
My Mother's Yiddish - drjohnson
https://theamericanscholar.org/my-mothers-yiddish
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woodpanel
_Yiddish was largely derived from Middle High German, and the irony of ironies
is that the language that united Jews is so close to the language of Hitler._

Rest assured that the irony is on hitler too: in many polish towns the only
thing remaining that remenbers one that this was Germany once are the
inscriptions at yewish cemetries.

Just imagine that the holocaust Never happened: German would be much closer of
what the Nazis thought it should be, a world-wide spoken language.

Bloomberg didn't study Physics because you had to know German for that.
Accadamia abandoned German. As did most of german-americans.

Yiddish was the defacto language of many Zionist settlers. Israel speaking
German, unimaginable today but a Real concern for zionist theorists that
complained about too few people adopting hebrew.

~~~
x5n1
Made me sad... apparently a good 1/3 of Americans spoke German before WWI,
after which anti-German hysteria caused a decline in German speakers in
America. So it was not only the Nazis that were responsible for German's
decline.

~~~
shas3
Take heart, German descent folks are a silent minority (46 million) that have
done very well for themselves.

[http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21642222-america...](http://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21642222-americas-largest-ethnic-group-has-assimilated-so-well-people-
barely-notice-it)

~~~
cafard
They aren't all that silent, but the noise they make is in English...

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jeffwass
Having grown up with a small sprinkling of Yiddish words in my parents'
vocabulary, I agree with Sasha Baron Cohen's character in The Dictator, where
he says "I like Yiddish, the words sound like what they mean". I actually made
this same comment to my Dad 15 years ago, and he told me it only seems that
way since my brain learned the words in context.

My grandfather grew up in Brooklyn with Yiddish as his primary language. On
his first day of Kindergarten, probably 90 years ago, the teacher held up a
fork and asked the class what it was called. He answered "Gopel".

On his first date with my grandmother, he wanted to take her to the Yiddish
theatre in NYC. But my grandmother refused, not being proficient enough. Today
the idea of live vaudeville Yiddish theatre in the USA is almost unfathomable.

And some of this Yiddish is still getting thru to my kids. Eg, they'll say
they bumped their keppe (head, pronounced 'keppy'). I've always liked the
sound of that. My wife even heard our Italian baby sitter here in London, at
the playground babysitting another child, say in Italian accent "aww did you
bump your keppe?"

My favourite Yiddish quote : "A pish on a fartz iz vi a regn on a duner".
Translation : To pee without farting is like rain without thunder.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> "A pish on a fartz iz vi a regn on a duner". Translation : To pee without
> farting is like rain without thunder.

Is that phonetic? You write "on a" twice, but I'm thinking of the German word
"ohne", meaning "without". But then I know little German and even less
Yiddish.

~~~
taejo
"a" is an article in Yiddish (like English); אָן (on) is indeed the word for
"without" (of course it's related to German "ohne").

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azernik
> To be a mensch was the pinnacle of her moral code, and it didn’t matter that
> it meant “man.” Women could be mensches, too...

Nitpick: "Mensch" is actually gender-neutral (in Standard German it just means
"person" or "human being", not "man" (which is "Mann").

~~~
slipjack
In Yiddish (at least as spoken to me), it often has a masculine connotation.

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kramarao
There are couple of books by Leo Rosten, Joy of Yiddish and Joy of Yinglish,
that teaches Yiddish words through jokes and anecdotes. It used be my bedside
reading for an year! Once you learn Yiddish words and the phrases, the sitcom
dialogues started making more sense (like "from your lips to God's ears" or
such turn of phrase).

~~~
panglott
Michael Chabon's essay "A Yiddish Pale Fire", which discusses his encounter
with a Yiddish travel guidebook that eventually inspired "The Yiddish
Policeman's Union", is a great read too, if you can track it down. Looks like
it's disappeared from the Web.

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jstoiko
On a related note, there is highly educative book on Yiddish called: "If You
Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It In Yiddish" by L.B. Epstein [1].

Yiddish curses put any other language's curses to shame. They use a lot of
very well thought analogies. They also sometimes revive a bit of the (lost)
history of the Jewish people pre-wwII.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Anything-Nice-
Yiddish/dp/0806...](http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Anything-Nice-
Yiddish/dp/0806527315)

