Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

What’s a Nice Gerund Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

[ ![][2]][2]

When people ask me who put the “sin in cinema,” I respond, “Kenneth Marcus of Englewood Heights, N.J.” Into their dropped jaws I explain that during the early days of American movies — when Englewood and environs were Hollywood and Broadway rolled into one — Mr. Marcus wanted to lend a sheen of sophistication to his tawdry fare.

He used the German-sounding Kinema, an anagram of “I am Ken,” to advertise his projection house. Shortly thereafter, with a drop in attendance as his patrons feared he had gone too highbrow, he softened the K to a C, introducing “sin to cinema,” thus reassuring his patrons and generations of others. (It was another Jew, Phil Silvers, who put the “Phil” in “Philm.”)

Which fishy tale brings me to a message in a bottle from Mr. Arthur Salmon of Halifax, Nova Scotia. “I have been suffering from shortness of breath, a liking for dill and an embarrassing discoloration of the pupik,” he writes. “Have I been misusing Yiddish grammar?”

Well, Mr. Salmon, judging from your usage of “liking,” I can only say that it seems as though you might, indeed, be suffering from an infectious gerund. Common to only Yiddish and Kawakiwak, a native American language now spoken by a single duck in Appalachia, it was first diagnosed in Europe in the early 19th century, when it wiped out whole populations.

A cure of sorts was developed — using a concoction of locally plentiful buckwheat — by an enlightened Lithuanian nobleman named Kashka Varnishkas, after whom the treatment was named. Previously the buckwheat in that valley had been used as mortar to build cheese houses in which cheese rounds were matured, giving the “kashkavalley,” or “kashkaval” cheese, its distinctive earthy flavor.

My 26-volume Alexander Harkavy Dictionary of English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic with Extended Appendix on Babylonian Courtly Etiquette points out “caciocavallo,” or “horse’s head,” as an alternative source for the name of the cheese, but, apart from its obviously treyf roots, this equine etymology neglects another entirely elegant construction.

The Hebrew word for cheese, “gvina,” comes from a Biblical hapax logomenon (a word that is used only once). In Job 10:10, the eponym asks rhetorically: “Hast Thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?” The word is used nowhere else, but one of the names for Mount Sinai — Har Gavnunim, Mountain of Peaks — is a cognate.

Gvina” thus seems to be a gerundive form for the verb “to peak,” or “to stick up,” referring to the appearance of solid masses in the dairy fat.

Cheese, foolishness, gerunds, things sticking up and, as our friend Job reminds us, profound, divinely inspired suffering, all seem to be closely interrelated in Lithuanian Jewish life.

As the saying goes, “Ven der putz shteyt, der seykhl geyt.”

[]: https://forward.com/backward-purim/

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.