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Dress British Drink Yiddish: Manischewitz

A wine spritzer made with Manischewitz kosher wine

It is time for us to tackle the complicated legacy that is Manischewitz brand kosher wine, because, honestly, I don't think it is possible to stock a Jewish bar without having the stuff on hand. For many American Jews, who drank the inexpensive, Concord grape-based drink furtively at bar and bat mitzvah, this is a drink we associate with synagogues, thrift, and wine headaches. Me recommending it for Jewish bars is not that far removed from the fact that hipster bars made a point to carry Pabst Blue Ribbon, and it has the same appeal of being déclassé, kitchy, and cheap.

But I'm not here to suggest Manischewitz as the wine-of-choice for the ironic Jew. I have another suggestion for that, which I shall write about later, and that's Mogen David and its even-less-reputable relative Mad Dog 20/20.

No, I am not here to suggest Manischewitz as an ironic Jewish wine, but an iconic one. It's got a few things going for it. Firstly, it's old, coming from a company that started in 1888 producing matzo. Secondly, it's about as authentically Jewish as anything produced in America, having been started by a rabbi named Dov Behr Manischewitz , whose name actually was Abrahamson until he escaped Russia using a dead man's passport. Thirdly, the wine's roots are in Brooklyn, as it was originally produced by the Industry City-based Monarch Wine Company. Finally, while its sweetness may put of many wine connoisseurs, it's the result of an approach to wine-making that we now consider an asset: using local sourced grapes. The grape used for Concord wines, in this case Vitis labrusca, is native to North America and grows in upstate New York. The grape is sour and musty, and so sweeteners are added -- typically corn syrup, but the company makes a Passover version that uses the now-trendy cane sugar.

It should be noted that sweet wines are frowned on specifically because they are associated with the drinking habits of the urban poor, which is, to put it mildly, problematic. Sweet wines, for example, are popular among many African Americans -- as an example there is Moscato, a sweet white that has enough of a cache to be the subject of NPR's Code Switching podcast. And, not incidentally, one of the first Moscatos to find an audience in black communities was Bartenura, a kosher wine, which I will likely also write about. There are theories floating around that the flavor of Concord wine may already have been familiar to blacks with southern roots, as Baptist churches may have used kosher wine as sacramental wine during the 30s, but wherever the reason, sweet wines have long had a place in the black community.

Bartenura was just following a path already trod by Manischewitz, which started pitching itself to the black community all the way back in the 1950s, and was popular enough that a Doo Wop group, The Crows, released a song celebrating the drink called "Mambo Shevitz." Manischewitz used black artists like the Ink Spots and later Sammy Davis Junior to promote their wine, and all the way up to the 1980s, according to Forbes, the average Manischewitz drinker was urban, working class, and black.

So this is a wine enjoyed by both the Jewish community and the black community, and, with Sammy Davis Jr., both simultaneously, and if such a wine doesn't have a place in a Jewish bar, no drink does.

For those that find the drink's sweetness to be cloying, I have some suggestions. I have used Manischewitz as an ingredient in coolers and spritzers, and it works marvelously in both -- the other ingredients mediate the sweetness without losing the wine's distinctive Concord flavor. I have also mixed Manischewitz with Coca Cola, a combination imported from Spain and called Kalimotxo, and that works nicely as well. Coke's signature flavor comes, in part, from orthophosphoric acid, which goes a long way toward adding tartness to anything sweet. Kalimotxo is sometimes made with additional ingredients, such as anise liqueur or a lime twist, and those are worth experimenting with.

I suspect there are a lot more ways to make use of Manischewitz, and so I'd entourage drinkers to be unafraid in exploring the wine. Think of yourself as a modern Sammy Davis Jr, and, like him, look at the little bottle of sweet wine and say "Yes I can."

Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Marjorie Morningstar (1958)


I'm including the 1958 film "Marjorie Morningstar" in this collection of essays just to be a damn completest, because while the title character does attend a Jewish summer camp in the movie, it's all of about two minutes before she paddles across the river to a Borscht Belt summer resort, meets Gene Kelly, and falls madly in love.

But this is likely the first representation of a Jewish summer camp in film history. I don't know how much more of the camp was represented in the original novel by Herman Wouk -- from what I gather, not much. He provided a much more detailed look at camp life in a novel called "City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder," published in 1948 and detailing a Jewish boy from the Bronx who goes to camp with characters named Yishy Gabelson and Ted Kahn. This was also made into a film, 1951's "Her First Romance," but I won't be covering it because it was so stripped of Jewish content as to be useless. Herbie Bookbinder was not only changed into a non-Jewish girl for the film, she was played by Margaret O'Brien.

"Morningtar's" camp scenes were lensed at an actual upstate New York camp, Camp Cayuga, which is not a Jewish camp. It nonetheless looks like it might be Jewish in the film, as it features a scowling camp director who could be the father of Morty "Mickey" Melnick, the camp director from "Meatballs." But Wouk drew from his own experiences at largely Jewish camps and resorts for this book, including Camp Copake, where he met Elinor Glenn, the Brooklyn-born daughter of a Jewish suffragette and a Jewish union tradesmen who reportedly was the model for  Morningstar.

The film's Morningstar wants to be an actress, and this is why she lands at summer camp, in a position as drama teacher. She is played by Natalie Wood, looking coltish and fragile as usual, and here she is the daughter of upwardly mobile Jews from the Upper West Side. Specifically, her parents are played by Claire Trevor and Everett Sloane, the former doing a credible impression of an oppressive Jewish mother, the latter, well, being Everett Sloane, which is about as Jewish as anyone has ever been on film this side of Fyvush Finkel.

The film doesn't short-change the family's Jewishness either. There is both a bar mitzvah scene, where Marjorie's brother not only accurately chants a haftarah portion but managed to swing it a little, and a Passover scene. (More about that in a moment.) Even if there isn't much Jewish camp in the film, it's nice that there is so much Jewishness, even if about half the cast is not Jewish -- and the Jews they do have are superlative, including Ed Wynn, Martin Balsam, and George Tobias.

Unfortunately, the film loses interest in Marjorie's career as an actress as quickly as he loses interest in her summer camp, which barely even gets named -- it's Camp Tamarack, which we mostly know because the campers and staff all have adorable crew shirts with the name emblazoned on it.

Instead, the film sends Morningstar to the nearby resort, where she meets a deftly drawn but rather depressing type, played by Gene Kelly. He's a struggling songwriter and playwright who manages to be quite a big deal during the summer theatrics at the resort and quite a nobody for the rest of the year. Marjorie falls for him instantly, and the rest of the film is about the emotional labor he demands from her. Marjorie essentially ends up babysitting him as a full-time job, blinded by her affection for him to faults that are obvious to everyone else. He is unstable, unhappy, and unlikely ever to accomplish anything, and he has nothing to offer Marjorie except a romantic fantasy where she is helping a tortured soul.

Kelly plays it pretty straight, and, as a result, is a genuine bummer. His character is also Jewish, but the only way you know it is that he rankles at any mention of his father, a well-respected New York judge, and looks quite bored during Passover, both of which feel like the most authentically Jewish moments in the film.

Marjorie helps Kelly get a musical produced, and, in one of the film's few really sharp comic scenes, we know it's a flop because his friends enthusiastically tell him how great the scenery is. In the end, he just sort of fails his way back to the summer resort, which is where he belongs, and Marjorie ends up with a playwright with real talent who has held a torch for her for years.

