Word: yiddishisms
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Hebrew and Yiddish: Language and Literature...
...YORK'S IMMIGRATION officials gave my maternal great grandfather his name. "What kind of work will you do?" I can imagine an Ellis Island inspector asking him. "I can sew," my great grandfather probably answered in Yiddish. "A tailor. Alright, Morris. Stitch is your new American name." Henceforth the man would be known by his product. The confusions and contradictions of the arrival, the harrowing journey from the homeland, and the family still trapped on the Russian shtetl, anxiously waiting for word to come join him, were glibly ignored by this new alien world...
...life on the East Side overwhelmed them. The interminable hours in the sweatshops, families crowded six to a room in the tenements, the growth of crime and near epidemics of dysentery, typhoid and tuberculosis, the "tailor's disease," seemed to reflect the chaos of their lives. Howe quotes the Yiddish writer Leon Kobrin...
...ambitions, the collective dream of Jewish fulfillment and the personal wish to improve the lot of their sons and daughters could be satisfied at the same time." In the ambitious second half of the book, Howe analyzes Yiddishkeit as the culture of the postponed decision. The "modernized" fiction of Yiddish culture grappled with universal themes of class struggle, personal relations and urban anomie as well as with the Jewish experience in eastern Europe. Uneasy Yiddish theater, trapped between the artistic aspirations of its playwrights and the communal experiences clamoured for by its audiences, emerged as brilliant, outrageous theatricality, a cross...
...coat on, tapping away at a computer terminal. In the cafeteria a radio speaker has been playing classical music all night to an empty room. At midnight the music yields to a recording of two comedians performing live. They're telling jokes and singing folk songs in a thick Yiddish accent. Applause and laughter echo from the radio into the darkness...