[Mendele] Mendele Vol. 23.003

Victor Bers victor.bers at yale.edu
Wed Jun 19 15:05:28 EDT 2013


Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
____________________________________________________

Contents of Vol. 23.003
June 16, 2013

1) Dona Dona (Stanley F Levine)
2) Dona Dona (Sandor Schuman)
3) Vi halt men shoyn bay zey? (Stanley F Levine)
4) kiemizm (Suzanne Faigan)
5) IB Singer's Nobel Prize address (Kalman Weiser)
6) Avrom Karpinovitch's Vilna stories (Helen Mintz)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: May 16
Subject: Dona Dona

For the most part, the translation reads nicely in English, but it
sometimes misses the
point of the Yiddish.  For example, the second strophe -

Turn toward the west, turn toward the east,
And the rest - turn toward the south,

- mistakes the number three "dray" for the verb "drey."  Even without the
pasekh to help,
the latter is impossible for a few reasons:

-- since the narrator is speaking to more than one bird, the verb "drey"
would have to be
plural imperative: "dreyt" (with a final t).

-- to be consistent, the translation is forced to insert the verb "turn" in
the second line,
with no equivalent in the Yiddish original.

-- if the tree is abandoned, as the following line tells us, the birds did
not "turn," they
flew away.

-- To make the imperative "drey" coherent, the third line would have to be
another
imperative, or a future, not past.

-- if the translation's understanding of this third line as "the tree is
left alone" were
correct, the Yiddish would have read "der boym" not "dem boym."

un azoy vayter....

Stanley F Levine

2)----------------------------------------------------
Subject: Dona Dona
Date: May 15

Wikipedia has a useful entry on this song:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Donna

Sandor Schuman

3)----------------------------------------------------
Subject: Vi halt men shoyn bay zey
Date: May 16

I had always understood this line as meaning, how are things (progressing)
with respect
to them (the other, yet-to-be-married-off daughters).  If this is a
misunderstanding, can
someone explain to me why?

Stanley F Levine

4)----------------------------------------------------
Subject: kiemizm
Date: May 15

Hello, I wonder what you might understand by the term "kiumizm" which I
have found,
in a list of other -isms (Yiddishism, Hebraism, culturism) in a
Yiddish-language feature
article from 1968. Thanks in advance for any comments,

Suzanne Faigan

5)----------------------------------------------------
Date: 15 June
Subject: IB Singer's Nobel Prize address

Can anyone tell me where to find the text of the Yiddish version of IB
Singer's speech
upon winning the Nobel Prize? He can be heard giving the speech on Youtube
but I
cannot locate the actual text.

Kalman Weiser

6)----------------------------------------------------
Date: May 28
Subject: Avrom Karpinovitch's Vilna stories

Sholem aleykhem:

I am preparing a collection of translations of Avrom Karpinovitch's Vilna
stories. I would
appreciate help with the following:

1. Translation help:

 In the story "Vladek" (*Baym Vilner Durkhhoyf)*, Karpinovitch writes:

"der lerer gershovits, vos mir hobn im gerufn katzefay mit di beblekh, hot
farshtanen mit vemen er geyt tsum tish. . . "

Does anyone have any suggestions for the translation of katzefay (or
possibly katzefey or
katzepey) mit di beblekh? There's really no other information in the story
about
Gershovits to help contextualize what this might mean.

- Eliezer Niborski suggested it may be related to

(kutzefayke): jacket; short pelisse; quilted jacket/coat;*iron.
* old-fashioned outfit.