I don't know if Marjorie gets back to acting after the final scene -- there is no reason to think she does, and Wouk's original novel ended with her married and settled in as a notably ordinary housewife. It's a shame, too. If the character was based on Wouk's old friend Elinor Glenn, she wound up acting in a troupe that appeared in union halls, which led to her cofounding and leading a women's labor union in Los Angeles. Hers was a notable and decidedly not ordinary story, without the years wasted acting as unpaid emotional support for a talentless hack, and I would sort of like to see that story told.

In the meanwhile, I'd also like to see versions of the Camp Tamarack crew shirts made available for purchase. We don't get much Jewish camping from this film, the least we can get is a stupid t-shirt.

Week 28: Facebook Yiddish


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 196 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 111 hours
I have reviewed 2,662 individual flashcards

After seven months of Yiddish, you find yourself making Yiddish jokes on Facebook.

The context is as follows: I read a story on Facebook about a building in my childhood neighborhood of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, which has a large Orthodox Jewish population. There is a Jewish bookstore there, Elijah's Cup, and a Kosher delicatessen, Prime Deli, and a Christian rock band has placed a billboard above these businesses that read "JESUS," surrounded by stars and spangles and other images of Americana, because that's how we do in America.

I don't know that the Christian rock band knew there were Jews that worked and ate underneath that sign, but, superficially, it seems a bit tone deaf. I also know that St. Louis Park is surrounded by an eruv, the elevated wire that some Orthodox communities use to surround their neighborhood, that allows them to do things that are traditionally forbidden on the Sabbath, such as carry car keys.

So I posted the following on Facebook about the billboard: It's within the eruv, so we can carry is away on shabbos.

And then, underneath it, thinking about what I had just said, I wrote: That's the most Jewish thing I have ever said.

And then it occurred to me that this was a wasted opportunity, so I wrote: I should have said shlep.

And then, what the heck, I rewrote the whole thing in Yiddish, as best I could: Es is in di eruv, mir veln shlepn fun shabbos.

I'm fairly sure that, to a native speaker, that sentence reads like a caveman were attempting Yiddish, but, then, American Jews have a history of finding Yinglish to be funnier than correct Yiddish, and so I can console myself that my bad Yiddish is comedy gold. I mean, I got at least two Facebook likes for all that work, so, in the end, it was all worth it.

In the real world, I find myself just randomly translating stuff into Yiddish all the time, especially when talking to my dog. "Go potty," I will tell him during our morning walks, which mostly consists of him stopping randomly and staring into space like he's trying to remember something very important. When he doesn't listen and doesn't potty, I will say to him "Pish vi a loshek" -- piss like a racehorse.

He doesn't listen to that either, but instead tends to spend a few minutes staring in absolute horror at a deflated Mylar balloon.

I also find myself remembering Yiddish phrases I have memorized, but not at moments when I can use them. You want to have them on hand to use triumphantly at the moment you need them -- for instance, in watching the 1988 Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny Devito comedy "Twins," when the actors, playing unlikely twins, find themselves in conflict, you want to be able to sagely say "A brother turned enemy is an enemy for life," and have everyone nod at this wisdom. It is, however, considerably less useful when you're buying pastries at a donuts shop and the baker has just asked if you'd rather have the cream cheese or apricot filling.

But that's how Yiddish has been for me. First, I don't know it. Then, I know it, but not when I need it. Eventually, I know it when I need it. I've gotten pretty good at complaining that I am tired and it is time to go to bed in Yiddish, and I do so at bedtime. I'm also good at complaining about being hungry at mealtime and complaining about the weather when I am outside, as this week it has been heis, feicht, and shtikidik, none of which is pleasurable and all of which I can remember when I need it, which is during my long bus trip home.

Bus trip? I should have said shlep.

Jewish Summer Camp Movies: Meatballs (1979)


I know that the subject of Jewish camp movies is a little afield from the main theme of this blog. There certainly were summer camps where Yiddish was used, but not so much in the genre of summer camp movies. In fact, there isn't even much Jewish content to most of them, and I must instead go through them with an eye for small but telling details and subtle references, in the way that author Vito Russo teased out gay subtext in classic Hollywood films in his book "Celluloid Closet."

So let's call this a side-mission, if I may use the language of video games. I'm doing it because it is summer, so it's a good time to watch summer camp movies. I'm doing it because I am a product of Jewish summer camps, in my way. I attended a JCC day camp when I was a boy, then a succession of YMCA overnight camps, and then, when I got old enough, returned to Jewish camps as an assistant counselor and eventually songleader. So I am both predisposed to liking summer camp movies and sensitized to Jewish content in them, even when it is well-hidden.

Let's take "Meatballs" as our first example, which is sort of the ur-text of summer camp movies. (Or, I should say, summer camp comedies; there is another genre of summer camp movies that developed at the same time, the summer camp horror film.) "Meatballs" is a minor example of the slobs-versus-snobs style of comedy filmmaking that was then popular, in which rough-but-likable outsiders took on privileged elitists and won. "Meatballs" came directly on the heels of "Animal House" and shared a lot of DNA, including Harold Ramis as a writer and Ivan Reitman, who had produced "Animal House" and directed "Meatballs."

"Meatballs" likewise acted as a showcase for a Saturday Night Live actor -- John Belushi in "Animal House" and Bill Murray in his first starring role here. But there's a reckless meanness to "Animal House" that is absent here, a legacy of the so-called sick humor of National Lampoon Magazine, who produced the earlier film. The heroes of "Animal House" might be slobs, but they are no less privileged than the snobs, and they are especially awful toward women, who are casually used and discarded.

"Meatballs" is a sweeter film, although Bill Murray does have a bullying quality to his flirting that would continue in "Ghostbusters," which was also an Ivan Reitman film. Mostly, "Meatballs" focuses on Murray, as a summer camp's head counselor,  mentoring a shy young camper, played by Chris Makepeace, and, in total, it adds up to a nicely detailed one-act play about the friendship between an adult who is holding on to childhood a little too much and a child who is uncertainly at the cusp of exiting it. It's also the least Jewish thing in the film.

The rest of the movie looks at an assortment of assistant counselors, here called CITs, or councilors-in-training. They are quite young, most just a few years older than Makepeace, but they've reached young adulthood in the way people did in movies in the 70s, with a focus on partying, pranking, and exploring the other gender. In fact, the movie's staff of counselors and campers are relegated so much into the background that they barely appear, visible occasionally behind the main characters or wandering into the frame once in a while, often oddly.

The storylines for these CITs was truncated to make more room for the Murray/Makepeace story, and so they sometimes just seem sketched in, with two of them, a nerdy fellow and a fat fellow, mostly playing "nerd" and "fat." Even still, by the standard of the films of the era, this is a pretty charming group. The women especially are written and lensed less as objects of desire than partners in fun, and they have a lot of sexual agency. There is one scene where two male CITs act as peeping Toms, and in a film like "Porky's" this is used as an excuse for showing a lot of female pulchritude. Here, the boys witness nothing, are pretty quickly caught, and are driven away. Instead it is the women who pick who they want to be with, and often set the terms. The most striking example of this is a female counselor that Murray aggressively hits on, played by actress and playwright Kate Lynch. She rebuffs his more aggressive behavior while still encouraging him, and clearly communicates that she's interested in Murray, but only when he's not being so cartoonishly Bill Murray. By the end of the movie, he's a lot more subdued with her, and a lot more honest about what he wants from her, and she appreciates it.

