Word: yiddishe
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...adult heroes in the book become weird variants of Groucho Marx, perhaps spawned by Michaels' boyhood watching the Yiddish theater: wise guys who fast-talk on capitalist society's turf and win. In "Reflections of a Wild Kid," Michaels's persona makes it with an ex-girlfriend by removing the woman's present boyfriend, a nerdish college professor. The persona's method: piss out the window of the woman's apartment, hide in the closet and let the police seize the wrong man--the boyfriend--when they come around. Michaels describes this as "genius...
Director-Writer Joan Silver, who used to produce educational shorts and is making her feature debut, has a palpable affection for her characters and a passion for period detail. She has made excellent use of limited resources, kept much of the dialogue in Yiddish (translated in subtitles) and evoked a persuasive sense of the past. Indeed, Silver has little trouble with her "little movie's" practical problems. It is quite another kind of challenge that confounds...
...Rothschild plays a melody "so passionately sad and full of grief that the listeners weep ... and force him to play it as many as ten times." In Passions, Isaac Bashevis Singer's new collection, all 20 tales recall the earlier story, with its Russian theme transmuted by vibrant Yiddish inflection...
...problem is that the language learned at home and in the streets can be crippling in America if the black child-or the Puerto Rican raised on Spanish, the Jewish child raised on Yiddish-does not also learn the standard English that is the currency of opportunity. J. Mitchell Morse, a professor of English at Temple University, writes vehemently: "To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed, good writing is inherently subversive ... Black English, the shuffling speech of slavery, serves the purposes of white racism." Of course, there is angry argument over whether black dialect...
...blacks and whites. As with some other black-white questions, it can be as much a matter of economic class as of race. Rural poor whites have trouble with standard English just as some poor blacks do. Says Jean Stafford: "I feel about black English as I do about Yiddish. Theirs is a lingua franca that they are free to use among one another, but if they are not making themselves understood to those outside their group, then they can expect nothing but misinterpretation. There has to be an official language, an acceptable language...