Quotes About Yiddish

I wouldn't say 'Hello' to a paskudnyak like that!" "Did you ever hear of such a paskudnyak?" "That whole family is a collection of paskudnyaks." This word is one of the most greasily graphic, I think, in Yiddish. It offers the connoisseur three nice, long syllables, starting with a sibilant of reprehension and ending with a nasality of scorn. It adds cadence to contempt.

I think of a shmegegge as a cross between a shlimazl and a shlemiel—or even between a nudnik and a nebekh.

Sholem Aleichem defined a shadkhn as "a dealer in livestock.

Yiddish is the Robin Hood of languages. It steals from the linguistically rich to give to the fledgling poor. It shows not the slightest hesitation in taking in house-guests—to whom it gives free room and board regardless of genealogy, faith, or exoticism. A memorable remark by a journalist, Charles Rappaport, runs: "I speak ten languages—all of them in Yiddish.

Yiddish became the Jews' tongue via the Jewish mother, who, not being male, was denied a Hebrew education.

As you know, six nights a week we gather together to sing songs we know and love, to dance, to escape our daily lives. But on the seventh night … God created Yiddish theater.

Whenever you're interviewed, think British, act Yiddish

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

Pyorrhea. Gingivitis. Swollen gums. One schmutzig mouth after another. Schmutz is her métier.

Grandpa wasn't a Jewish nationalist—he was a Jewish humanist, a spiritual, believing Jew, who complained not in an antique tongue called Hebrew but in colorful, rich, vernacular Yiddish.

There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love…. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.

referred to the Ghetto, a Yiddish term, sitre akhre, for the dim world where demons dwell and zombies wear a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light.

I heard Yiddish when my father's family came to the house, which was as seldom as my mother could arrange it.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

If the first chapter seems to talk more about the Bible and Talmud than bupkes and tukhes, it's because the Bible and Talmud are to Yiddish what plantations are to the blues. The only difference is that blues left the plantations behind, while Yiddish—try as it still sometimes does—never escaped from the Talmud. A