"Meatballs" is unmistakbly set at a Jewish camp, although it's pretty well camouflaged. The film was created almost exclusively by Canadian Jews, including director Reitman, who was the Czech-born son of Holocaust survivors, as well as writers Len Blum (whose Zionist mother traveled back and forth between Canada and Israel), Daniel Goldberg, and Harold Ramis, who was a Chicago native but had moved to Canada to work on SCTV. The cast is filled with Jewish actors and the characters have Jewish names. And the film was lensed at an actual Jewish camp, Camp White Pine, in Ontario, and was reportedly shot while the camp was in use, so the campers and counselors seen in the background were often actual campers and counselors. The script was originated by Reitman, who was a graduate of Jewish summer camps, and he specifically contacted Blum and Goldberg because of their experiences at summer camps.

The film was intended for a general audience, and so Reitman downplayed both its Jewishness and its Canadian-ness, although co-author Ramis would later be upfront about what he saw as the essentially Jewish content of his collaborations with Reitman, telling interviewers that he was looking to create a Jewish comic character that was the opposite of the hapless schlemiel and was more heroic. You can see these sorts of characters throughout his career as a film writer, clearly coded Jewish, but not defined by neurosis or oppression: Peter Riegert 's character in "Animal House," Rodney Dangerfield in "Caddyshack" and "Back to School," and Ramis's own delightfully weird performance in "Ghostbusters."

"Meatballs" captures a lot of the day-to-day details of summer camping. The camp director, played by the marvelously oblivious Harvey Atkin, even wears a t-shirt that reads "When the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut," an expression that is about as common to camps as poison ivy. There are campfire singalongs and weird post-meal rituals in massive wooden mess halls. There are gangs of parents arriving to visit homesick children on Parent Day and sobbing girls hugging each other on the last day of camp. The film was written by people who attended camp and remembered it, and so much of it feels authentic, even when nothing much is happening, like when the CITs lazily float along on canoes singing some improvised song on ukulele.

But the camp experience has also been edited. Jewish camps featuring a lot of Jewish content, including frequent use of Hebrew phrases (campers are often silenced with the Hebrew words "sheket bevkasha," which is met with a pair of handclaps). All-camp events inevitably include Hebrew singalongs, and camps are often invaded by visiting Israelis, who seem impossibly mature and alien. Depending on the camp, there may be a few or more very Orthodox campers, who wear yarmulkes and sometimes have visible fringes under their shirts. Reitman and his writing staff certainly remembered this, and chose to leave it out. This will mean nothing to the casual observer, but to somebody whose experiences mirrored those of the filmmakers, the film's Jewishness feels elided, as though there were scenes that should have been in the film but were just skipped over.

It's as though there might be a longer take of "Meatballs" somewhere, in which a scene at lunch doesn't begin when the food is eaten, but before, when the camp says grace in Hebrew, and scenes in which campers weren't in the background, but instead carried a pretend passport on an imaginary trip to Israel, where the Israeli councilors feed them falafel and send them away with gifts of Bazooka Joe gum with all the jokes written in Hebrew.

Dress British Drink Yiddish: I. W. Harper Bourbon


There is a part of me that veers toward a sort of absurd conceptual purism. I managed the box office for a bar/nightclub in New Orleans for a while, and the conceit of the place was that it was a speakeasy. I was of the opinion that we should have private memberships and people should drink their liquor from teacups and that we should occasionally be raided by the police, and we did none of that, and went home every night disappointed.

In the same way, I sort of want this little project to be nothing but a succession of increasingly rare and increasingly terrible East European liqueurs, until I am finally huddled over from an ulcer caused by drinking illegal fermented mare's milk. "Now this," I would say through gritted teeth, "this, at last, is a Jewish bar!"

And so my impulse is to say that bourbon doesn't belong in a Jewish bar. It's a goyishe drink, so goyishe that you sort of think it must be made in crude stills fashioned from radiators by men in straw hats and tattered overalls smoking a corn cob pipe. It's associated with Kentucky and was supposedly invented by Elijah Craig, a Baptist minister, and all of this sounds like the setup to an Appalachian folk song and not anything Jewish.

But I am here to tell you, the Jews had a hand in the making of bourbon. Some of it was through work as liquor wholesalers, which has a long and mostly undocumented Jewish history in the United States. There was, for example, Loeb, Bloom, & Co. in Paducah, Kentucky, who were active in the region in the 1870s and helped open the market for bourbon distillers. But Jews weren't simply in the bourbon trade as merchants. A German Jew named Isaac Bernheim graduated from working as a bookkeeper at  Loeb, Bloom, & Co to owning his own distillery. Now, Bernheim is not the sort of name you associate with Kentucky bourbon, even in the 1870s, so Isaac was savvy enough to brand his product with a name that could belong to a mountain roughneck: I.W. Harper.

The bourbon is still around, or, rather, it is back, having been discontinued in the 1990s, which was a bad time for whiskeys. There are a couple of Harper-inspired brands out there, including one called Bernheim Original Kentucky Straight Wheat Whiskey, and I reckon a Jewish bar should have the complete selection. Here in Omaha, I had some trouble tracking down anything but the I.W. Harper Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey (there is also a 15-year-old version), but that was enough for my purposes.

I had two drinks with the stuff. I started with a bourbon and coke, which is always the drink I use to try a new bourbon, because the Coke is always going to taste the same and so differences in whiskeys really become highlighted. I suppose I could just drink the stuff straight, but what am I, a 1920s bootlegger? Anyway, I.W. Harper is unmistakably bourbon, with a very strong flavor of the charred oak barrels it is aged in. In fact, it's a pungent enough bourbon that it overpowered the Coke flavor a bit, and I started feeling guilty about making such a declasse drink with such a bold liquor.

So I also got a Manhattan, which is a decidedly upscale drink, supposedly having been invented for Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill. And I.W. Harper makes an excellent Manhattan, blending well with the drink's other ingredients, sweet vermouth and bitters. I usually have my Manhattans with rye whiskey, I suppose because everything in the whole god damn world has to taste like a deli sandwich to me, but I.W. Harper makes a really enjoyable Manhattan, with a strong but enormously palatable flavor.

I wanted to make a cocktail designed by a Jewish bartender, but so far my research hasn't been all that forthcoming, and it doesn't help that the origins of most classic cocktails are often shrouded in myth. There is one fellow, Frank Meier, who I will write about in a future entry, who was the bartender at the Paris Ritz, invented a drink called the Bee's Knees, and was apparently a spy, but he doesn't seem to have made any bourbon cocktails. I found a site that suggests infusing bourbon with apricot and then rimming the glass with poppy seeds to make an alcoholic hamantaschen, which seems ingenious to me, but I have not tried it and it might be terrible.

There's also a drink called the Jewish Bulldozer, which is a mix of bourbon, club soda, and cream of coconut, and I don't know what to say about this drink. It doesn't seem to actually be Jewish in any way and I can't find any provenance for the drink, and I am afraid, like the Irish Car Bomb, that it may be a drink of extreme poor taste, as, deliberately or not, it seems to reference the death of Rachel Corrie, and I am not of the opinion that that complicated and tragic international politics makes for a very good cocktail name.

I am instead of the opinion that, if a Jewish bar is to stock a Jewish bourbon, its cocktails should reflect on the distinct Jewish experience in the American south. A classic bourbon cocktail is the mint julep, which combines bourbon, powdered sugar, water and mint, and is the official drink of the Kentucky Derby. I think it would be very easy to create a Jewish bar version of this with I.W. Harper. Offhand, I would switch out the water for seltzer, and I might consider using both sugar and cinnamon in the drink to give it a hint of kugel.

