July/August 2007 Feature

From Yiddish to English: The Humor of It All

The impact of Yiddish on American English goes far beyond the “Borscht Belt” words and expressions I grew up with related to the physicality of life such as bupkes, drishke, greps, grob, kishkes, knish, kvetch, pupik, and various words not to be mentioned in polite society. Unlike the above, the influence of Yiddish on American English crops up often when it is least expected. In my freshman year at Dartmouth, during a holiday break, I took a gentile classmate from Montana to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He showed great interest in how these people lived. At one point he turned to me and said, “I can’t quite understand what they’re saying.”

I smiled before replying: “You know, they are speaking English.”

“Not like the English I know,” he answered.

“Don’t be so sure,” I said.

“For instance,” he asked, “what does it mean dohnt esk?”

So I explained to him that dohnt esk, is Yinglish for freg nisht, which morphed into the commonly used American English expression “don’t ask,” meaning “What’s the sense of asking?”

Genug shoyn is another example of a Yiddish expression making it into mainstream American English, not in the original Yiddish but in a close American English approximation. In this case, we have Jack Benny to thank for capturing perfectly the nuances and intonations of genug shoyn in his punch line “alright already,” which he used for decades in countless routines before millions of people on radio and TV until finally it entered mainstream American English.

Like genug shoyn, es ken nisht shatn became popular as “it wouldn’t hurt” in translation, thanks to its use as a punch line in countless comedy routines done interchangeably in Yiddish and English. Here is my favorite: In order to regain his audience’s attention, Yiddish matinee idol Boris Thomashefsky as a last resort would signal his leading lady to drop flat on the floor before addressing the audience as follows: “My leading lady may be dying before your eyes. Please, is there a doctor in the house?” On cue a female plant in the balcony would yell down: “Mr. Thomashefsky, give dot lady an enema.” The more the plant persisted, the more Thomashefsky pretended to ignore her. Finally in mock exasperation Thomashefsky turned to her and said, “Lady, it wouldn’t help!” whereupon she would respond, “Mr. Thomashefsky, it wouldn’t hoit!” That expression in Yinglish used in countless routines no doubt paved the way for the American English expression, “it wouldn’t hurt.”

The translation of ken zayn to “could be” might not have taken place had both expressions not been used interchangeably in countless vaudeville routines stretching back to before Fannie Brice and Eddie Cantor. My favorite is of two Jews sitting in Rutgers Square across the street from the Forverts building on East Broadway. One is reading the Forverts, a virtual university in print. The other turns to him and says Vos leyst du dortn in de Forverts (“What are you reading there in the Forverts?”) To which the reader responds, “I am reading about a teary of evolution from a man called Chales Dolvin.”

“Oh,” the inquirer says. The Forverts reader then proceeds to summarize the highlights of Darwin’s theory to which the inquirer responds, “Could be.”

The Forverts played a pivotal role in the Yiddishization of American English by perfecting a journalistic style approximating one-to-one conversational Yiddish which, during the Depression years, writers like Mike Gold, Meyer Levin, Leo Rosten, and Clifford Odets translated into American English. What more proof is needed than Bessie Berger delivering her exit lines from Act One of Awake and Sing, which might just as well have appeared in the Forverts—and probably did: “Mom, what does she know. She’s old fashioned. But I’ll tell you a big secret. My whole life I wanted to go away too, but with children a mother stays home. A fire burnt in my heart too, but now it’s too late. I’m no spring chicken. The clock goes and Bessie goes. Only my machinery can’t be fixed.” The genius of Odets was to translate the words but also the rhythms, the accents, and the intonations of Yiddish—what my father would have called its flever—into American English. Entertainers like Fannie Brice, Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker had been doing this successfully for decades before bigger and bigger audiences, as had Stella Adler, daughter of Jacob P. Adler and the original Bessie Berger on Broadway who coined the expression: “Think Yiddish; Speak British.”

Some Yiddish words make it lock-stock-and-barrel into American English because there isn’t any adequate English-language equivalent. Take underlining what you are saying in English with dortn which means much more than “there,” or saying feh as a response to everything from smelling a rotten egg to describing a hangover to contemplating an operation for hemorrhoids, instead of “phooey” or “nerts.”

