Word: yiddisher
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...sailed with his new wife Dvorah to the Ottoman Empire's province of Palestine. Hebrew today is the mother tongue of 3 million Israelis, but when Ben-Yehuda landed, there were fewer than 25,000 Jews in Palestine, and most of them spoke Arabic, Yiddish or the Spanish-Jewish dialect known as Ladino. Exactly 100 years ago, in August, Dvorah gave birth to a son in Jerusalem. Ben-Yehuda named him Ben-Zion and vowed that he would become the first baby since Roman times to learn Hebrew as his mother tongue...
...there's little that he can do to overcome it. Joseph Bologna, Jessica Harper, Bill Macy, and Adolph Green are all fine character actors, but in this case, we've seen the characters too often before. Most of them are in the well-worn uptight-showbiz mold; the Yiddish momma schtick at Benjy's Brooklyn home is an excruciating parade of old cliches. Only one memorable move emerges from this stew of reheated vaudeville; when Benjy announces: "We Jews know about two things suffering, and where to get great Chinese food...
...Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten records a joke about the Lipshitz Curse: a blond at a charity ball is wearing an enormous diamond. She boasts that there are three great diamonds in the world-the Hope, the Kohinoor and her own, the Lipshitz. But, unfortunately, she tells her friends, with the Lipshitz diamond comes the Lipshitz Curse. "The Lipshitz Curse? What is the Lipshitz Curse?" The blond sighs: "Lipshitz...
Such optimism would seem empty if Singer did not test his characters so severely while they achieve it. His no-nonsense prose prohibits moral posturing. All of these stories were written first in Yiddish, a language that draws rough vitality from the vernacular; Singer has seen to it that his many translators preserve the outspoken qualities of the originals. (Gimpel the Fool was rendered in English by Saul Bellow, a rare instance of one future Nobel laureate transcribing another.) And the passage of time has ratified Singer's vision of the living and the dead busily coexisting. The places...
...suggested by saying already every two minutes. Nor is he aided by Director Milton Moss's attempts to create crowd scenes by bunching his cast in clumps. Doubtless the profit motive made the producers wheel a pushcart show to the Broadway stage. They might have recalled another Yiddish proverb: The longest road is the one that leads to the pocket. -By Stefan Kanfer