I would call it the Art Sherman Julep, after the Jewish horse trainer who won the Kentucky Derby in 2014. That's how you name a cocktail.

The 100 Yiddish Words Everyone Should Know: Shtetl


If you've seen "Fiddler on the Roof," and who hasn't, you've seen a shtetl, which in English just means "little town." "Fiddler" features the impoverished shtetl they call Anatevka, consisting of a Jewish section with some squalid houses, a merchant's section, and a little wooden  synagogue, and a Christian section, consisting of some squalid houses, a somewhat nicer Eastern Orthodox church, and a building with a few local officials.

American Jews all tend to think they must come from shtetls. We don't learn much about our European past, and so we tend to use "Fiddler" to fill in the gaps. We especially suffer due to an older (and now almost completely gone) first generation of immigrants who were notoriously recalcitrant to discuss the subject. You'd press them on their lives before America and they would wave a hand dismissively and say, eh, it's the old world, who needs to talk about it?

As a result, a lot of us just sort of think we came from Jewish towns in Russia that occasionally suffered attacks from Cossacks, and a lot of us don't really know what a Cossack is, except they were some sort of early breakdancers. We know marriages were arranged by yentas in the shtetls. We know these shtetls were Yiddish speaking, and very Orthodox, and that men danced with bottles on their heads. And we know that at some point things got bad and we had to come to America, and that was life in Europe.

All these things were true, to some extent, except the matchmakers being called yentas -- they were called shadchans. Yenta was just the name of the character played by Molly Picon in the film, and it's not a very nice thing to call someone.

But all the things we think we know about shtetls were also not true, to an extent. For instance, most of us didn't come from Russia, and we get confused because the places we did come from were under Russian control from the late 1700s on, and so that's what our ancestors put as their nationality when they came here. Russia controlled an enormous part of Eastern and Central Europe, called the Pale of Settlement, and they called it this because here is where they encouraged Jews to settle, while discouraging them from settling in Russia, although there were some Jewish communities in the west of the country. The Pale of Settlement included parts of  Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Latvia, and Ukraine. Even Anatevka, the shtetl from "Fiddler," is not in Russia -- it's Ukrainian.

There is more that we get wrong about shtetls. Rather than being all-Jewish hamlets, they often had a majority gentile population, and many of them were factory towns rather that the rustic agrarian village of Tevye the Dairyman. And rather than being pockets of isolated Jewish piousness, they were often market towns, and could be surprisingly worldly. In fact, shtetl residents often made fun of Jews from small rural villages in the way that my New York cousins made fun of their hayseed relatives from Minneapolis, never mind that Minneapolis isn't a small town and never mind that the hayseed relative was me.

And so it goes, fact upon shtetl fact that we get wrong. If you're an American Jew, there's a pretty good chance your ancestors did not live in a shtetl, but in a big city. If you did have shtetl ancestors, they may not have been especially religious, as there was a Jewish enlightenment called the Haskalah. Or they may have been religious, but from a weird sect that nobody in the family discusses anymore, like the Frankists, who followed the Polish false messiah Jacob Frank in the 18th century. And instead of being attacked by Cossacks, your ancestors might have been Cossacks, like the  Israilovsky Regiment, which consisted of nothing but Jews and was founded with the intention of invading Israel.

 History is complicated, too complicated to piece together from grandparents who refused to discuss the subject. Instead, we have sort of buffed down the edges of history into a simplified tale of shtetl Judaism, and, as a result, the shtetl still looms large in Jewish imaginations. They're the stories we got: Shtetls were popular subjects in Yiddish literature, sometimes as folkloric centers of Jewish identity, sometimes as corrupt bastions of small-mindedness. Shtetls were awfully useful, from a literary perspective. 

As a result, it sometimes seems like the shtetl was less a real place and more a metonym for the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe. It's as though Americans went abroad and insisted to everyone that every single one of their ancestors came from Buford, Wyoming, and all our literature was set in Buford, and our art consisted of dreamlike images of cowboys playing banjos on the tops of barns or flying through the air over a lonesome prairie. As a result, Steven T. Katz's book "The Shtetl: New Evaluations" calls these European towns "probably the greatest invention of modern Jewish imagination." We needed to come from somewhere, after all, and none of our grandparents were willing to discuss Frankist orgies in Częstochowa. So we all became Fiddlers on Eastern European shtetl roofs.

American Jews may not actually be shtetl Jews, but, in our hearts, we're shtetl Jews. The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, is designed to recall a shtetl. The Jewish press likes to refer to isolated communities of Hasidim living in upstate New York as American shtetls. When opera singer Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell traveled performing Yiddish songs last year, news articles said he was reviving the music of the shtetl. Never mind that Russell's repertoire was largely drawn from the music of Leningrad State Opera's former basso, Sidor Belarskym, who lived and frequently performed in the tiny shtetl of Los Angeles. The Canadian Yiddish web series Yidlife crisis has a partner series called Global Shtetl, where they visit Yiddish-flavored communities throughout the world. So far, they have been to such small Jewish towns as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and London.

 So you see, that's how it is for us. Even when things aren't shtetl, we think they are shtetl. 

 Some uses of the word shtetl:

 Shtetl in My Mind, Martin A. David: "Even the Jewish communities springing up on the Internet carry on the spirit of the shtetl. In these electronic shtetls all and none are strangers. The spirit of community is woven together by people who may have never seen each other's faces." 

 KALISZ: A journey of return, Rosalind Brenner: "This was his shtetl, the only place he was accustomed to. Each of the narrow roads led to the park, which opened to the village square, a bustling market place, except on Saturdays, of course, when nearly all the Jews went to shule" 

36 Letters, Joan Sohn: "JewishGen organizes tours for 'shtetl schleppers,' people who are looking for their roots in the towns where their families lived for generations. They often feel fortunate to find even an intact cemetery, because the Jews are gone."

Week 27: The pile up


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 188 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 106 hours
I have reviewed 2,586 individual flashcards

Have I ever explained the reason I started this blog? It's because when I started studying Yiddish on my own, I searched the web for other blogs about the experience of learning Yiddish, because I wanted to know what to expect. I figured there are people out there in the world, somewhere, probably far from Omaha, and they are studying Yiddish and must be blogging about it.

I think I thought that because I have not yet realized it is no longer 2001 and so not everybody in the world blogs about everything anymore. But it is not 2001, and so I did not find such a blog, and I would not know where else to look. So here I am, sharing my experiences.

I decided to post every single week, whether I had anything new to say or not, just so that if anyone else wants to try to tackle Yiddish in the way I am, they will at least have my expediences to refer to. It might be week after week of me ineptly doing mathematics to figure out how many words I will need to memorize to be able to tell a dirty joke in Yiddish, it might be full of weird digressions and little experiments that nobody is likely to repeat (my Boy Scout-style sash, as an example), but it will be as complete a map as I can offer.

Well, readers, if you make it to week 27, you're going to crash. It might happen sooner, it might happen later, but eventually all the words you have trouble with are going to catch up with you, and all the phrases that you've tried to learn but failed will reappear at once, and words you memorized six months ago and forgot will show up, and you will have a week of total chaos, as I did.

I have repeatedly had hour-long study sessions, and, at the end of that hour, there were still 30 or 40 words or phrases that I failed to remember that got pushed back to the following day. The backlog just getting larger and larger, and it was making it impossible for me to learn new words, because I was having to cycle through this endless stream of words I can't remember, and, by the time I got to the new words, I had forgotten them too.

