actually claimed that all language was descended from Basque. Yiddish was only one of the more fully-developed examples.) While not nearly as amusing, far more widespread is the belief that Yiddish "has no grammar," an assertion originally put forward by German-speaking snobs but all too readily believed even by Yiddish speakers themselves. If this describes you, do me a favour. Read Jacobs.
Moving away from the linguistic realm, we find 2005 also rich in literary translations and criticism. It's hard to believe the extraordinary poems of Anna Margolin have been so little translated, but for the first time we have a full rendering of her entire poetic output, a bilingual edition called Drunk From the Bitter Truth with translations by another Canadian, Shirley Kumove. This is a must-have item for any serious Yiddish poetry collection. Another great addition to studying the full panoply of Yiddish poetry comes in the form of Proletpen, an anthology of radical left-wing writers. A wonderful feature of this book is translator Amelia Glaser's willingness to tackle extremely hard poems. Playful and punning poems, "shape" poems that require certain line-lengths and layout-these are the hardest things to make live in another language, and all too often translators simply avoid them rather than take the risks involved. Glaser also looked broadly at the writers' bodies of work, not limiting herself to those with overtly political content. While the writers were all left-wing, a love poem generally remains a love poem, and the writers are people, not ideology. At over 400 pages, Proletpen is like eating a big, satisfying meal.
For those on a restricted literature diet, there's the slim volume of Dovid Bergelson's modernist short stories, Shadows of Berlin. Several of these stories appear for the first time in English, and Bergelson is such a fascinating writer that you find yourself wishing you knew something about him-and when you do, you can pick up Gennady Estraikh's masterful In Harness: Yiddish Writers' Romance With Communism, in which Bergelson plays a major role. The book examines Yiddish writers in the 20 years after the Bolshevik revolution, both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Estraikh is a refreshingly nuanced and subtle writer on Soviet Yiddish and its political meanings. Somewhere between literature and history we find Jan Schwarz's Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers. Schwarz focuses on canonical writers in this first effort to comprehensively understand the role of fictionalized memoirs in the shaping of Yiddish literature. The book came out too late in 2005 for me to have yet gotten my hands on it, so I can't report how well Schwarz serves the topic.
In the social sciences-where I suppose Jochnowitz's food blog should have been too, only the tie-in with Schaechter's sixteen words for schav was too tempting-is Jeffrey Shandler's Adventures in Yiddishland. He isn't kidding either. Shandler has a lively and capacious intellect, and has spent more than 20 years investigating what Yiddish means to different people in the contemporary world. He doesn't discriminate: he is willing to pick apart the motivations and feelings of the super-frum and the avant garde alike. It is not necessarily a comfortable read for those of us who find ourselves under the microscope, but it is thought-provoking and, with a Ben Katchor cover illustration, as hip as Yiddish gets.
And if all these are too heavy for your taste, here's a light alternative: Sholem Berger, who brought you Di Kats Der Payats (The Cat in the Hat ) two years ago, has now produced Dzhordzh der Naygeriker (Curious George ). Like the earlier volume, it is a charming, lively translation and a great idea: a classic, enduringly popular children's book, suitable for all denominations of Judaism. In the canniest Yiddish marketing since the self-centred and ruthless I.B. Singer bamboozled the English press with his gentle-Old World-vegetarian routine, both the Kats and Dzhordzh have arrived in the same year as mainstream movie adaptations. Can you ask for anything more to get the kids interested in Yiddish? Like the Kats, too, Dzhordzh is fully annotated to help the grownups pronounce the words right, and is beautifully produced.
But if, on the other hand, you weren't looking for laughs but something even more esoteric, there's Jerold Frakes' compilation Early Yiddish Texts, 1100-1750, a useful volume that not only makes these very rare texts available, but contextualizes them with impeccable research. Frakes translated Jean Baumgarten's extensive French-language study on the same topic, appearing this year as Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature as a kind of companion volume to his own. It's worth noting that a great deal of original scholarship on Yiddish emanating from both Quebec and France never seems to get translated into English. (The only extensive work I know of on the extraordinary poet Aaron Zeitlin is in French, for example.) This isn't such a hardship for Canadians, who are pretty used to dusting off their high school French when it's called for. But the look on the faces of students in American Yiddish programs-many of whom have already spent summers in intensive German, Russian or Hebrew programs, as a complement to their Yiddish studies-can be quite comical.
Myself, having drunk of these incredible riches all year-I am feeling
as satisfied as a Yiddish addict can. The only thing that bothers me is
not knowing what kind of year 2006 will be. Of course, I've still got
Schwarz to tide me over, and luckily, the new corrected English version
of Max Weinreich's classic History of the Yiddish Language is expected
out from Yale in 2006. At almost 1,000 pages, it can take up any slack.