Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish 9780804780117

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BLESSINGS, CURSES, HOPES, AND FEARS

Nostalg ia Jew is hness is a lullaby for old men gumming soake d w h it e bread. .  , mode r ni st Yiddi sh p oet

CONTRAVERSIONS JEWS AND OTHER DIFFERENCES

DANIEL BOYARIN, CHANA KRONFELD, AND NAOMI SEIDMAN,

EDITORS

The task of ‘‘ The Science of Juda ism’’ is to g ive Juda ism a decent burial .  , founde r of ninetee nth - ce ntur y philolo g ical Jew i sh Studies

BLESSINGS, CURSES, HOPES, AND FEARS PSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS IN YIDDISH

JAMES A. MATISOFF

Stanford Universit y Press • Stanford, Califor nia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©  by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Originally published in  by the Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Inc. (ISHI), Philadelphia Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Matisoff, James A. Blessings, curses, hopes and fears : psycho-ostensive expressions in Yiddish / James A. Matisoff. p. cm. — (Contraversions—Jews and other differences) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.  --- (cloth : alk. paper). —  --- (pbk : alk. paper) . Yiddish language—Terms and phrases. . Proverbs, Yiddish. 3. Blessing and cursing. I. Title. II. Contraversions (Stanford, Calif.)  .  '.—dc - Original printing  Last figure below indicates year of this printing:           Designed by Sandy Drooker Typeset by Tseng Information Systems in / Minion

to th e m em or y of Ur i el We i nre ich , zikhroy ne liv rokhe

and o f my parents , Ma u r i ce a n d B e r n i ce Mat is o ff , ale ye m ha shole m

CONTENTS

     xi  xxi      xxiii  xxix       xxxi

1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 SEMANTIC SUBTYPES OF PSYCHO-OSTENSIVE EXPRESSIONS 9

3 BONO-RECOGNITION: THANKS AND CONGRATULATIONS 11

4 MALO-RECOGNITION: LAMENTATION AND SYMPATHY 17 5 PETITIVE ATTITUDES 23 6 BONO-PETITION 29 . Classification by Desiderata, 31; . Action-Oriented Blessings and God’s Help, 34; . Parenthetical Blessings, 36; . Theo-Bono-Petitives: Liturgical Blessings, 39; . Ironical Commentaries on the Petitive Attitude, 41

7 MALO-FUGITION: DELIVER US FROM EVIL! 43 . Banishing the Evil from Consciousness, 44; . Pronouncing the Magic Word kholile and Its Relatives, 48; . Invoking the Aid of a Benevolent God, 52; . Appeasing an Awful and Incomprehensible God, 54; . Exorcising the Demons of Misfortune, 57; . The Scapegoat Approach, 62

8 PSYCHO-OSTENSIVES RELATING TO THE DEAD 65 9 ALLO-MALO-PETITION: CURSES! 71 . Expressions Already Encountered in Other Psycho-Ostensive Contexts, 72; . Curses with ruekh ‘‘Ghost, Evil Spirit,’’ 76; . Calling Down Disease, 77; . Calling Down Death, 80; . Attenuated Curses, 84

10 SWEARING OATHS 89 . Bono-Petitive Oaths, 90; . Auto-Malo-Petitive Oaths, 93; . Malo-Fugitive Oaths, 94; . Manipulation of Oaths for Special Effects, 95

11 CONCLUSION AND COMMENCEMENT 97 . Syntactic Properties of Psycho-Ostensive Expressions, 97; . The Atomic Psychic States and Their Interrelationships, 100; . Involvement Versus Detachment: Compulsion Versus Freedom in the Use of PsychoOstensives, 101; . The Expressive Function of Language: Word Power, 103

12 ‘EPES AN ÉPILOG’: THE RELEVANCE OF YIDDISH PSYCHOOSTENSIVES TO RECENT AND FUTURE WORK IN LINGUISTICS AND OTHER FIELDS 107 . Field Linguistics, Anthropology, Ethnography, Folklore, 107; . Sociolinguistics, 110; . Psychosemantics, Psychology, Psychotherapy, 111  117      149   ( ) 155

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Why This Book Isn’t, God Forbid, Out-of-Date (to be read after reading the book)

Yiddish today As Chana Kronfeld puts it: The revival of interest in Yiddish cultural and linguistic studies in recent years has really been quite remarkable. Intensive programs on Yiddish language are offered in numerous places. . . . Scholarship on Yiddish language, literature, and culture is increasingly being done not only within the context of Jewish studies, but also as a paradigm example in the conversation on issues of cultural identity, hybridity, and ethnicity. A similar revival is taking place in popular culture, where Yiddish, no longer threatening a successful Jewish acculturation in mainstream society, is being reclaimed by a community that once wished to deny any connection to it. Now that the revival of Hebrew is complete, it has become really ‘‘in’’ to study Yiddish as a foreign language (even in Israel), and increasingly the history of Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism is explored and embraced.1

