Word: yiddisher
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...Motol was never too far off. Though Chaim Weizmann was fluent in seven languages, it was in Yiddish that he felt most at home. His humor too was peculiarly Yiddish; his stories the wry, comic-sad little folk tales that Jews tell to illustrate their precarious position in an oftentimes hostile world...
Most of the steady, old hands of both parties (e.g., the Massachusetts duo, Republican Leader Joseph Martin and Democratic Leader John McCormack) will be back. One old face that will be missing: the pudgy countenance of New York's Democratic Representative Donald L. O'Toole a Yiddish-speaking Irishman, whose Brooklyn district was carved into a new shape last year by the Republican state legislature. In the new district, which gerrymanders through Brooklyn taking in some safe G.O.P. territory, the veteran O'Toole (eight terms) lost to Republican Lawyer Francis E. Dorn...
Some of the best modern writers have been self-conscious artists, working for the admiration of small followings and often requiring cabalistic analysis before they could be fully understood. Not, however, Sholom Aleichem, the Ukraine-born Yiddish humorist who died in The Bronx 36 years ago. Sholom Aleichem (real name: Solomon Rabinowitz) was a genuine folk artist. Between himself and his Yiddish public throughout the world there was an instinctive understanding; they could grasp his twists of idiom, his slightest reference to a Torah phrase or a ghetto custom...
...first two (TIME, June 24, 1946 and Jan. 31, 1949), collections of stories, revealed him as a tender satirist and a wild humorist who sometimes capered off into the topsy-turvy world of surrealism. The third book, Wandering Star, is a rambling, picaresque novel about the life of Yiddish actors in the Europe of 50 or 60 years ago. Aleichem wrote best in the story form, but Wandering Star, for all its meandering pace, is often a funny and touching novel...
...Flew. Sholom Aleichem was a master at capturing the folk poetry and humorous abuses of Yiddish speech, and even in a rather stiff translation something of the verbal crackle comes through. When a character wants to dismiss a story as nonsense, he says: "A cow flew over the roof and laid an egg." The actors' scorn of domesticity is expressed in their saying: "The best marriage is the worst death." When a director wants to tell the angel that the best of plans take money, he cracks: "Without fingers you can't thumb your nose...