Yiddish - A Struggle for Survival

Broadcast from the BBC World Service: "Dennis Marks travels to New York to discover what has become of Yiddish and how much of the language survives today."

Interesting, but I have some quibbles.

1. Most importantly, if he was looking for Yiddish, he was on the wrong side of the East River. You can hear plenty of Yiddish in the right neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Not just from old, European-born people, but from young mothers speaking to toddlers and vice versa. I've heard it in South Williamsburg, which is mostly Satmarer Hasidim, and I bet it's also a living language in Crown Heights, which I understand is mostly Lubavitcher. Maybe he'll get there next week, but it doesn't sound like it.

And of course there are neighborhoods in Jerusalem where you can hear it too.

1. Di goldene medina is America, not New York specifically. Medina is city in Arabic and maybe in Hebrew, but apparently in Yiddish it's "land" or "country".

2. Most serious contemporary Yiddishists are driven crazy by statements like those from Miriam Hoffman about how Yiddish is full of joie de vivre. It's a language. Like any language, you can use it to express joie de vivre, Weltschmerz, or what you think Barack Obama or of this year's Nobel Prize in physics.

3. He doesn't name the museum. If anyone is looking for it, it's the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Worth a visit. Not specifically Jewish.

4. I tried to find Cab Calloway doing Utt da Zoy but it's not up on YouTube. So here he is singing A bee gezindt, as long as you're healthy, his other big Yiddish hit. That's Dizzy Gillespie briefly on trumpet; the dancers are the Nicholas Brothers. And contrary to what the man interviewed on the BBC says, he never lived in the suburbs of Baltimore, and there wouldn't have been many Jews in the suburbs at the time either. For that matter, until after the war, there wasn't much of anybody in the suburbs.

5. The diamond district is West, not East, 47th Street.

I haven't heard the program yet, but "medina" is country, land in Hebrew as well. I think the Yiddish is medine (ending in -e), no?
The Yiddish form is also used for country in the sense of countryside, as opposed to city, so "di goldene medine" would have to be America, not New York specifically.

Thanks, shilgia. I don't how they spell it in Yiddish. I've seen in in English as goldene medina, but that might be influenced by Medina in Saudi Arabia and the family name Medina etc. I guess it's possible that in Yiddish it's written it the same way medina is written in Hebrew, as they do with Hebrew words like kosher and pesach, in which case it's anyone's guess what YIVO would say the English transliteration should be.

Another niggle: When Ms. Hoffman on the audio and the BBC in the summary list the languages that contributed to Yiddish, they leave out Polish and the other Slavic languages, which probably contributed more vocabulary to Yiddish than anything except German (and possibly Hebrew).

I'm looking Forward to listening to this at the weekend. While Yiddish has surely been through a struggle for survival I was under the impression that Yiddish was under going a revival in the US, with universities offering courses that had large take up rates.

Vinny - I was waiting for informed comments from someone like you, so thank you. I had a feeling that there might be inaccuracies in the report but don't know enough about either New York or Yiddish to put my finger on them.

I was under the impression that Yiddish was under going a revival in the US, with universities offering courses that had large take up rates.

My old university, McGill, in Montreal (Canada) offered Yiddish. I'm not sure what the take-up rates were like, though.

Leo Rosten used goldeneh medina+ because he wanted to be sure the final syllable of "goldene" was pronounced. The updated +Joys of YIddish+ says that the YIVO spelling is +goldene medina.
Rosten says
> Goldene medina meant America: land of freedom, justice opportunity--and protection against pogoms. Rarely did I hear such overtones of gratitude as went into the utterance of this compound noun.

He gives a second definition of "fool's paradise," when used ironically or sarcastically. "A poor tailor who lived in a cellar and worked for a pittance" might say bitterly that New York is some goldene medina.

#4 -- There's some evidence of that in the report, M_B, with the young people in the Second Avenue Yiddish theater.

I was immediately annoyed by Marks referring to Yiddish as "jargon."