Yiddish Fiddler (aka Yiddler) was the unexpected off-Broadway hit of 2019. What else could I do but honor it's January 5th closing with a grumpy op-ed about linguistic oppression for JTA. Audiences may love Tevye, but they're a lot more mixed on the language he speaks.
I'd been wondering why Yiddish is always tagged as 'guttural' and after seeing myself described with that word in a newspaper article, it occurred to me that:
I'd been wondering why Yiddish is always tagged as 'guttural' and after seeing myself described with that word in a newspaper article, it occurred to me that:
If one had to locate Yiddish within the popular imagination, it would be found in the primeval Jewish throat.
The success of Yiddish “Fiddler” shows that Yiddish, from afar, can attain a certain symbolic stature in the public eye of the theatre class. But the intimate experience of Yiddish, up close and personal, still speaks to nothing so much as lingering discomfort, and an estrangement between observer and object.
Yiddish is often characterized by its guttural “ch’s.” But Hebrew, with just as many guttural sounds, rarely seems to get tagged as such. As late as 1930, Zev Jabotinsky was arguing that the ideal Hebrew pronunciation would “First of all … have to avoid the Yiddish ch, which is like the hoarse cough of someone with a throat disease.” Ouch.
Read more at JTA ...
No comments:
Post a Comment