Clips from the Yiddish “Fiddler”
For those of you who read my recent post about the Yiddish “Fiddler on the Roof” currently playing in New York and were curious to get a taste of what it’s like, here’s a clip of very short excerpts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t contain the translations, but if you actually attend the play you won’t have trouble understanding because there are simultaneous subtitle translations as with opera.
I think you will be able to see from these short excerpts that the Yiddish language gives a special quality of intensity and authenticity to the production, and that the actor playing Tevye is superb (the rest are excellent as well, but he is really a standout):
That does look like quite an event. It’s strange hearing Yiddish at such length – due to its relation to German, I can catch a fair number of words, but it makes me feel like listening to Dutch does: I can sort of get the gist, but in the main it eludes me.
Philip:
I agree about the strangeness of hearing Yiddish at length. Prior to seeing the show, I’ve only ever heard a few words or at the most a phrase or two at one time (except for a song or two). I kept feeling as though I could almost understand it, almost but not quite.
Thanks, Neo.
The wonders of Broadway.
“TheProducers”: First a movie about fraudulently producing a Broadway show. Then a Broadway show about fraudulently producing a Broadway show.
“Fiddler on the Roof”: First an English language Broadway show based on the Yiddish language writings of Sholem Aleichem. Now, a Broadway show that is a Yiddish translation of the English language show.
Really enjoyed that, Neo. Thank you. :>)
Wow. I’m very impressed.
I hope I can return the favor.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2018/12/07/remember-pearl-harbor-76th-anniversary/
“All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor’s Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor”
https://www.amazon.com/All-Gallant-Men-American-Firsthand/dp/0062645358
It’s a good read,
Bittersweet watching this. Compared with the yiddish i heard from my emigre grandparents – and what i hear from Tevye”s descendants in the “ultra” Orthodox enclaves of Jerusalem:
1. the English accents of some actors are obvious.
2. The yiddish itself is literary and too German-inflected, compared with the yiddish spoken further east in the shtetl, which has more hebrew and russian/polish/ukranian.
3. It was amazing to hear Tevye yell “gevalt!” To open the dream sequence. I guess that moment encapsulates the motivation for this production.
Ben David – I also expected to hear more Russian than German; is the Deutscher Yiddish more familiar in America, perhaps?
Wikipedia had a long article, including this:
“Secularization
The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch,[25] i. e. “Moses German”[26]—declined in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment and the Haskalah led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. A Maskil (one who take part in the Haskalah) would write about and promote acclimatization to the outside world.[27] Jewish children began attending secular schools where the primary language spoken and taught was German, not Yiddish.[27] Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew, Western Yiddish survived only as a language of “intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups”. (Liptzin 1972).
In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture (see the Yiddishist movement). Notable Yiddish writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem, whose stories about ????? ??? ????????? (Tevye der milkhiker, “Tevye the Dairyman”) inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof; and Isaac Leib Peretz.
…
Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. Michael Wex writes, “As increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were so quick to jettison Slavic vocabulary that the most prominent Yiddish writers of the time—the founders of modern Yiddish literature, who were still living in Slavic-speaking countries—revised the printed editions of their oeuvres to eliminate obsolete and ‘unnecessary’ Slavisms.”[30] The vocabulary used in Israel absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and there was a similar but smaller increase in the English component of Yiddish in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom.[citation needed] This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries.
…
On the eve of World War II, there were 11 to 13 million Yiddish speakers.[9] The Holocaust, however, led to a dramatic, sudden decline in the use of Yiddish, as the extensive Jewish communities, both secular and religious, that used Yiddish in their day-to-day life, were largely destroyed. Around five million of those killed — 85 percent of the Jews who died in the Holocaust — were speakers of Yiddish.[10] Although millions of Yiddish speakers survived the war (including nearly all Yiddish speakers in the Americas), further assimilation in countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union, along with the strictly monolingual stance of the Zionist movement, led to a decline in the use of Eastern Yiddish. However, the number of speakers within the widely dispersed Haredi (mainly Hasidic) communities is now increasing. Although used in various countries, Yiddish has attained official recognition as a minority language only in Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Netherlands,[31] and Sweden.
Reports of the number of current Yiddish speakers vary significantly.
