Comments on: Jew & A – Yiddish

By: JF

JF — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:41:40 +0000

well said, editor.

By: Becca

Becca — Mon, 05 May 2008 04:55:17 +0000

[edited to keep Becca from having to transcribe a whole long letter at 1am]

Dated 1906

Dear Editor,

I am a girl from Galicia and in the shop where I work I sit near a Russian Jew with whom I was always on good terms. Why should one worker resent another?

But once, in a short debate, he stated that all Galicians were no good. When I asked him to repeat it, he answered that he wouldn’t retract a word, and that he wished all Galician Jews dead.

Dear editor, does he really have the right to say this? As a reader of your worthy newspaper, I hope you will print my letter and give your opinion.

With thanks in advance,
B.M.

Answer:

The Galician Jews are just as good and bad as people from other lands. If the Galicians must be ashamed of the foolish and evil ones among them, then the Russians, too, must hide their heads in shame because among them there is such an idiot as the acquaintance of our letter writer.

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:58:22 +0000

Nu? How did the Esteemed Editor answer?

By: Becca

Becca — Sun, 04 May 2008 00:10:49 +0000

Julia, you’re welcome! My Yiddish is too poor to know how to answer you in kind. But yes, I love the photos of old street signs from the Lower East Side with all the Yiddish. It takes a lot of letters to make Yiddish words versus Hebrew which says things in much shorter ways.

Alex, this was one of the themes of a Bintel Brief. “I overheard some Russian Jews saying Galicians were worthless… esteemed editor, do you agree?”

Irish & Sarpon, I also loved AoaKF! I always wanted to dye my dress in tea and see how it came out…

By: sarpon

sarpon — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:12:42 +0000

Another All-of-a-Kind Family fan! We should have a sign, like a secret handshake, but I don’t know how well that would work on the internets. Maybe we should sign every post with “I’m a friend of Henny” or “Don’t lose your library books!”

This is my unresearched, off the cuff opinion, but I think Yiddish is the language the bound the Jews together before the creation of Israel after WWII. European Jews didn’t converse in Hebrew. My mother’s mother emigrated to the US from Russia when she 16 and of course she spoke Russian, but her every day language was Yiddish. She got along fine in Brooklyn because the Jews in her neighborhood in in the early 1900’s had come from Russia, Germany, Poland, Austria, etc., but all spoke Yiddish. English was her third language and she never mastered it because she never had to.

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 03 May 2008 04:44:35 +0000

Ah, Irish, that’s a little like the excuse I use for my poor spoken French. My first French teacher, Mme. Gonzales, had come to this country to get away from Castro. My second French teacher, Mme. Rogers, was from Tennessee. During her class I always wondered, maybe this is what French sounds like in the South of France? But I don’t think it was.

By: Irishcardinal

Irishcardinal — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:19:33 +0000

I get it too, Alex. One of Russian my co-workers always made fun of our student assistant when he tried to speak Russian to her. She said he spoke with a Ukrainian accent [big rivals in East Slavic-dom], though he was Scottish-American. He learned from a Ukrainian-born language teacher.
Fascinating answer, Becca. Thanks for your in-depth research. Most of my knowledge of NYC comes from watching 1930s movies and reading All of a Kind Family books. I’m just a little behind the times.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:56:51 +0000

Well done, Becca! That was a really great answer.

As to dialects, I suspect it is somewhat as Irish describes: the difference between Brooklyn English and New Orleans English, or Brooklyn English and Australian English. I had a neighbor once who wanted to please her elderly mother, who had come from Germany (maybe?) as a girl, so my neighbor went to take a Yiddish class at the Jewish Community Center. After some time, my neighbor went to visit her mother in the home and spoke to her in Yiddish. The mother snapped back, disdainfully, “Stop that! You sound like a Galitz!” (“Galitz,” short for Galitzianer–a Jew from Galicia, a little area in eastern-central Europe that sometimes was in Ukraine, sometimes in Poland…it all kind of depended on whose army was strongest at the time.)

Becca probably gets the humor. Apologies to everyone else.

By: Julia

Julia — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:36:26 +0000

Interesting! It had never occurred to me before that Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters, I suppose because I see words transliterated (?) so often.

!אַ שיינעם דאַנק