The Joke's on Irving Howe
By NEAL KARLEN
Here's a question, Jewish book lovers: What would Irving
Howe have thought about books such as Yiddish
with Dick and Jane (2004), Yiddish with George and Laura (2006), and Yiddish for Dogs (2007)?
Answer: They would have driven the revered literary critic absolutely meshugge (comme on dit). Remember
that Howe, author of the magisterial, 714-page World of our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and
the Life They Found and Made There, tried to assassinate, in the New York Times, Leo Rosten’s classic, The Joys of Yiddish, when it was first
published in 1968. Rosten’s work, a relaxed, usually funny lexicon of Yiddish
words and phrases, is a wonderful volume that sparked a renewed interest in the
mameloshn (mother tongue) among 1960s
Jews who could spell “assimilation” but had no idea what “Ashkenazic” meant.
“Something about the Broadway-cum-TV tone of Mr. Rosten’s book,” Howe wrote,
with what Washington spy novels refer to as “extreme prejudice”—“the tone of
elbowing, [and] backslapping ‘local color’ gives me the chills.” Behind
Rosten’s tinsel, Howe wrote, was more tinsel.
It's safe to assume, therefore, that the bestselling 104-page volume, Yiddish with Dick and Jane, would have
given the late critic a conniption fit of epic proportions. Which is too bad: Yiddish with Dick and Jane is good fun.
In it, co-authors Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman take the noted
grammar-school icons and transport them to an alternate world in which Dick and
Jane grow up and spout Yiddish words in modern situations. Jane, for instance,
now sells real estate, and she lugs her open-house signs to and from her car. “See
Jane schlep. Schlep, Jane, schlep. Schlep, Schlep, Schlep."
While our contemporary Yiddish joke books are admittedly light and fluffy,
they are also gut fur di yidn—good
for the Jews. They are especially helpful for those with no sense memory of
Jewish heritage (kids, say, whose grandparents were not born in Eastern
Europe). They're for people who march for Darfur but can’t spell “Dachau. ”
These books are approachable reads that initiate young, ignorant, and/or
curious people into Yiddish, the sui
generis language of magic and loss. They're also good for people who like
to laugh. Who can’t appreciate the word for freeloaders—shnorrers—and smile at how they shamelessly come to Jane’s
open-house with no intention of buying, all the while happily noshing for free?
Shnor, Shnorrers, Shnor. Shnor Shnor
Shnor.
Weiner and
Davilman successfully hit for the fences again in Yiddish with George and Laura (the Bushes, of course). Here there
are true lessons of realpolitik. Why listen to Obama rail on and on about the
president, when this volume points out with great succinctness that Dubya is a
“shmegegge” and his pearl-smothered
mother is a "farbissineh."
Now, it’s
said that the biggest failing of der
ganzer macher Bob Dylan (who’s Yiddish-filled high school notebooks sold
for $80,000 at Christie's a couple years ago) is the approixmately
1,789,000 would-be Dylans who still clog subway stations and French streets
playing bad harmonica. So it goes with Yiddish joke books.Take the
copy-cat Yiddish for Dogs, by the
apparently well-intentioned Janet Perr. This book is apparently not good for
the Jews, or dog lovers, or most members of the human race, and will probably
go the way of Laugh, Jew, Laugh
(1936). Filled with pictures of dogs that only treacle lovers could love, Yiddish for Dogs make the questionable
claims that dogs can kvell or
recognize a mentsch.
Oy.
But this
silly volume is ultimately gut fur dem
yidn because unlettered, sentimental Jewish dog-owners—and the books they
read—still belong in our family. Jewish peoplehood is a knot that can't be
undone.
Speaking
of which: why exactly did Irving Howe get his gottkes (underwear) all knotted up over The Joys of Yiddish? In the Joys,
wrote Howe, “Yiddish is torn out of its cultural context, its integral world of
meaning and reference.” Perhaps Howe, a true member of the Yiddishist pantheon,
may have temporarily forgotten his Yiddishkeit
here. This “cultural context,” allegedly missing from The Joys of Yiddish, made little sense at a time when most Jews
considered expressing their religion tapping their toes to “Sunrise, Sunset,”
then eating at Mama Leone’s. And that was 1968.
But maybe
the best explanation of why Yiddish joke books still matter came in a 1946
volume by Sammy Levinson (later “Sam” of Everything
But Money fame) entitled Meet
the Folks: A Session of American-Jewish Humor. Why
was it important, Levinson asked, a year after the Holocaust, to include in a
Yiddish lexicon words such as koved, the
Yiddish term for honor, which he glosses as "Allowing the other guy to pay
the check."
Said Levinson: "[Today’s] grandchildren speak very little Yiddish. Generally speaking,
they know less of Yiddish than their grandparents knew of English. This
dictionary contains remnants of grandpa’s Yiddish which still circulate among
the younger of American-Jews. They are retained because they are sweet and
colorful. They are richly idiomatic and ‘hit the spot.’… They ‘belonged’ to our
people. They are precious because the places like Jewish Poland where people
used them most as their very own are fewer and the people who sang to their
children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish and made love in Yiddish are nearly
all gone.”
The Emes, Sammy, Emes. Emes, Emes, Emes.