Although it must be admitted that Yiddish is still in retreat as a spoken language, in the United States and elsewhere, and that nothing will ever bring it back to the status it enjoyed before World War II, it clings stubbornly to life in a hundred ways. Books and periodicals continue to appear in the language or in bilingual editions.2 The most heartening dexi

velopment for the preservation of Yiddish literature has been the success of the National Yiddish Book Center,3 which has rescued millions of Yiddish books from attics and cellars all over the world, restoring them to good condition, reproducing or digitizing them, and making them available to individuals and libraries everywhere. There are Yiddish-speaking summer camps (some of them oriented toward computer literacy) in New England and upstate New York, sponsored by organizations like the Workmen’s Circle. The growing communities of ultra-Orthodox Chasidim in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States and Israel 4 use Yiddish as their everyday language, although the American variety is increasingly influenced by English and contains an extra-large component of Hebrew/Aramaic words and phrases in its lexicon. It is as the object of academic study that Yiddish truly continues to flourish. Distinguished work continues to be done on the grammar and lexicon of the language.5 To the list of universities that have traditionally been strong in Yiddish (like Columbia), we must now add Oxford, where a chair in Yiddish studies was recently endowed,6 and Kôchi University, on the southern coast of the island of Shikoku, Japan, where the leading Japanese scholar of Yiddish, Kazuo Ueda, carries on his work. I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Ueda in Kôchi in , when he proposed that we collaborate on a Japanese-Yiddish phrase book. For a while I seriously considered this offer,7 although the pressure of other commitments has kept this project on the back burner. Still, interest in the Jews and in the Yiddish language continues to be strong in Japan.8 Lovers of Yiddish have of course invaded cyberspace. One can spend many happy hours per week on such E-mail networks as MENDELE, trading queries and information with people all over the world about points of Yiddish grammar or Jewish culture. Yiddish already possesses a fully developed computer-related vocabulary, with multiple competing neologisms (some of them very cute) waiting to be sorted out.9

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Yiddish psycho-ostensive expressions and recent intellectual currents in linguistics Linguistics nowadays (September ) is, thank God, vastly different from what it was back in the early ’s when this book was written. Formalism, though still hanging on in many quarters, no longer has a stranglehold on the field as a whole. Although many competing ‘‘theories of language’’ exist, the attitude of their partisans is less dogmatic and more eclectic. No more do linguists feel that in order to be intellectually respectable they have to approach language as if it were a branch of mathematical logic. Attempts have been made to rally those linguists who are not committed to any particular formalistic theory of grammar (like the ‘‘government and binding’’ promulgated at MIT) 10 under the banner of functionalism (see, e.g., Givón ). This is certainly a healthy cover term, but it fails to do justice to the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of the current linguistic scene in the United States and Europe. Yiddish psycho-ostensive expressions have turned out to be interesting and relevant to scholars working in a wide range of subspecialties in modern linguistics and allied disciplines. Although this is certainly not the place to attempt a systematic summary of recent developments in such burgeoning fields as psycho- and sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, or semantics, I would at least like to hit a few high spots 11—enough to show that this book is not, kholile, out-of-date, but rather as fresh as a herring plucked straight from the sea.

Jewish rhetoric, psychosemantics, and the emotive use of language Yiddish jokes constitute the largest body of data for this book. Jewish humor has had a worldwide influence and has certainly been decisive in shaping twentieth-century American humor, thanks to vaudeville, the borscht circuit, Hollywood, and television, although the average American might be unaware that every time he tells a story with the line ‘‘I have some good news and some bad news,’’ he is quoting from an ancient Jewish comic routine. Complex and intellectual, but often earthy PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