And Solon Beinfeld weighed in with the following:

"Dear Helen: Harry (Bochner) is checking with a Slavicist he knows to see
if "katsap"
with various endings is a common slang term.  In Yiddish its as far as I
know just a
derogatory term for an ethnic Russian (as opposed to aPole, Ukrainian,
etc.) in an area of
mixed population.  It doesn't have the feel of "upper crust" to me.  As for
"beblekh,"
 in Russian "bobyl" can mean a lonely old bachelor, seemingly derived from
"bob"
(bean).  Beans certainly are not an dish favored by Russians if they can
help it. In
Russian to get beans for your efforts is to get nothing.  Well, there is no
end to
conjectures, but if you go with katsap and beans, the students would seem
to be mocking
Gershovitsh as being like a poor Russian peasant.
I am not familiar with the story, so I don't know what characteristics
Gershovitsh had that
students would pick on. Solon"

Other suggestions out there?

II. Glossary help:

The manuscript includes a glossary giving background information about
items that
appear in the stories. Do you have information on the following?

1) Lerer Gershovits: a teacher at the Tores Emes school in Vilna during the
interwar period. [from the story "Vladek" (*Baym Vilner Durkhhoyf*)]

2) Lerer Eyzikov (or Ayzikov):  a teacher and the principal at the Tores
Emes School in
Vilna during the interwar period. According to the story, "Valdek," he
committed suicide
in the Vilna ghetto.

3) Kahne-Bashke Funk: also a teacher at the Tores Emes school In Vilna. A
daughter of
the Funk family who owned a bookstore.

4) Does anyone have any information on Khayim Gordon?

To date I've been able to find the following:

Khayim Gordon: Khayim-Meyer Gordon, the shames of the Great Synagogue is
described in "The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania" in the entry
July 4, 1941 as "a
big, tall Jew with a white beard" (Kruk 2002).

5) Siomke Kagan, reporter for the Vilner Tog during the interwar period.

Any information about him would be helpful. I'd particularly like the dates
of his birth
and death.

According to Liba Augenfeld, a native of Vilna, Kagan was a poet and a real
character.
He lived with the gypsies, learned their language, and translated some of
their songs into
Yiddish.

9) Date of birth and place and date of death and any other information on
Feyvush Krasni
(Krasny), the director of the Mefitse Haskole Library from 1918 until the
Nazi invasion.

Any information about him would be helpful. I'd particularly like the dates
of his birth
and death.

7) Khaykl Lunski , librarian at Strashun Library.

Does anyone know the year of his death?

According to Shavit, (Shavit, David. 1997. *Hunger for the Printed Word:
Books and
Libraries in the Jewish Ghettos of Nazi-Occupied Europe*. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland &
Co.), Lunski was murdered by the Nazis at Treblinka.

8) Does anyone know whether any of the interwar Vilna publishing houses
published
serialized shund novels? Which publishing houses? When Tall Tamara (Vilna
Mayn
Vilne. Tel Aviv: I.L. Peretz Publishing House, 1993.) moves out of the
whorehouse she
takes with her ale forzetzungn fun dem roman, Regine di Shpionke vos zi
flegt koyfn
yedn fraytik. Presumably this was a shund novel.

9) Date of death of Stan Bronetsky (b 1894). He was an actor, first in the
Polish theatre
and then in the Yiddish theatre in interwar Poland.  He married the actress
Dina Halperin.
They moved to New York in 1938, where he met with failure in the theatrical
world.
There is an entry on him in Der Leksikon fun Yidishn Teyater, vol 6 (1969).

10) Date of death of Leyb Shriftzetser.  He was an interwar Yiddish actor,
known for his
declematie of the works of various Yiddish writers. He was murdered at
Ponar.

There is an entry on him in Der Leksikon fun Yidishn Teyater, vol 5 (1967)
as  well as in
the first volume of Farloshene Shtern  by Yanosh Turkov (Tsentrale-Farlag
fun Poylishe
Yidn in Argentina, 1953.)

11) Does anyone have a record of publication of Karpinovitch's biography of
Branislav
Huberman, written in Hebrew and also released in Spanish (according to the
Leksikon
fun der Nayer Yidishn Literature)?

Helen Mintz

______________________________________________________
End of Mendele Vol. 23.003

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