So on Friday, I did the unthinkable: I stopped adding new words and phrases to my flashcards. I don't like to do this, because I just want to keep shoving Yiddish into my head, as much and as quickly as possible. But there just comes a point where you have to take a break and catch up.

So I spent the weekend pushing though the flashcards that were giving me trouble. You can see from above that yesterday I reviewed 538 cards and it took 81 minutes, and that's about how it went the whole weekend.

So that's all I have to say today. But heed my warning, fellow travelers. One day you too will be happily studying Yiddish and you will hit this wall. It is real, and it is terrifying.

Cooking the East European Way: Ukrainian Deviled Eggs


I've eaten a lot of deviled eggs in my day. I sometimes go party crazy, where I just want to live like there is always a 1970's-style party going on. I even imagine multiple variations of the theme: Fondu parties, where everybody is dressed in leisure suits and discusses art movies; Studio 54 parties, where everyone is spray painted gold and shares amyl nitrate; key parties, where everybody is dressed in leisure suits and discusses art movies.

During these party deliriums, I eat a lot of hors d'oeuvres, because that seems appropriate. And so deviled eggs have wound up being an entire section of my party nutrition pyramid, which also includes such categories as "cocktails," "canapes," and "flambes." But my experience with deviled eggs has been limited to the Midwestern version, which is, for those of you who haven't had it, a half a hard-boiled egg with its yolk removed, combined with mayonnaise and mustard, and then returned to the middle of the egg, sometimes garnished with paprika.

I had not realized there were international versions of the deviled egg until I tried this Ukrainian iteration, called "Nachynani Yayechka" or "stuffed eggs." It is very much like the Midwestern version, but with the addition of finely chopped sweet pickles and scallions to the yolk and, of course, dill as seasoning. I don't know that this is what John Steinbeck ate when he visited Ukraine in 1947, but he described eating some "strange-tasting stuffed eggs." It's possible he got another version of the recipe I located that had smoked ham in it. Maybe he got the one with chicken liver. Or mushrooms. Anyway, he's right that these don't taste like Midwestern version.

The pickle, of course, makes all the difference, and viva la difference. Obviously I already like deviled eggs, as the mustard in the filling gives the hors d'oeuvre an almost delicatessen flavor, and this quality is greatly increased with the addition of pickle -- my girlfriend makes an egg salad sandwich that contains pickle, and this is like a deconstructed version of that.

(I want to take a moment to note that my girlfriend always seems to have made her own version of whatever Slavic food I am taste testing, despite coming from a lumber family in Northern Minnesota. We were at a loss to explain it until a genetic test determined that she is part Croatian. It may also explain why her mother once tasted Slivovitz, a plum brandy that most people compare to a junkyard fire, and declared it "smooth.")

I am curious to try some of the other recipes. As I investigate these appetizers, it's become increasingly obvious to me that Ukrainians think that just about anything can be added to egg yolk, mustard, and mayo and stuffed into an egg white.

That sounds like a party to me.

The 100 Yiddish Words Everyone Should Know: Shtup


Yiddish has a reputation for being a dirty language, and maybe it's because a lot of people who knew some Yiddish, like my father, liked to swear in it. It's also a language that sounds like it should be dirty, as it is composed of the same sort of hard, Germanic consonants we rely on for so many English cuss words, coupled with a sibilant softness, a shushing noise that sounds insinuating, like somebody is whispering in your ear, and everything they whisper is galling.

I have not found it to be that dirty a language, and often surprisingly modest. One of the Yiddish words for vagina is "dortn," which just means "there." Another is "sphiel zakh," which means plaything. Others? Knish and peirog, which are just names for food, and are no more inherently vulgar than calling a penis a sausage. Jews curse a lot, and they do sometimes tell people where to shit (on the ocean) or fart (in their own throat), there are fewer of these sorts of phrases than there are curses like this: "Go take a bath!" Or, "I have you in the bathhouse!"

For some reason, Jews like to included baths in their curses.

So there is a word for the sex act, and it's was popular enough in Yiddish to find an English-speaking audience, and it sounds like a curse word. The word is "shtup," and, as you probably already guessed, it's not much of a curse word. The word is used regularly in Yiddish, and usually when it is used, it is used to mean "push."

A lot of language does this -- takes an innocent verb and, because it calls to mind something dirty, presses it into service to describe sex. We don't have sex with a piece of wood when we screw it, or, at least, most of us don't. These are, at worst, mild swear words, the sort of phrase, like "jumping their bones," that is used in G-rated films to describe coitus.

There is another word, treated in Yiddish as far dirtier, far more vulgar, for the sex act, the equivalent of our F word. That word is "yentz," and its most literal translation is just "that thing." So, as I said, Yiddish speaking Jews could be unexpectedly modest in their use of curse words.

I'm sure I heard the word "shtup" from my father, but my clearest first memory of the word is from the 1982 film "My Favorite Year." The film follows a young Jewish television writer as he must shepherd a drunken proxy for Errol Flynn, who is to appear on a filmic proxy for "Your Show of Shows." At one point, the young Jew, played by Mark Linn-Baker, brings the Flynn proxy, played by Peter O'Toole, to meet his cartonish Jewish family. Around the dinner table, an uncle, played by the great comic actor Lou Jacobi, presses O'Toole for details inspired by Flynn's rumored romance with a 15-year-old. “That paternity rap a few years ago," Jacobi asks, "did you shtup her?"

The website English Language & Usage charts the general popularity of this word, noting that it started gaining traction in the 60s and really took off in the 80s, about the time of "My Favorite Year." They also note that before that, its appearance in English tended to be nonsexual. As an example, in Clifford Odetts "Awake and Sing," a character says "I shtupped him a ten-dollar bill," meaning about the same as "I slipped him some money." There's nothing terribly surprising about this usage if "shtup" means "push," although it does create a surprising image is "shtup" means "have sex with."

 But by the 60s, the word had undeniably joined American slang as a word for sex, as in Julie Bovasso's 1963 play "Moon Dreamers," where a police chief confesses "I was shtupping! I was shtupping!" When a French character asks what the word means, he's met with a dismissive, "You're a Frenchman and you don't know from shtupping?"

 There is a part of me that want to credit every Yiddishism that entered the English language in the 60s to Leo Rosten, author of "The Joys of Yiddish," but in this case I suspect the author who gets a lion's share of the credit is Philip Roth, who used the word a few notable times in his bestselling comic novel "Portnoy's Complaint," where it seemed perfect for the whole leering, uncontrollable sexual pathology of the book. Incidentally, the film version of "Portnoy" starred Richard Benjamin, who directed "My Favorite Year," so Mr. Benjamin may be the actor most associated with shtupping, linguistically speaking.

 Some samples of the use of the word "shtup":

 Dark Waves and Light Matter: Essays, Albert Goldbarth: "'They come, these shloomps, they don't know if their breath is like a chazzer's tuchus' a swine's ass 'but their head is filled with the shtup shtup shtup, so nu?' She shrugged. 'So I get filled with the shtup shtup shtup a bissel mineself.'"

Fifty Shades of Oy Vey: A Parody, E.L. Jamesbergstein: "'This conversation has really helped me,' I whisper. 'I think we could shtup now.' 'Yes, Anatevka,' he breathes. 'You and I, we both want the same things. Let's shtup.' My breath hitches. My skin flushes. In the room next door, a toilet flushes."

Approaching Oblivion, Harlan Ellison: "Besides, meaning no offense, I don't shtup with strangers. It wouldn't be such a good thing for you, either, believe me. Everybody says Evsise is a rotten shtup.I got very little feeling in my pupik, you wouldn't like it, not even a little." 

