Word: yiddishisms
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...Donna Donna, Miss Baez uses a flowing translation of a lyric song composed by Sholom Secunda for the Yiddish musical theatre. Although it has long been a favorite of Jewish folksingers, and was recorded recently by Theodore Bikel and Martha Schlamme, Miss Baez gives it a delicate, and very personal touch...
Part of the phenomenon is the author himself. André Schwarz-Bart, 32, is largely self-taught. Born in the long-embattled French-German border city of Metz, the son of a Polish-Jewish peddler, Andre spoke Yiddish as his first language and picked up French in the streets while selling newspapers to help support his family. At 14, after the Nazis invaded France, Andre lost his parents to the gas chambers, subsequently escaped a French internment camp to join the Maquis, and was finally mustered out of the French army at an underage 17. As a postwar tractor-factory...
...lactic accents in a series of private schools, Mike went on to the University of Chicago as a pre-med student but soon drifted toward the theater. A year younger than Mike, Elaine was equally adrift when they met in 1955. Born in Philadelphia, the daughter of the late Yiddish Actor Jack Berlin, she has seen the inside of more high schools around the country than James B. Conant, was married and divorced in her teens (she has a ten-year-old daughter). Together, Mike and Elaine took up with a Chicago campus theatrical group that later became the Compass...
...finally forced to take it on the lam westward, one jump ahead of the secret police. The rest of Lasik's nonstop global pratfall is something of an anticlimax-but not to Lasik himself. In Germany he is delighted to find that "everyone around him spoke Yiddish, though in a slightly imperfect way." In his lunatic vision, the Weimar Republic becomes a memorable cartoon-rather as if George Grosz had been a Disney animator. On a diet of zwieback, Lasik sits in a druggist's window advertising the shocking effects of not drinking cod liver oil; later...
...selections in most cases are shrewd and useful. The authors have worked both sides of the street in every major slang-producing area-advertising, journalism, sports, show business, politics, Wall Street, the underworld, the armed forces, teenagers, jazz musicians, racial minorities and Texas. The contributions from Negro and Yiddish slang are particularly striking. Prudes may be disturbed by the volume of sexual references, but there is a fascination about the many different, often unlikely contexts in which sexual terms are employed in American slang...