Between the Holy and Profane: 

    Yiddish Songs About Sex, Prostitutes, Angels, and Peace

A program of lesser-known, beautiful, inspiring, mystical, and slightly shocking songs culled from the Meir Noy collection of Hebrew and Yiddish songs in Jerusalem.   

Sharon Jan Bernstein (voice, piano) has presented her rare Yiddish repertoire in  festivals and concerts in Europe, Israel and the US.  In addition to concertizing and teaching Yiddish song, she is the Cantor at Congregation Sha'ar Zahav in San Francisco.  

Sunday, March 6, 2PM 

8339 W. 3^rd Street (East of La Cienega, at Flores)

Los Angeles, CA

Refreshments & Valet Parking Available 

Admission: $12 CIYCL members; $15 General
Free for full-time students

For reservations and information, contact Miriam Koral

(310) 745-1190 | miriam@yiddishinstitute.org

The Vortsman, meaning "man of his word," brings you the story of a different Yiddish word or phrase each month.

Written by Hershl Hartman, long-time Yiddishkayt Board Member and Education Director at the Sholem Community 

However March may blow in or out, there's a heavy bag of stuff for "Der Vortsman" this month, so here we go:

BREAKING NEWS! A widely-reported paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded that "people who speak more than one language are better at prioritizing tasks and working on multiple projects at one time." The study was based on research involving electroencephalographs, MRIs and eye-movement devices. So much for parents in previous Jewish American generations who avoided speaking Yiddish at home so as not to "confuse" the children. Bilingual is better.

And more breaking news: A new restaurant in Culver City, recently glowingly reviewed in the L.A. "Times," features Asian noodle dishes. Its name: Lukshon. The reviewer, understandably, missed the play on words. lukshn is Yiddish for...noodles. 

And yet more "breaking news:" In the United Kingdom, this is census month. Yiddish was, supposedly, among the many languages into which the questionnaire was translated. Ye Olde Vortsman was assigned by a British firm to proofread the translation and...s'iz im finster gevorn in di oygn-everything went black before his eyes. It was full of transliterated English terms for which there are common Yiddish words: instead of shloftsimer, for example, there was "bedrum," dutifully spelled in yidishe oysyes-Yiddish/Hebrew letters. In addition, the syntax was more English than Yiddish. An email exchange with the translator confirmed my guess: though she knew Standard Yiddish, she'd done her work with the intended users in mind: Hasidic and Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews who speak and read the recently-developed dialect known as "heymish"-homey.

Der Vortsman will stick with Standard Yiddish...

Back on this side of the other pond there was the Angeleno who needed the actual Yiddish spelling of the name "menakhmen" and who wanted to know whether the ampersand (&) was ever used in Yiddish literature. He learned that the Hebrew-origin name was actually menakhem, spelled in both languages mem-nun-khes-shlus mem, and that we'd never seen an ampersand in printed Yiddish. Our best guess for the reason: it faces the wrong way!

Then Claire Bergen-a onetime intern at Yiddishkayt and an awesome klezmer fiddler as well as an inventive first-grade teacher at the Sholem Sunday School (www.sholem.org) - wanted to know the proper Yiddish name for her klezmer group. It's already half-Yiddish: The Shpil (game, or play), but what Yiddish article would properly replace "The"? der shpil (masculine)? di shpil (feminine)? dos shpil (neuter)?

Herewith, the grammatical reply: in all but Lithuanian (litvak) Yiddish, it is dos shpil -the neuter article. Litvakish has no neuter gender, so it uses the feminine, di shpil. (We'll leave the complexities of declensions for another month.)

On the other hand, heymish disregards the "niceties" of gender and declension: whatever's handy is okay.

And then there's the Purim connection (March 20, this year). Wikipedia tells us that a boisterous play performed on Purim is a "Purim spiel." Oy! That's a Germanized spelling which, in modern English, means "a lengthy, usually extravagant speech." What the Wiki-experts meant to say, of course, is purim-shpil. Of course...

Finally, a reader surfing the internet came upon the Sholem website, noted above, and saw a reference to belfer. Since she had recently interviewed a member of a family called Belfer, she was curious. Der Vortsman sent her a full-page article on the belfer in the East European townlets-shtetlekh (not shtetls, f'hevvinsakes). The article, in PDF form, is available to all on request, but the soundbite answer is: what we now call "teacher's aides" were called bahelfer-helpers-in the elementary religious school (kheyder) of the old shtetl. The term was contracted to belfer and became a family name, as well.