The Return of Stewie Stein, Stan Weisleder: "They were shtupping everybody and everything, male, female and transvestites, they didn't care in the least. Not one bit. Marlene Dietrich wasn't shy at all about her escapades. You might even say that she flaunted them."

Yiddish Songs: Introduction


I've known since I started this blog that it would eventually have a musical component. Dress British Think Yiddish was conceived as an activist blog, in that it's goal was to encourage readers to likewise explore the world of Yiddish. One of the few great remaining strongholds of Yiddish is music, mostly klezmer, but you'll find classical musicians and folk musicians who also record Yiddish songs.

I have a long relationship with music, especially Jewish music. I was a songleader at Jewish summer camps for somewhere in the vicinity of five years, and since then I have had a small but not insubstantial career as a songwriter, especially in theater, where I often write songs to accompany plays that I have authored. I was a solo musician for a number of years, playing original material on ukulele at coffee shops. I have been a member of several bands, and written songs for those bands, and I have produced several of my own albums.

I've been thinking about how to approach Yiddish music since I started this blog. I've flirted with the genre before, and so know a half-dozen songs on ukulele. I considered buying a balalaika, which isn't really a traditional Jewish instrument, but is one that interests me, and starting my own little band, but passed on that idea. Having been a band member before, I know the amount of time and energy it requires. When you start or join a band, you're essentially starting a new, unpaid part-time job, and I'm not looking for that.

Instead, consistent with my activist approach to this blog, I wanted to start a project that would encourage others to participate in Yiddish song. There's a Brian Eno quote that has stuck with me for a long time, about the band The Velvet Underground: "Only about 1,000 people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them formed a rock and roll band." In my own way, that's my goal with this project.

I'm not looking to encourage rock and roll bands, of course. I guess I'm looking to encourage songleaders. I'm very much a product of songwriter/songleader Debbie Friedman, a fellow Minnesotan who radically recreated Jewish music in the 60s and 70s. I never met her, but my start as a songleader came as the result of impersonating one of her students, MJ Gilbert, who in turn had borrowed a lot from Friedman, who Gilbert had known.

Friedman played a large 12-string guitar and benefited from two movements in the 1960s. Firstly, there was folk rock, and there is an unmistakable Peter, Paul and Mary influence on Friedman, especially in her use of driving melodies and soaring harmonies. Then there was the Civil Rights movement, and other activist movements of the 60s, that made songleading an effective tool of activism.

Now, I'm not Friedman, and while I would say this project is informed by Friedman, it's not looking to duplicate her work. From what I have read, she was a profoundly spiritual person, and sought to use music to encourage a communal spiritual experience. To that end, she often wrote her own melodies, based around existing texts that nonetheless communicated ideas she wanted to explore in the context of the synagogue -- with "Miriam's Song," as an example, she used the story of the prophetess Miriam as a way to explore a place women might have in modern Judaism (unsurprisingly, it's as a songleader.)

I have different goals. I'm looking to take existing songs and popularize them. I am a secular Jew, and so I'm not looking for songs that communicate a spiritual worldview or feeling, but instead represent a legacy of great Yiddish songwriting, as well as a cultural heritage that isn't widely taught anymore. I do hope to get these songs into the camps and the synagogues, but primarily because these are the places where Jewish songs are most often taught.

But I think there is a lot that I can borrow from Friedman. I have stumbled across dismissive responses to Friedman as being an author of "camp songs," but camp songs are just a variation of the great American tradition of the communal folk music sing-along, which is a demonstrably effective tool for both creating community and teaching songs. Sing-alongs create an environment where the audience is actively encouraged to participate in singing songs, and I'd like to note a few ways that Friedman, as well as other Jewish songleaders, matched their material to this goal:

1. They tend to use relatively short Hebrew phrases. Some Jewish sing-along songs are a single Hebrew sentence, repeated over and over.
2. They offer parallel lyrics that translated the Hebrew into English
3. They make extensive use of handclaps. call-and-response, rounds, and simple harmonies to generate musical excitement
4. They pick songs with strong choruses, so that, even if participants do not participate the entire song, they quickly become comfortable with the chorus and join in.

There is very little Yiddish music that already conforms to this. Yiddish songs were rarely written for communal singing, but instead for solo or theatrical performance. So part of the challenge of this project will to be to take existing Yiddish songs and create new arrangements with this in mind, which will often mean dramatically simplifying the songs, sometimes reducing them from epics with dozens of verses to just a single chorus or even a single lyric.

I know that there are people who will see this as doing great violence to the source material. It is, but I think with cause. The songs were written for a Yiddish-speaking audience, who could enjoy long songs with dozens of verses. I will be restructuring them for an English-speaking audience that typically has very little background in Yiddish. I'd like to argue that I'm trying to create a gateway drug, that if I am successful I hope to ignite interest in the original versions of the songs. This may happen, to an extent, but I don't think that's my primary goal. My primary goal is to create new versions of these songs that will have a life of their own, and a value of their own, whether or not the new audience and singers ever go on to learn anything else about Yiddish.

I think we have to assume that for most American Jews, Yiddish will never be anything more than a flavoring, rather than a meal. I think we have to be okay with that, and to make sure that, at the very least, they have access to the flavoring, to make sure that Yiddish remains in the metaphoric spice box of the American Jew. But I do think that there will be some who find the flavor intoxicating, if I can extend the metaphor, and want to taste more of it.

Modern music has given us some marvelous tools for taking a song and making it an earworm, which is my goal -- to recast these marvelous old Yiddish songs so that a modern Jew will hear it and find they can't forget it. I want people to find themselves humming melodies months and years after first hearing them, and I want 12-year-olds who have just bought their first guitar to think, I bet I could play that. To this end, I have made a list of rules that I will be following in the creation of new arrangements. They are as follows:

1. Focus on arrangements that make use of a few simple, open guitar chords
2. Make extensive use of simple, but memorable intro riffs and fills. Arrange songs around easily reproduced rhythm guitar sections.
3. The niggun, or wordless melody, is one of the superheroes of Jewish song; make frequent use of it
4. Simplify lyrics. Find the kernel of the song and highlight it. Offer parallel, translated lyrics when possible.
5. Look for strong, simple, memorable choruses.

I know that this is the opposite of the approach used by a lot of contemporary Yiddish performers, who either wish to celebrate Yiddish songs in its historical context or use it as a jumping off point for instrumental virtuosity. And I'm glad those performers exist, because I see the enormous value in what they do. But these musicians are not activists, they're not explicitly looking to democratize Yiddish, to provide forms of it that anybody can use as a participant, rather than an audience member.

I will say here what I find myself saying everywhere on this blog: Maybe I'm not the one to do this. I am not an enormously skilled guitar player, nor do I have an especially fine singing voice. I am not a very social person, nor do I enjoy being the center of attention, although I know how to fake both when I am performing. I am not a trained song arranger, and it is very possible I will not be popularizing Yiddish song, but producing weird, ruined versions of Yiddish songs. This is an experiment, but, if it is a failed experiment, I expect that Yiddish will be able to survive it.

In the meanwhile, I have a 12-string guitar in the mail. It should arrive tomorrow.

Week 26: 1001 Yiddish Proverbs


The stats:

I have studied Yiddish for 183 days
I have studied Yiddish flashcards for a total of 101 hours
I have reviewed 2,549 individual flashcards

First, some milestones: As of yesterday, I have completed half a year's study, 182 days. Sometime in the past few days, I studied my 2500th flashcard, half of the 5,000 I want to study in my first year. And as of yesterday, I completed 100 hours of studying, so if I am to ever become an expert at Yiddish, I just need to do 1,000 times that many, according to Malcolm Gladwell.

