Word: yiddishe
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...superb fall production of Philadelphia Here I Come, the overlapping ambiguity between the two characters who play the schizophrenic selves of one person made for a rich interplay. Melvoin has consciously chosen to differentiate very clearly the two main characters in Rosencrantz. Jeff Rubin as Rosencrantz plays a good Yiddish Sancho Panza character who alternates between dawdling silliness and self-indignant outrages over nothing. But our comic response is much more problematic towards Guildenstern (Steve O'Donnell), played as a brooding almost Hamlet-like character who utters Stoppard's lines dripping with metaphysical existentialisms as if they were completely serious...
...Poorly constructed, too prone to phrases like "our mouths melted like liquid," it has a shapeless, self-indulgent plot and weak characterizations, especially of the men. But Isadora obviously has wide appeal. Says her creator: "Fear of Flying is a litmus test for everybody's mishegoss [Yiddish for craziness]." Warren Farrell, a spokesman for the men's liberation movement, feels that Fear of Flying will help free both sexes. As women take more initiative and responsibility for their sex lives, he believes, "some of the pressure will be removed from men." Feminist Spokeswoman Betty Friedan hails the book...
...director has become a socialist in Warsaw, and the frustrated, would-be Dreyfus has fled to Germany with his wife. Germany seems a safe place to be, safer than either Poland or England. The older Jews are left to act their plays alone. They put on an old Yiddish match-maker comedy that closes with a little song and dance routine about things getting better someday. The irony is tragic and painful, for we know what lies ahead for these people...
Joisey for Jersey. The origins of Brooklynese are controversial. It has many characteristics, but its hallmark is the pronunciation of the diphthong er as if it were oi (like Joisey for Jersey) and vice versa. Some linguists believe that Brooklynese stems from German and Yiddish. Griffith argues forcefully that it is rooted in Gaelic. He notes that the dialect appeared after a wave of Irish immigrants settled in Brooklyn in the late 19th century. Moreover, Griffith finds that the trademark Brooklyn diphthong oi also appears in many Gaelic words; taoiseach (leader) and barbaroi (barbarians), for example. He also points...
...busts. In Chicago a foolish bigoted judge puts on a show for the electorate. It's Ash Wednesday and the jurors he addresses all sport ashened foreheads. "It was like the goddammed Spanish Inquisition." The plain clothesmen who are sent out to gather evidence against him misinterpret Yiddish phrases. Gestures of benediction are mistaken for gestures of masturbation. Meanwhile his earnings have gone down from $350,000 to $6,000 and he shuttles in and out of hospitals, claiming to his listener (and implicitly through Speiser to us) that his drug habit involves merely prescribed psychiatric medicine...