Philologos
By Philologos
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News Stealing Fanny
Manus Gass of River Edge, N.J., writes: “Reading about Michelle Obama’s cousin, Rabbi Capers Funnye, stirred a recollection of a Russian Jewish word that I believe referred to the Tsar: ‘Fonye.’ If I remember correctly, it was sometimes followed by *ganef, *thief. Could you let me know whether such a word or phrase really exists?”…
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Culture County Fare
Forward reader Donald Allen, having come across a reference in a column of mine several weeks ago to “Kovno *gubernya,” *the czarist province of Kaunas in Lithuania, writes: “When I was growing up, my father, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895, always told me that his father and mother were from ‘Givilney gubernya,’ probably close…
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Culture ‘Settling’ the Score
In a long opinion piece column in the June 22 New York Times, New York University professor Tony Judt — who in recent years has been only slightly better-disposed toward the State of Israel than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — writes about the settlements in the occupied territories. Essentially, he claims, they are a continuation of the…
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Culture Getting to the ‘Bottom’ of a Kiwi Query
This column’s first letter from New Zealand is surely cause for celebration. It comes from Daniel Meyrowitz of Auckland, who writes: “I have an inquiry about what I assume to be a Yiddish word, ‘unterdetzura’ or ‘interdeshira.’ I gather from the context in conversation that it means something like the English idiom ‘the long and…
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Culture On the Trail of Deep Throat
Walter Askinas writes from Boynton Beach, Fla.: “My late father, born in Kovno Gubernya [the tsarist province of Kaunas in Lithuania], used to say about someone whose actions he deplored, ‘Er meg zakh shemn in vaytn haldz.’ I always understood exactly what he meant, but not the origin of the expression. Can you elucidate it?”…
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Culture Calling the Faithful To Witness
‘I am a Christian,” President Obama declared in his June 4 address in Cairo, “but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan (sic) at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.” Although…
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Culture Working Ourselves Into a Real State
The term “Jewish state” has been much in the news lately in two different but clearly related contexts. The first is the demand of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the leaders of the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel as “a Jewish state” before Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resume. The second is the Israeli Knesset’s passing on a…
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Culture Darkness Thickens As My Head Changes
If this week’s column strikes some of you as rather technical, you can blame Cantor David Nemtzov of Willowdale, Ontario, for a question he asked about my column of the May 8 issue, in which I pointed out that the Hebrew word *ta’am, *“taste,” is shortened to *tam *in Yiddish by the elision of its…
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