Actually, that's not fair to the amount of work I have done. As I have mentioned in the past, I spend between a half-hour and an hour a day making new flashcards, so, conservatively, I have now spent 150 hours on flashcards. I also spend a half an hour per day listening to a Yiddish language program on my iPhone, minus weekends, so that's maybe another 25 hours. I blog about the subject almost every weekday, which requires additional research, so maybe another 15 hours. I read books about Yiddish and watch Yiddish movies, so maybe another 10 hours. All told, in six months, I've probably spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 hours working on various Yiddish projects.

So according to Malcolm Gladwell's formulation in "Outliers," I just need 9,800 more hours work to become an expert at Yiddish. Just 25 more years of study at this rate.

I can't be the only one who dislikes  Malcolm Gladwell, can I?

As I mentioned last week, I have been memorizing proverbs. Most of them are drawn from Fred Kogos' book "1001 Yiddish Proverbs," and it hasn't been an enormously satisfying experience. Kogos never explains where he found these proverbs, neither does he try to explain them when they seem to make no sense. He includes the proverb's original Yiddish, which is sometimes different than his translation, and writes the Yiddish in Roman characters, which is more than a little frustrating when you are trying to learn them in the Yiddish alphabet. And despite Kogos' insistence, in his into to the book, that he has assembled the"proverbial wisdom" of the Jewish people, a lot of the proverbs are less wise than, at best, hokily comic, like something a bottom rung Catskill's comic would come up. At worst, some of the proverbs reflect a meanness and smallness of mind that I don't really want to commit to memory.

There's an underlying sexism to many of the proverbs that I genuinely find awful. Some of it is openly misogynistic -- proverbs about women's appearance and their place in society are frequent -- but it also shows itself in the absence of women from general conversation. The first example, the openly sexist proverbs, are frequent enough that I can almost open any page and find an example -- I just did, and the first thing my eyes fell upon was the phrase "more blemish, more dowry," which makes it clear that to whatever Jews passed these proverbs along, a woman's value as a companion came either from her appearance or her money.

Another: "When the wife wears the pants, the husband washes the floor,"  which sounds like something Ralph Kramden would say, and then set about to wash the floor under his wife's icy stare, seething the entire time. But, as I have said, there is also a sense of the absence of women in other proverbs. It's hard to place, exactly, but I can't help but feel that unless they appear in a proverb as a wife, mother, or lover, the proverbs don't really take women into consideration.

I know we should expect these sorts of epigrams about women, or with women pointedly absent, as Yiddish's history developed largely in a pre-emancipated word. I suppose they have historic value, although, considering that Eastern Europe had a large number of Jewish women who both ran their household and their family business, as well as women who were actors, authors, activists, and even religious leaders, these aphorisms do not so much represent history as represent what historical sexism looked like. Regardless, it's not Yiddish that I need to memorize, and that means that Mr. Kogos's 1001 proverbs are more like 101 sexist jokes, 700 blandly amusing observations, and maybe a couple hundred aphorisms that I actually want to memorize.

That being said, the proverbs I have learned so far I genuinely enjoy. An example: One is a lie, two are lies, three is politics. That seems like the sort of thing that I'm going to make use of for the rest of my life. Or this strange aphorism: All corpses have one face. I don't know precisely what it means, but it is tantalizingly ambiguous. Does it refer to the fact that superficial things like beauty cease to matter when we're dead? Is it more literal, in that all corpses end up just having skull faces? Is it an anguished cry from a time before photography, when most of our loved ones, when they die, died without their appearance ever being recorded, and so were lost, first to memory as our impressions of them dimmed, and later to history, as we all died and melted into the great faceless void of the past?

I should say proverbs are hard to memorize. If you don't manage to learn all your flashcards, the Anki flashcard program just carries the remainder over to the next day. For six months, I have not had this happen, but since I started this, I regularly find words and phrases shoved back to the next day, despite the fact that my study time has doubled from a half-hour to an hour. I may have to take a little break from proverbs just to catch up, and then introduce them slowly, so I don't overwhelm myself.

That's okay. I need time to track down the proverbs that I really want to learn. There's a scene in the film "Amelie" when the title character's friend quizzes the man Amelie has a crush on, and she does so by starting a proverb and asking him to complete the sentence, which he does. "I  think that those who know the proverbs can't be bad persons," she explains.

I agree with this, sort of. But only if they know good proverbs.

Alt-Yiddish: Yiddish as Underworld Cant, part 1


The shadow of antisemitism is so profound that it destroys any pleasure we might take in what otherwise might be delightful. For instance, there was, as far as anybody can tell, a sizable Jewish criminal class in Europe. How big or significant it was is unsure, because, of course, antisemites latched onto this and used it to demonize Jews in general. As a result, the Jewish criminals of Europe are still rarely discussed or researched, because when something was used as a weapon against you, you don't necessarily want to give people the blueprints to rebuild the weapon.

It may be that Jews are somehow nobler people that we don't have a tradition of celebrating our European outlaws, but I think not. There were Jewish-American gangsters, and American Jews seem to get a real kick out of them. I suspect we suppressed our outlaw history in Europe out of self-preservation. But not entirely. Jews were often regarded as being behind white slavery in Europe, and both playwright Sholem Asch and author Sholem Aleichem addressed this, in Asch's 1909 play "God of Vengeance" and Aleichem's story "The Man from Buenos Aires."

The presence of Jews in the underworld left its mark elsewhere: In the language of the underworld. Ever since authors started putting together dictionaries of criminal cant, they have noted that many of the words were borrowed from Yiddish. I have put together a sampling of these words, in part because I do not believe antisemties should be able to dictate what history I can comfortably research, and also because I don't think antisemites should have a vote in what I find delightful. And when I discover that thieves used the words "dingbat" and "hokey pokey" as criminal terms in the Victorian era, as in the examples that follow, and they thought both words were Yiddish, well, that's delightful.

All the following are edited from "A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant," published in 1889 by Albert Barrere and and C. G. Leland. I don't know how skilled Barrere or Leland were at linguistics, how familiar they were with Yiddish, or how much they knew of the underworld, and so I can only present this as a curiosity, rather than as a document of unassailable scholarship. That being said, there is a lot of fun to be had with old curiosities, and so I will likely follow this up with other slang dictionaries in the future.

Yiddish Words from "A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant"


Adonee (old cant), the Deity. Evidently Yiddish, from Adonai, Lord. Martin Luther uses the word as a cant term among beggars for God. A tramps' toast says : —" May the good Adonee/ Soften the strong; Lighten our loads / And level our roads."

Autem or autum, a church. This word, which is of the oldest cant, and is given by Harman, is probably the Yiddish a'thoumme, a church, which in ordinary conversation would be pronounced autem. It seems to have been at first always associated with clerical marriage, and as in cant Adam and Eve are terms for husband and wife, it is possible that Autem also owes something to Outem or Oudem, as Adam is pronounced in Yiddish.

Baldower (Yiddish), head-speaker. One who conveys information ; a spy. Connected with this are baldowern, to direct, plan, spy, lurk, observe (in Dutch slang baldoveren), also baldorer, a spy or traitor.

