Let's Hear Only Good News

The Mendele Review: Yiddish Literature and Language. 
http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/ 14 January 2004 Yoysef Guri, _Lomir hern gute psures; yidishe brokhes un kloles_. Yerusholaim: Hebreisher Universitet, 2004.

This latest of Yosef Guri's specialized four-language lexicons is no less usefully and attractively compiled than its predecessors (see TMR 3.017 and 6.006), making it accessible to laymen and scholars alike. The profusion of indexes makes it a research tool; its subject matter and illustrations make it a fun -- but not only a fun --book.

HAARETZ, English Edition 23.4.2004, May a Cossack thug cross your path' , By Michal Zamir
Every attempt at preserving the vivaciousness and culture of the Yiddish language - which is in a pitiable state with its natural speakers dwindling in number, and is crawling on its belly down the corridors of academia, desperately eager to establish itself as a legitimate area of research alongside Assyrian and ancient Babylonian - cannot but engender warm feelings. The volume in question is an impressive compendium of 199 blessings and 666 folk curses in Yiddish that has been compiled, and translated into Hebrew, English and Russian, by Yosef Guri. He has also added a clear introduction on the blessing and the curse, and their status in the Yiddish language, as well as indexes to words and subjects and lists of parallel expressions in the three aforementioned languages. Although we have gathered here on the occasion of the publication of a new lexicon that deals with blessings and curses, the more we read, the more it seems as though we are paging through a rich, polyphonic social novel, which by bringing alive the speech slowly creates a lively and lost world of beliefs and opinions, rituals and everyday life - everything, from routine phrases, banal greetings and curses that are silently muttered through the teeth, to sayings reaching the heights of Job-like tortures that only the bitterest imagination could conceive.The selection includes standard greetings and blessings - like "Ir zolt im migdal zeyn letoyre, lekhuppe ulemassim toyvim," meaning, "May you bring him up to observe the Torah, to be married under the huppah , and to perform good deeds," which in effect definitively and hermetically organizes in its smothering embrace the entire lifetime of a helpless infant on the day of his circumcision - as well as sophisticated formulations like: "Ikh vintsh dir Davids futterl, Yehudes taus un Boazes shrek," meaning: "I hope you may have King David's fur coat, Judah's error and Boaz's shock."To understanding the full significance of this baffling wish, we have to bridge the distance that has gaped between us and the sources that fed the consciousness of the citizens of that world, and which allowed expression through humor, doubts and the travails of the present as well. Here, Guri helps us out with his explanations: The little fur coat refers to Abishag, the beautiful young maiden who warmed King David in his later years; Judah's error was impregnating his daughter-in-law Tamar when she disguised herself as prostitute; and Boaz's shock was when he found Ruth lying at his feet during the night. Indeed, mistakes sweeter than wine. The second part of the dictionary deals with curses, which constitute the bulk of the contents, and draws back that same curtain that conceals the wealth of stunning contradictions in this Eastern European world. The selection ranges from the dubious blessing "A bagegnish zolstu hobn mit a kozack" - that is, "May a Cossack thug cross your path," which harnesses the ancient decree of anti-Semitism to the narrow realm of personal benefit - to the extremely vengeful use of all the plagues of Egypt and to exegetical formulations, like "Homans gedduleh un koirekhs nes zol dikh treffen," which means, "May you have Haman's glory and Korach's miracle." Here, too, it is clear that only a profound familiarity with the precise nature of Haman's greatness and the miracle that was done to Korach permit the appreciation of the plasticity and the irony of linking together the imposter and the fervent blessing.It should be noted that the majority of the curses have to do with the human body and upon reading them, a kind of catalog emerges of the potential tortures inherent in it in their most tantalizing form - that is, the description of great happiness that the person who is cursed cannot, by reason of his personal situation, enjoy under any circumstances. Thus, there is the wish that, "hundert heyzer zolstu hobn, in yedder hoyz hundert tsimmern, in yedder tsimmer un tzvanzig betten, un kadokhes zol dich varfen fun ein bett in der tzveiter," i.e., "May you own 100 houses with 100 rooms in each house and 20 beds in each room, and may fever toss you from bed to bed."And just as they brought the cursed person to the heights of happiness only to make him suffer from a fever (which is almost a synonym for any disaster), they also wished: "Heng dikh oyf oyf a tsukershtrikl, vestu hobn a zisn toyt" - which means: "Hang yourself on a sugared rope and you will have a sweet death." All at once it becomes clear that death itself is not enough: A double, sugared death is needed. But I did find one small and symptomatic flaw in this collection, which can very much detract from the pleasure of reading it: the illustrations. Because we are dealing with Yiddish, and in Yiddish every day is Purim, the illustrators entirely relinquish the elucidative value of a dictionary illustration in favor of getting a laugh at any price. It's a horror show of overbearing and anachronistic humor of the sort reserved for the producers of witticisms - the constant companions of the dying language, who draw their justification from the ancient observation that "in Yiddish, it sounds better."I can nearly take pity on these illustrators, which determinedly grasp at their rakes and labor mightily to tickle the reader's armpits, and I even wonder to myself whether it was the effort that drove them over the edge. But even the enlistment of all my Jewish mercifulness does not leave me feeling equable in face of the illustration of the blessing "Hallevai oyf mir kotsh helft," which means, as is written in the book: "Half your luck!" What in the world does Lenin pensively patting his bald head while gazing longingly at the plentiful mane of his rabbi and teacher, Karl Marx, have to do with this everyday Jewish saying? Why drag this convoluted and ridiculous agenda into our realms? Lenin, incidentally, stars in a number of the illustrations alongside Moshe Dayan, the man and his eye patch, who stands on one leg in a kind of ballet pose for purposes of illustrating the folk curse, "Ikh zol dikh zehen oyf eyn fuss, un du mich - mit ein oig," which means, "I hope to see you on one leg - and may you see me with one eye." A time tunnel indeed, not to say a stupid joke.It seems to me that the height of their artistic crystallization is achieved by the illustrators in the choice of their realization of the curse, "Kush a ber untern fartekh," which is to say, "Kiss a bear under his apron." Whatever the meaning of this curse, it is something that does not require an illustration and certainly not one of a young man in his wedding clothes kneeling before the hairy claws of a captivating and pretty female bear in an apron, sticking his head under the apron with only the soft folds of cloth separating us from the scandal. Yet, nevertheless, the experience of reading this book is extremely amusing, even if now and then one wonders what was on the minds of this pair of sweeping illustrators, or why, for example, the blessing "Mir zol zein far dir" was translated into English as "I will carry the ball for you" and not as, "May your troubles descend upon me instead." Nu, may these be the worst of our problems.Michal Zamir's book, "Twelve Meetings," was published by Katom Press.

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