…
There has been frequent debate about the extent of the linguistic independence of Yiddish from the languages that it absorbed. There has been periodic assertion that Yiddish is a dialect of German, or even “just broken German, more of a linguistic mishmash than a true language”.[36] Even when recognized as an autonomous language, it has sometimes been referred to as Judeo-German, along the lines of other Jewish languages like Judeo-Persian, Judaeo-Spanish or Zarphatic. A widely cited summary of attitudes in the 1930s was published by Max Weinreich, quoting a remark by an auditor of one of his lectures: ?? ??????? ??? ?? ???????? ??? ??? ?????? ??? ??????? (a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot[37] — “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”).”
(the long string of ???? is Hebrew lettters in the original)
Regarding the Yiddish in the production—the actors were coached by people who are Yiddish experts, from the Jewish Museum where the production has been performing.
Also, the translation is one done in 1965 in Israel, by Shraga Friedman, a native Yiddish speaker from Warsaw born in 1924 who fled the Holocaust with his family.
I read with interest about the Japanese production of Fiddler on the Roof. The thing about Japan and the Japanese people is that they have no tradition of anti-Semitism. They simply don’t have a paradigm for that. That led to one of the more amusing chapters in the history of WW2 and of the 1930s, if anything about the treatment of the Jews during the run up to the war and during the war can be said to be amusing. The Japanese heard all the Nazi propaganda about how rich and powerful the Jews were, and how they secretly ran the world. And they believed it all, but they had an entirely different reaction to the propaganda. Their reaction was, those are people you want on your side. During the ’30s they had a policy of controlled immigration. Official Japanese aid to the Jews ended when they signed the Tripartite agreement. But the Japanese never adopted the anti-Semitic policies the Germans insisted on. They thought, among other advantages, that Jews in Japan would influence American Jewry to adopt favorable policies toward Japan.
I mean, we all know that a cabal of Jews holds the reins of power in the U.S., right?
That didn’t work out for them, obviously. But after the war broke out the Japanese government had no intention of needlessly provoking the allies by slaughtering Jews. They encouraged the Jews living in Japan to move to the Shanghai ghetto, where they lived largely unmolested.
The Germans had the misfortune of partnering with countries that just weren’t into hating Jews. Italy had its anti-Semites, and I don’t want to whitewash their record during the war. Still, if you were a Jew you were better off in Italy than you were in France or Romania. Anti-Semitism in Japan was almost entirely unknown. Almost, as the Japanese did try to help out the White Russians against the Bolsheviks, and the White Russians were ardent anti-Semites. White Russian generals used to distribute copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to their troops. And Japanese liaison officers transliterated that into Japanese. It never really caught on. It isn’t as if the Japanese are incapable of hating people. It’s just that Jews are way down on the list as opposed to, say, Koreans. You’d have to explain why they should hate Jews slowly and carefully, and even then most of them won’t get it. Chiune Sugihara just didn’t get it. As Japan’s consul to Lithuania he kept handing out transit visas to all the Jewish refugees who fled into the country after the Germans invaded Poland. The Japanese government ordered him to cut that out, but he ignored his orders and kept handing them out. Eventually the Japanese government evacuated their embassy staff, but as his train was pulling out of the station he kept signing the visa forms and threw them out the window into the crowd.
https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/sugihara.html
The Nazis finally figured out how to get the Japanese to crack down on the Jews toward the end of the war. The secret was they didn’t tell the Japanese they were cracking down on Jews. The Nazis told the Japanese that they were harboring a large population of anti-Nazis among their German residents and that anti-Nazis were also anti-Japanese. It just so happened that the anti-Nazis were also Jews (and I’m sure that was true as if I had been a German Jew during WW2 I would have most definitely been an anti-Nazi, but they weren’t anti-Japanese). The Nazis didn’t identify them as Jews, just potential espionage threats. The Japanese were paranoid about espionage so they demanded a list of all the suspected anti-Nazis residing in Japan, and lo and behold the Germans already had the list drawn up. This resulted in a large number of people being detained, but no extermination camps resulted.
Not for the Jews residing in Japan or Shanghai. There were plenty of extermination camps, but you had to be an allied POW to get into one of those.