Bark (popular), an Irish man or woman. Hotten says that no etymology can be found for this. In low Whitechapel Yiddish the term would at once be understood to mean a wanderer or vagabond, based on barkolis, or bargolis, one who goes about in misery and poverty, and batches, "further," as barches holchen, "to go further." It is, however, probably derived from the Celtic barrag, scum, or dirty scum. Scum, as an abusive term, "scum of the earth," is originally Irish, vide Barkshirk. (Common), the skin, to "bark one's shins" is to get the skin off one's shins.

Barney — Barnum. and bharna, to fill or satisfy. Barney, a swindle, a sell, or a cross, is probably from the Yiddish bai-niss or barnoss, which becomes a Jewish proper name in Barnet, popularly Barney. (Dickens gives this name to a young Jew.) Bamiss means a leader of a multitude, or head- man of any description. Remote as the connection between a "swindle" and a "captain" may seem to be, it is direct enough according to the lowest form of Yiddish or German thieves' slang, in which a leading, a clever, a swindling man are all united in cochemer, "a wise man," and also "a leader of thieves."

Callithumpian, Calliathumpian serenade (American), a serenade after the fashion of a cha- rivari, in which old kettles with sticks, gridirons, cows' horns or tin horns, penny trumpets, or anything that will make a horrible and discordant sound is employed. It is possibly from the Yiddish calle, a bride, and means bride-thumping or mak- ing a noise at a bridal, or from "call" and "thump."

Cocum (common London slang, also Yiddish). In Hebrew chochum, chochem, or cochcm, crafty, learned, wise, or a wise man. According to Hotten the English slang term means shrewdness, ability, luck. "Jack's got cocum," he's safe to get on. Among themselves German thieves call one another by this name. Mr. Hotten does not recognise any Hebrew origin for the word, and suggests that it is "allied to the Scottish keek and German gucken, to peep or pry into." In Yiddish cochemer or cochem, pronounced almost like cocum, means wisdom ; cochum- wirth, a thieves' landlord ; coch-mas Schlaumauch, the wisdom of Solomon.

Cuffer (military), a lie ; spinning a cuffer, telling an exaggerated, grossly improbable story; one that cuffs or beats any story. (American thieves), a man, rustic. From old English cant cofe, or the Yiddish kaffcr, a stupid fellow; kaffori, Hebrew for a peasant.

Deaner (thieves), shilling. It has been suggested that deaner is from denier, but more probably it is a corruption of the Yiddish dinoh, a coin.

Ding-bat (American), money.  The word din or ding seems to indicate value in several languages. E.g. , in Yiddish, dinoh mimaunaus, money questions.

Dolly-shop (common), a pawnbroker's shop of the poorest and lowest description. From the Yiddish dal or dol, poor, which suggested the hanging up a doll as a sign for such places.

Duffer (common). This word has two opposite meanings. A rank swindler, a clever cheat — "a word in frequent use in 1701 to express cheats of all kinds." n Yiddish every word which means clever or wise also means roguery ; and in Yiddish doffer is a shrewd, clever, very crafty man (adjective doff, from tov or toff, good) ; Dutch thieves' slang doffer, a tramp, a seller of forged pictures.

Hokey-pokey (common), good-for-nothing, cheated, done. This word seems as regards both meaning and sound to have a relation to the Yiddish orche-porchem, a vagabond, a tramp. It is from " hocus-pocus."

Jomer (popular and thieves), a mistress, a sweetheart ; literally a kiss, either from the gypsy ckumer, a kiss, or the Yiddish joma.

Joskin. Generally used to denote a dull rustic or greenhorn. It would seem, however, to be derived from the Yiddish or German - Hebrew joschen, to sleep, sleepy {i.e., stupid), or from joscJien, old ; ein joschenisch, an old man.

Kaffir (popular and Yiddish), a prostitute's bully. Yiddish and Arabic, kafir, an infidel, a country boor.

Kibosh (English and Yiddish), nonsense, rubbish, or humbug.

Mace (thieves), to give it on the mace, or strike the mace, to obtain goods on credit without any intention of paying for them ; to sponge an acquaintance, beg or borrow money. Formerly mace grieffs were men who wittingly bought and sold stolen fish. Several Yiddish words may have contributed to this term, such as inasser or meser, a betrayer, hence "masse-stapler," which see; mas-chomet, a blackguard. Also moser or moser, a cheat ; mos, money, hence to make money.

Magsman (common slang), the Tuagsman is at the very head of the profession of roguery. He is the great man, the Magnus Apollo among thieves and swindlers, or what the French call de la haute j'egre. He is a first-class confidence man who selects his victims in the street, in the smoking-rooms of hotels, in stylish bars. Probably from the Yiddish mochas or magas (to which mann maybe arbitrarily added), meaning a great swell, a great man or highly honoured lord ; or from to mag, to talk persuasively.

Moshkeneer, to (common), to pawn an article for more than it is worth. There are watches and articles of jewellery made for the special purpose of swindling, and which appear to be of solid gold or silver, but which are only covered with thin rolled metal. Probably from the Yiddish or German-Hebrew mos, money, and kenner, one who knows, one who is " fly," as in the word kenner-fetzer, a thieves' butcher. The word moss, it may be observed, has in slang taken a wide range, and is quite applicable not only to money or gold coin, but also to any kind of valuables.

Nab, to (old English), now used n a slangy sense, properly to take, seize. In thieves' lingo, to receive or take in stolen goods. It is possible that as the "fences" or receivers were once generally Jews, the word in this sense is derived from the Yiddish. (French thieves use the word ne'p for a rascally Jew, a receiver, or dealer in sham jewellery.)

Shake-lurk (old cant), a letter prepared for a vagabond stating that he has incurred a great loss, such as sickness or shipwreck. As it is a lying letter, it is probable that the term owes its origin to the Yiddish shakar, a falsehood. Also scheiker. But it is quite as possible that shake is the provincial "shack," a vagabond.

Shakester, shickster (popular), a female. "Amongst costermongers this term is invariably applied to ladies or the wives of tradesmen, and females generally, of the classes immediately above them" (Hotten). In America a shakester is a lady, and shickster a woman. Derived from the German-Hebrew shigsel, shixen, shichsle, a girl. In Yiddish vocabulary it is defined as a Christian girl.

Shicer, shyster, the lowest and vilest kind of a man. The term is supposed to have been first used in England among the lowest order of Jews. It is said to be derived from the German scheisser {hat. cacator), but maybe influenced by the Yiddish sheiker, a lie, falsehood, or liar (Heb. shakar). " Sheiker we kisun," lies and falsehood. In New York the word shyster is specially applied to the lowest type of criminal lawyer — "a Tombs lawyer."

Stook (thieves), pocket-handkerchief. Probably Yiddish, from the German stuck, a piece. Stook-hauler, a pickpocket who steals pocket-handkerchiefs.

Toff (popular), a dandy, a swell, one who appears well. Also toffer, a well-dressed gay woman. Derived from the Yiddish or Hebrew toff, tov, tuw, literally good, and used in an extended sense which perfectly warrants its application to good or a fine appearance.

Usher (thieves), yes ; from the Yiddish user, it is right, it is so.

Zoyara (American), an effeminate young man, a lady-gentleman, a "Molly." In 1860-61 there was a young fellow whose name "on the slangs " was Zoyara, a circus-rider, who affected the dress and airs of a girl so well that it was the town-question in New York for some time as to Zoyara.  what the sex of the "phenomenon" really was. Of course every circus in the United States had for some time after a Zoyara.

The London Globe having inquired why the stage names of female acrobats and circus- riders so generally begin with Z, a correspondent (C. G. Leland) remarked that they are, as in Zazd, Zaniel, Zoes, derived from Hebrew or Yiddish words meaning devil or goblin.






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