A vocabulary bereft of schmooze, schlep, shtick, klutz, spiel, maven or glitch would be much the poorer
Happy Hanukah! Or should that be Chanukah? Chastened by misspelling cwtch in a previous post, I double-checked every Yiddish word – and opened a can of worms. Guardian Style prefers the former (although the latter occasionally sneaks past), the Oxford Style Manual opts for Hanukkah, with Chanukkah as “a scholarly and US variant”, while Collins agrees on Hanukkah, but lists Chanukah as its variant.
It got worse when I followed a friend’s advice to check her transliteration of “chap me nisht un chanick“, an expression used in her family to indicate surprise and which she translated as “hit me over the head with a teapot”. Google quickly corrected chanick (teapot) to chainik – although Yivo, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, prefers the spelling tshaynik – but the closest I found to her phrase was “hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik” – literally “don’t knock me a teakettle” or, more usefully, stop bothering me.
I’m thankful, though, that I’m writing rather than talking about Yiddish after Jason Solomons asked in his Sounds Jewish podcast: “Why is that our non-Jewish friends try to co-opt our Yiddishisms? And why is it that when they do, they mispronounce – or in the worst case misuse – those precious words? Are they all schmendricks?” Which made me feel even more embarrassed that I’d been piling apple-sauce on latkes at my neighbours’ Chanukah (sic) parties for several years before I saw the episode of Friends where Ross attempts to interest his son in Hanukah and made the connection.
However, to answer what I hope was a tongue-in-cheek question, I’d suggest we co-opt Yiddishisms because they’re so useful. Can you imagine your vocabulary bereft of schmooze, schlep, shtick, klutz or spiel? Or how you’d cope without maven or glitch? I agree alternatives exist (although right now I’m struggling to think of one for schmooze), but they wouldn’t feel as right. And that brings me to my second point, that it’s Yiddish’s expressiveness, its compression of complex ideas into such succinct and satisfying sounds (even when we mispronounce them) that makes it irresistible.
I realise that in English we usually use schlep as an intransitive verb (dragging ourselves) rather than the transitive original (dragging an object). And that whereas we use chutzpah admiringly, for Yiddish speakers it’s more negative – the usual example is “a man who kills his parents then throws himself on the mercy of the courts as an orphan”. But all living languages evolve and, as the theory of hybridity argues, no meeting of cultures is one-way.
It would have been strange if neighbours living cheek by jowl, whether in the UK or the US, hadn’t shared – and influenced – one another’s words. And stranger still if the words hadn’t spread, particularly given Yiddish’s strong tradition in entertainment: from the vaudeville artist Jimmy “Schnozzola” Durante (a perfect example of hybridity in action) and the schmaltz of Hollywood, through to plays such as Steven Berkoff’s Kvetch and the use of schnorrer in The Sopranos. In the same Sounds Jewish podcast, Tanya Gold suggests Lord Sugar is responsible for Yiddish entering the vernacular, doing “what Topol could never do, and making Yiddish sexy”. But, while I’d have wagered good gelt that Topol was responsible for the entry of mazel tov, we’re both a long way out. It’s first recorded in English in 1862 and, even earlier, Dickens is said to have come up with the name Fagin by rearranging gonef (or ganef/ganif), the Yiddish for thief.
In his fabulous BBC Radio 4 documentary My Yiddisher Mother Tongue, the actor and writer David Schneider took his mother to visit the former Grand Palais Yiddish theatre in the East End of London, where his grandmother had acted and his grandfather had written plays – now a shop without a trace of the theatre remaining. He described the experience as surprisingly moving: “Where is Yiddish now, beyond the religious? It doesn’t really exist any more. It’s full of metaphors in there of it’s just been plastered over.”
Co-option, then, has at least helped some fragments to survive. Fragments that, like potsherds in a museum, can still suggest the beauty of the whole. So, to end with a celebration of hybridity, of its power to foster joy and creativity as well as sadness and loss, here’s a brief history of Bei Mir Bistu Shein, which in 1937 earned the Andrews Sisters the first gold record for a female vocal group. Originally written for a Yiddish comedy, it was given English lyrics and swing rhythms by Sammy Cahn after he heard it performed – in Yiddish – by an African American act, and there’s a recent version by the Yiddish Twist Orchestra, whose sound is described as a mix of classic Yiddish songs, West Indian calypso and English beat rhythms. Yiddish: co-option truly is the sincerest form of flattery. It means we think you’re really swell.
Twitter: @LaSoeur_Lumiere
via Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/dec/07/hanukah-chanukah-chutzpah-embrace-yiddish