Another example of a word that defies translation is epes. Go try telling an eynekl (grandchild) what epes means in English. Words like “something” or “somewhat” are useless. Only in context can its value for letting off steam be fully appreciated. Thus, toward a doctor who appears oblivious to your tsores, you might mumble under your breath: “This is epes a doctor?” Or if someone’s inflated ego is driving you crazy you might say in a stage whisper to your spouse: “This is epes a gantser knaker?” Or about a home entertainer whose jokes fall flat you might inquire: “This is epes a tumler?”

Oy gevalt is just as impossible to render unto English. “Oh woe is me” or “Heaven’s to betsy” will hardly do. For pure comic effect there is no substitute, especially when used as the punch line of a joke. My favorite takes place during the days of Gentlemen’s Agreements limiting Jewish access to gentile watering holes. A Mrs. Goldberg is welcomed into a posh Palm Beach resort by registering as Mrs. Gwendolyn van Pyster. That evening at dinner Mrs. Goldberg spills hot soup on her lap. “Oy gevalt,” she yells out before adding, “… Whatever that means.” Add to this a Myron Cohen delivery on the Ed Sullivan show and multiply it by countless imitators and you begin to appreciate what it takes for a Yiddish expression to make it intact into mainstream American English.

And in America you don’t even have to be Jewish to give Yiddish a helping hand as long as your writers are. Johnny Carson, for example, on late night TV, frequently referred to his accountant as H. & R. Goniff and his stockbroker as E. F. Shnorrer. Were it not for Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish in countless Middle American homes, imagine how many more gentile viewers would have been left in the dark.

Curses have also contributed to reinforcing Yiddish word structures, inflections, and tonalities as delivered in American English by any number of Jewish comic masters and mistresses of the insult from the Marx Brothers to Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Totie Fields, Rodney Dangerfield, Freddy Roman, and Woody Allen, all of whom would be comfortable delivering such lines as: “May all your teeth fall out except one, so you can have a toothache!”; “May you turn into a lulov so I can shake you for seven days and then put you away in a closet for the rest of the year!”; “Du zolst vaksn vi a tsibele mitn kop in drerd!” (You should grow like an onion with your head in the earth!)

Yiddish to English, we shouldn’t forget, is a two-way street with both languages impacting on one another. Thus, vinde replaces fenster in the vocabulary of the immigrant all too eager to show off his knowledge of English. Or entirely new words are introduced to describe conditions that simply didn’t exist in the Old Country, like living in a multi-storied tenement house with people walking over your head, under your feet, or on the other side of a paper-thin wall. Thus the necessity of coining such American Yiddish words as upstairsike, downstairsike, and nexdorike. Similarly, there was no word in ordinary Yiddish for a person who rises from rags to riches (something that rarely happened among Jews in Eastern Europe) but doesn’t have the manners to go with his newly acquired wealth. As words like parvenu and nouveau riche were beyond the reach of our bubes and zeydes, they had to invent a new word. So they took “alright” as in “alright already,” tacked on nik as in sputnik or nudnik, and came up with alrightnik.

A cautionary note: No matter how great the contributions of Yiddish have been to mainstream American English, we mustn’t take credit for words that sound like they are Yiddish but really aren’t—words like shush, lentil (even though it rhymes with yente), svelte (from the Italian svelto), mish-mash, and tumult which derives not from tumler but from the Latin tumultus.

Words like oysgegrinte—someone no longer a greenhorn but not yet Americanized—are no longer used today—even though, in the heyday of Eastern European migration, the oysgegrinte was no stranger to vaudeville routines from Second Avenue to the Catskills. “What is an oysgegrinte?” The Forverts asked its readers in 1912. Here are some of the answers:

Someone who makes her husband wash the dishes and mop the floor while she goes to the movies with a boarder.

Someone who talks the language of stocks and bonds but doesn’t have a hundred dollars to his name.

Someone who goes to the theater after having eaten instead of bringing along bread, herring, and other delectables.