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and vulgar, quirky, cynical, and self-deprecating, Yiddish jokes—peppered with psycho-ostensive expressions—furnish paradigm examples of what Harshav calls ‘‘Jewish rhetoric.’’ 12 There is much truth to the stereotype that Jews love to talk and that they enjoy argument as a mode of social interaction (see Schiffrin ).13 This verbal jousting employs all the psychosemantic devices and rhetorical tropes known to man, including indirection, irony, sarcasm, litotes, hyperbole, enantiodromia, euphemism, and others too fierce to mention. The psycho-ostensives that lubricate Yiddish jokes, arguments, and ordinary conversation constitute a sort of paralanguage ‘‘in which all referential utterances are covered by, indeed controlled by, a layer of expressions which convey the speaker’s emotive and evaluative attitudes toward what he is saying. Some of these evaluative expressions represent the social norms of the community while the speaker himself shows his rather different or even opposite perception of the matter.’’ 14 The expressivity of Yiddish is implicit throughout this book and needs no belaboring here. What is interesting is how much the emotive side of language in general has become a focus of scholarly concern in recent years. No longer is research in this area dismissed as ‘‘linguistics lite’’ or as something best left to anthropologists or psychologists.15 Sophisticated analysis of conversational interactions has revealed how much speakers convey beyond the ‘‘literal’’ meaning of their utterances and how elusive these paralinguistic clues can be.16 Much of this communication is nonverbal, an aspect of Jewish rhetoric that I have largely neglected in this book but that is well illustrated by the following joke, where a man is being instructed on the use of the telephone: A yid iz amól aráyngegangen in telefón. Er hot gedárft redn mit ímitsn, hot er ober nit gevúst, vi me redt in telefón. Hot er gefrégt di meydl, vos iz dortn gezesn, zi zol im gebn tsu farshtéyn, vos er darf makhn. Zogt im di meydl, ‘‘Ir vet nemen mit eyn hant un vet ónklingen ota-do far dem dreydl, un mit der ander hant vet ir haltn di trube.’’ Git der yid af ir a kuk un zogt, ‘‘Vos heyst? Un mit vozhe vel ikh redn?’’ (Once a Jew went into a telephone exchange. He had to speak with somebody, but he didn’t know how you talk on the telephone. So he asked the girl who was sitting there to explain to him what he should xiv

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

do. So the girl says to him, ‘‘With one hand you take ahold of the crank right here and ring it up, and with the other hand you hold the tube.’’ The Jew gives her a look and says, ‘‘Huh? And with what, pray tell, will I talk?’’) (RP, p. ) 17

The prepatterned nature of language: Playing with set expressions Linguists have been paying increasing attention to the fact that a good portion of one’s daily communication with others involves the trading of ready-made, predictable, prepackaged utterances,18 ranging from the ‘‘Hello?’’ with which one answers the telephone to small talk about the weather (‘‘Hot enough for you?’’) to the uncounted thousands of miscellaneous conventionalized remarks that one throws into conversation (‘‘as I was saying’’; ‘‘other things being equal’’; ‘‘if I were you’’; ‘‘by the way’’; ‘‘I don’t want to be critical but . . .’’; ‘‘let me make one thing very clear’’). Entire conversations can be made up of formulaic expressions 19 so naturally that the interlocutors are not at all disturbed by their lack of ‘‘generative originality’’—indeed, quite to the contrary: there is great comfort and security to be derived from fitting into a wellworn communicative groove. Psycho-ostensive expressions in general 20 furnish choice material for researchers interested in the prepatterned, collocational nature of language. Steeped as they are in ‘‘Jewish rhetoric,’’ Yiddish psycho-ostensives have a flavor all their own; there is always a potential tension between the conventionalized words and the underlying feelings of the speaker. One formulaic genre that is mentioned only tangentially in this book is the proverb, arguably the fullest flowering of the set expression. What distinguishes a tired cliché from a beloved proverb or a brilliant bon mot? It would be revealing to undertake a crosslinguistic study of proverbs as a clue to cultural preoccupations.21 One might claim, for example, that our maxim ‘‘The squeaky wheel gets the grease’’ reflects a different attitude toward nonconformity or calling undue attention to oneself than the Japanese saying Deta kugi ga utareru (‘‘The protruding nail gets hammered’’). Yet it is easy enough to find contradictory proverbs within PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

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a single culture, as in the oft-cited English pairs ‘‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’’ versus ‘‘He who hesitates is lost’’ or ‘‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’’ versus ‘‘Many hands make light work.’’ Just as intriguing as cross-cultural differences in proverbial wisdom is the deep psychosemantic similarity one frequently finds among the proverbs of different cultures, despite often vast differences in the images, analogies, similes, and metaphors they contain. Thus it is not too surprising to find that the Yiddish proverb Az men brit zikh op oyf heysn, blozt men oyf kaltn (‘‘If you’re scalded by the hot, you blow on the cold’’; Ayalti, pp. –) corresponds quite closely in imagery to the Russian obšëgšis’ na moloke, duyut na vodu (‘‘Having been burnt by milk, you blow on water’’). Yet very similar meanings are proverbially conveyed, although via quite different images, even in geographically and culturally alien languages like Lahu ( p4 chè6 jɔ qo, p:-mà là kà6 k