Quotes About Yiddish

My father never lived to see his dream come true of an all-Yiddish-speaking Canada.

A wise word is not a substitute for a piece of herring.

when it happened, but now it appeared that she'd been even younger. The faded writing would be almost indecipherable even if it had been in English. It was going to take more than her knowledge of Yiddish to make out the text. The envelope had arrived in

The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.

He smiled. "What?" she said. "I was just thinking." "Thinking what?" "Something Esperanza said to me yesterday," Myron said. "Men tracht und Gott lacht." "Is that German?" "Yiddish." "What does it mean?" "Man plans, God laughs." She repeated it. "I like that." "Me too," he said. He

As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation.

when he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child.

In Yiddish, we say, 'Nisht ahin un nisht aher.' It's neither here, it's neither there. I get more nerves than on anything I do when I'm doing multi-camera. But single-camera, I love very much.

A Jewish deli should specialize in, first and foremost, Yiddish foods, the foods of the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. So, if it's a place that specializes in pizza or chicken wings or diner food and then does a corned beef sandwich on the side, it's not a Jewish delicatessen.

Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.

The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.

On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' I remember that sometime in Season 3, there was a Yiddish phrase, 'Kinahura,' and a friend of mine who was Jewish said that the closed captioning said 'Can of Hurrah.' And I thought 'Oh, God.' I never had bothered to see the transcripts but from that point on all the transcripts had to come to me and I checked them.

I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense.

My father was Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones and then went on to improvise some successful Yiddish parodies, some of which I perform. My favorite was 'Geshray of the Vilde Kotchke,' his version of 'Cry of the Wild Goose.'

My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera.

Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things.

The Yiddish language is so rich and unusual that I've always been hooked on its sounds, although I don't speak it.

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.

The sense of differentiation is so acute in Yiddish that a word like, say, paskudnyak has no peer in any language I know for the vocal delineation of a nasty character. And Yiddish coins new names with ease for new personality types: a nudnik is a pest; a phudnik is a nudnik with a Ph.D.

Jehovah Pronounced (in English) Jee-HO-vah. Not a Yiddish word. It is not a Hebrew word. It is some scribe's Latin transliteration of YHVH, to which the vowel marks for Adonai were added. The word appeared for the first time in an English text in 1530. God.