Though oysgegrinte did not survive, such is not the case for shlemiel, shlemazl, yente, klutz, shmendrik, krechtser, kibitzer, kvetsh, noodge, nudnik, shleper, nokhshleper, khokhm, knaker, and gantser knaker, just to name a few human types whose Yiddish name tags are not unfamiliar to us. Some, like kibitzer, are even defined in my American College Dictionary as “1) a speculator at a card game who looks at the players’ cards over their shoulders” and “2) a giver of unwanted advice.” Though we know them by their Yiddish names, they represent universal types. Why then are they known to us by their Yiddish names other than by names from other languages and cultures? This has a lot to do with the role such types play in an endless array of Jewish jokes. With apologies to the master of one-liners, the late Henny Youngman, here are a few examples:

A knaker is someone who does the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles with a pen.

A shlemiel spills soup on a shlemazl. Being good-natured, he throws a drowning shlemazl a rope but, being a shlemiel and the shlemazl being a shlemazl, he throws him both ends. If you get your junk mail postage due, chances are you are a shlemazl.

A kibitzer walks by an office shared by a psychiatrist and a proctologist. Unable to control his impulses, he writes over their names: “Specialists in odds and ends.”

A nudnik sitting next to an Episcopalian priest keeps asking the priest if he’s really Jewish. Finally, to shut him up the priest says he really is, only to have the nudnik turn to him and say, “Funny, you don’t look Jewish.”

A few weeks later a krechtser sitting on a plane next to the same priest looks up at no one in particular and says, “Oy, am I toisty!” He says this over and over even though he’s sitting on the aisle seat with no shortage of stewardesses to take care of his every need. In exasperation the priest steps over the krechtser’s feet, goes to the back of the plane, brings back a cup of water, and hands it to the krechtser without getting so much as a thank you. A few minutes later the krechtser looks up and says to no one in particular, “Oy was I toisty!”

The shatkhn is an equally popular figure in the world of Jewish humor. My favorite shatkhn joke takes place in the home of Reb Teitelboim, head of the Satmar dynasty of Chasidim. A shatkhn invited by the rebbe and rebetsin turns to them and says: “Have I got a goil for your Mordechai. She is as pretty as a picture.” “If dot’s de case,” responds the rebetsin, “Let’s look on de picture.” The shatkhn takes a picture out of his wallet to show them and they are aghast. One eye is here, the other is there. The nose is crooked. So are the teeth. The chin sports a mysterious growth. “This girl is an out-and-out mieskayt (ugliness),” the rebetsin shouts. “How in the world can you say she’s as pretty as a picture?” “Listen,” the shatkhn says to her, “either you like Picasso or you don’t.”

Sometimes a Jewish type lives on in the world of humor long after his disappearance in real life. So it is with the Jewish waiter whose likes have not been seen at Ratner’s or Grossinger’s since God knows how long, but whose spirit lives on in countless Jewish waiter jokes, which will never die.

My favorite of favorites involves a Jewish waiter waiting on single tables. A customer orders the borscht but is told by the waiter to order something else, as even the flies won’t go near it. When asked what he would suggest, after sizing up the customer, the waiter recommends chicken soup (which, being a Litvak, he pronounces “tsikn”) as something appropriate for a man of his station. The chicken soup is a maykhl in the baykhl (a pleasureable food in the belly), the satisfied patron declares.

The waiter now turns to a second customer who orders the pea soup. The waiter gives him the same story he gave the customer who asked for the borscht. When the waiter is asked to recommend something else, after sizing the man up and down, the waiter assures him that the barley soup will suit him to a tee. After tasting it, however, the customer complains that it’s a hartsveytik (a woe to the heart). “Why didn’t you tell me to order the chicken soup?” the customer demands. “Because,” the waiter replies, “you didn’t order the borscht.”

Like the Jewish waiter, Yiddish as a spoken language survives mostly in our memories. All the better that so much “mameloshn” has found its way into American English on the wings of Jewish humor. •

About the author
Dr. Kenneth Libo, holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the City University of New York and teaches American Jewish history at Hunter College. A National Book Award recipient with Irving Howe for World of Our Fathers, Dr. Libo has written for The New York Times, the Jewish Forward and many other publications.