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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/13267/full/13267/berkeley-bookseller-s-side-shtick-is-a-treasure-trove-of-yiddishisms/ <br /><br /> <b>Berkeley bookseller’s side shtick is a treasure trove of Yiddishisms</b> <br /> Friday, May 19, 2000 | by <p>JOSHUA BRANDT </p> <br /><br /><p>Deep within the chambers of Cody's Books in Berkeley (usually around lunchtime), mild-mannered sales director Ira Steingroot assumes the persona of his alter-ego: Moishe the Mensch—Yiddish Superhero.<br /><br /> Moishe dispatches villains with an array of moves that would make Muhammad Ali's poetry seem like bad haiku.<br /><br /> Potch!! Zetz!! Frosk!! Klop!! Shlug!!<br /><br /> Then comes the coup de grace. After giving the shmegegge a swift kick in the tuchis, Moishe hurls his signature insult.<br /><br /> "Zol dir vaksen tzibbeles fun pupik!—Onions should grow from your navel!"<br /><br /> "Yiddish is a language of earthiness and humor, but also of pathos and heartbreak." said Steingroot, who is Cody's Judaica buyer, "<br /><br /> He should know. He recently designed a deck of "Yiddish Knowledge Cards." The cards, which sell for $9.95, run the gamut from religious sayings to quite a few expressions concerning the less pristine functions of the human body.<br /><br /> Although the set of 48 cards offers no exploits of Moishe the Mensch, it does give a brief history of the Yiddish language and details its cultural significance to the Jews.<br /><br /> For those people who enjoy a stiff drink every now and again, for example, there is a veritable tavern of Yiddish lore. One card starts with the shikker (drunk), who had perhaps enjoyed too many shnaps (Eastern European whiskey) on the way to becoming farshnoshket (really sloshed).<br /><br /> For those more historically inclined, the cards serve up the Ashkenazi version of the Hatfields and McCoys. The rift occurred between the Litvaks of Lithuania, who put a supreme value on study and logic, and the Galitzianers of Poland, who focused more on prayer and emotions.<br /><br /> Since the Litvaks viewed the Galitzianers as "irrational and uneducated" and the Galitzianers viewed the Litvaks as "cold fish," the card states that it was impossible for a Litvak to be married to a Galitzianer.<br /><br /> Steingroot himself grew up in a haimish town—Toledo, Ohio—a town that he compares to Anatevka of "Fiddler on the Roof" fame.<br /><br /> "Toledo was this little town with an intense core of Jewish culture," he said, "and I grew up in a pretty observant household. Judaism was an essential part of what we did."<br /><br /> Yiddish was the second tongue of the Steingroot household, where it was spoken as code language between the parents. "But we could understand the gist of it," Steingroot recalled with a laugh.<br /><br /> One of the main reasons for the Yiddish language's survival (however tenuous it may be), is its everyday applicability, according to Steingroot.<br /><br /> "People like shmendricks and shlubs still exist," Steingroot said. "You encounter these people every day, and English just isn't satisfactory in explaining them."<br /><br /> Additionally, Steingroot said the Yiddish language offers a deep insight into the human psyche. "Yiddish is an excellent tool for delineating personality types."<br /><br /> Only Yiddish, he notes, differentiates between a shlemiel (a klutz) and a shlemazl (an unlucky man). Or a graub (a coarse figure) and a shlub (a less-offensive slob).<br /><br /> The zenith of the Yiddish language, according to Steingroot, was between 1850 and 1940 when there were roughly 11 million Jews throughout Europe who spoke it as their primary language.<br /><br /> "The Holocaust obviously wiped out a large part of the Yiddish culture. But it was further damaged when it became a sort of pariah language in Israel," he said.<br /><br /> "Thank God for the state of Israel. But Yiddish was unfortunately seen as a product of Germany, and it just wasn't acceptable to speak it. Now I think it's creeping back into the culture, but a lot has been lost."<br /><br /> A longtime jazz aficionado, Steingroot finds many parallels between the rise and decline of Yiddish and what has been referred to as the only true American art form.<br /><br /> "When I was in high school, I saw a lot of the big-name jazz cats," Steingroot reminisced. "Guys like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, the Jazz Messengers…<br /><br /> "Jazz has a spirituality to it, an earthiness and communal sensibility that you can also see in the Yiddish culture."<br /><br /> Noting that black and Jewish musicians often occupied prominent positions together in the heyday of jazz music from the mid-1940s to 1960s, Steingroot said that both groups had a common history of oppression that shaped their cultures.<br /><br /> "In Europe, Jews were killed on the basis of religion, not race," Steingroot said. "But the genius of America's founding fathers was to prohibit religious discrimination, so anti-Semitism in America has been very light in comparison to Europe.<br /><br /> "Unfortunately, the founding fathers offered no such protections against racial bias, which is why the African-American people have suffered so much."<br /><br /> Noting that Yiddish is still spoken in small pockets throughout the world and that there's been a resurgence of klezmer, Steingroot still sounds a cautionary note.<br /><br /> "Unfortunately, I think I lived through the death of jazz," said Steingroot. "It's still played, but it'll probably never reach the level of popularity it had 40 years ago.<br /><br /> "I'm afraid the same thing has happened to Yiddish. This is a language and culture we'll lose forever if we're not careful."</p> <p> </p>

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