One of the great aspects of this job (beyond the munificent honorarium) is that I get to hear from outstanding Yiddish scholars who correct my goofs or shortcomings. So, my first outing brought a correction from Hershl Glaser of YIVO, and now comes Prof. Rakhmiel Peltz, Director of Judaic Studies at Drexel University, to expand on my answer to the query about "asheem bloody."



Readers may recall that I traced that distorted, Anglicized "Yiddish" expression to the actual Yiddish, ash un porekh - ash and dust, meaning total destruction. I averred, correctly, that ash un had been corrupted to "asheem," and fudged about how porekh had become "bloody."

Dr. Peltz came to my rescue, noting that there's a similar expression, ash un blote - ash and mud - that would explain the corrupted "bloody." Actually, both variants appear in the Modern English-Yiddish/Yiddish-English Dictionary (p. 715, if you're checking).



Now, the editor of this Newsletter asks the meaning of mit a nodl, on a nodl - with a needle, without a needle. It's from a Yiddish folksong, one of many from the Enlightenment (haskole) period that glorified handicrafts as an aide in weaning 19th century shtetl-dwellers from the profitless trading that allowed them to "starve by their wits." The chorus of the song* goes: mit a nodl, on a nodl, ney ikh mir bekoved godl - "with a needle, without a needle, I sew away in the greatest of honor."

*Rubin, Ruth, A Treasury of Jewish Folksong, Schocken Books, NY, 1964,
p. 80 
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