Yiddish: It Has A Word for Everything
Lenny Bruce once said, “If you live in New York, even if you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish.” Jews — known for being the eternal outsiders — have assimilated so well in the Big Apple that they themselves have influenced the culture to the point that Yiddish — itself an amalgam of everything from Old French to Hebrew — has become a second language to New Yorkers. Only in the great melting pot can you hear a Presbyterian call for their schmatte, or a shikse maidel ask for a knish.
But what is it that makes the Jewish language so accessible to non-native speakers? “It’s so expressive,” says Catherine Christman, a native New Yorker who is one of the “Catholic Jews” Lenny Bruce referred to. “It covers the sublime and the ridiculous.” Native New Yorker Adam Swirsky agrees. “The English language lacks so many words that Yiddish just hits on the head. Like meshugah. What in English sounds like that? Or schmutz? Actually, it seems like Yiddish is good for describing the bad.” Indeed, telling someone they have schmutz on their tie gets the point across a whole lot quicker and more directly AND with a smile than fumfering around with “You’ve got something … umm …”
Aside from the everyday interactions on the streets of New York, what may have catapulted Yiddish to fame (if not necessarily fortune) were the good ol’ days of Vaudeville. The Jewish community no doubt drew upon Yiddish for their schtick. As Trav S.D. wrote in his book, No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, “Thanks to the participation of so many Jews, Yiddish became an important part of the language of Vaudeville. A bit of comedy business is known as schitck. To schlepp (as someone does with one’s costume, trunk and props) is an important Yiddish verb, as is to schmooze (as one did on the sidewalk in front of the Palace). And — very importantly for comedy — the language is unusually rich in names to hurl at a pathetic loser: nebbish, klutz, schnook, schmo, schmendrick, schlemiel, schlimazel …” Irv Saposnik, in his piece Those Serious Jests, said “Jewish comedy came here in steerage … Even today Jewish Americans still retain the (Groucho) Marxian suspicion of the club that might admit them as members.” Comedian Michael Showalter, whose mother is Jewish, agrees that there’s a certain charm to the nebbishness. “Yiddish words are wonderful and VERY funny. They capture the pure essence of their meaning. My favorite Yiddish phrases that I use all the time in my material and in life are kvetch which means to complain, and kvell which means to be overjoyed.” From the stage, Yiddish then made the great leap onto the big screen; famous non-Jew Jimmy Cagney translated Yiddish — for an Irish cop, no less — in 1932’s Taxi; the Marx Brothers brought Jewish New York culture to the big time with A Night at the Opera.
It wasn’t long until Yiddish settled into the home. Or, specifically, the kitchen: time was when a bagel was an exotic piece of bread. (It’s still slowly making its way across the Atlantic, accompanied by a thick slab of lox and some capers.) Now every mall in the U.S. is home to a Bagel World or Bagel Mania. Closer to home, all of New York gets to enjoy the Jewish holidays when shops roll out the Passover matzoh, Hannukah latkes and macaroons any old time. Katz’s Deli is a must-see for any NYC tourist, not only because it was the scene of Meg Ryan’s famous orgasm in When Harry Met Sally, but also for the New York “experience” it gives with a side of pickle.
Because Yiddish is a language without stringent rules, it’s frequently a malaprop victim. Woody Allen parodied failed attempts at Yiddish in his film Sleeper, when he was told to “stop whining and eat your shikse.” In a New York Times forum on Yiddish, a native speaker wrote, “I assure you, this member of the Yiddish community is made very tired by outsiders’ failed attempts at using Yiddish words.” Showalter remembers that, “My friend’s sister heard someone say schvitz and thought it meant ‘cool.’ So whenever people asked her how she was she’d say, ‘I’m shvitizin.’ Oy vey.” Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch, summed it up thusly: “I think the real problem rests on the fact that Yiddish … is the national language of nowhere … [and] has never been subject to the kind of authority that can successfully impose linguistic standards and make them stick … I tried to explain to a Yiddish ham-actor that the word he needed to say was rishes, which means “malice, wickedness,” not rishus, which means “permission,” he told me to get lost … And this despite the fact that I had written the script.”
But it’s more than just the words that make the Jewish New York accent unique. It’s the hard g, eh, and guttural edge that round out the sound. According to linguist William Labov, author of The Social Stratification of English in New York City, much of what causes the accent are remnants from Yiddish nudging its way into English — most famously, with the sound linguists call an “intrusive g” but what we know as “Lawn-guyland.” And just as the g makes its presence known, the r tends to disappear (what’s called a “non-rhotic” accent), as in the name “Heath-a.” In addition, Labov writes, “Yiddish accents in English seem to favor the use of [eh],” so the words bad and bed sound identical. What linguistic books omit, however, is the physicality that goes into emphasizing a “Jewish” way of speaking, particularly in comedy: the posture changes, shoulders are hunched, hands out, eyes open — the eternal outsider, forever farmisht.
The patois has also been taken to heart, made possible from the Mother Tongues that Jews brought over from Europe. Unlike the Irish and Italians, Jews had a different syntax, so “the man reads the book” would be translated as “it’s the book the man is reading.” The Jewish community kept this pattern even after its immigrants and their descendents began speaking English. In Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, the grandmother, Bubbie, worries about being robbed: “Someone should crawl in at night I’m always thinking.” The syntax also gets right to the point in put-downs. “Smart, he isn’t,” Leo Rosten writes in The Joys of Yiddish.
So why is it that the Jewish language has captured the imagination of generations of New Yorkers? The words? The tone? The chutzpah? Go know. One New Yorker summed up thusly: “English is shmenglish without a dash of Yiddish.”
