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I have been asked to write a short essay on the theme “Yiddish Goes Pop,” but I question the premise. Yiddish has not suddenly “gone pop”; it always has been “pop”—even in the efforts of avant-garde literati, secular scholars, and earnest kultur-tuers (cultural activists) to render the language highbrow. As Benjamin Harshav has observed, This “oral” and popular language has been successfully harnessed to impressionist prose, historiography, linguistic and statistical research, political propaganda , and “ivory tower” poetry. Nevertheless, in social perception, the language did carry a cluster of characteristic features, developed in its unique history and crystallized in its modern literature. The very fact that native speakers may assign such emotive qualities to the language, rather than seeing it as a neutral vehicle for communication, speaks for itself.1 In the semiotics of Jewish languages, Yiddish has long signified linguistic and cultural vernacularity. It is di shprakh vos redt zikh (the language that speaks by itself), the language that, as the linguist Max Weinreich observed, no one was ever flogged for not learning2 (in contrast to Hebrew—not only the traditional ivre of Jewish worship or the rabbinic Hebrew of a religious elite but also the coercive teaching of ivrit, the exclusive official Jewish language of the State of Israel,where this was a matter not of corporal punishment but of browbeating). Yiddish is imagined as autochthonic, indigenous, a part of the Jewish soul— and, like the Jewish soul, part of the Jewish body. Associations of Yiddish with the corporeal and the vulgar (in its multiple meanings) are vital for much of YIDDISH GOES POP Prelude jeffrey shandler 142 J e f f r e y S h a n d l e r the discourse on the language going back to the Enlightenment, both in disparaging Yiddish and in expressing its appeal. Yiddish culture, increasingly realized in the mode I have termed “postvernacular ,” has developed a new dependence on the academy for its sustenance.3 Therefore, it is a challenge (but also a delight) for scholars today to engage, sometimes to rediscover, Yiddish as vulgar. I’m reminded of an experience early in my career as a student of Yiddish: my first graduate course in Yiddish literature, which was taught in Yiddish by Avram Nowersztern during a guest stint at YIVO in the mid-1980s. I was still a struggling novice Yiddish reader, and Nowersztern kindly met with me individually to review some of the works we were reading in class. Once, we met to discuss “A Man from Buenos Aires,” one of Sholem Aleichem’s railroad stories. The story relates an encounter between the narrator, a traveling salesman, and the title character, who is very successful in a business that he never quite gets around to naming, despite the narrator’s repeated efforts to ascertain what it is. “You know of course what the man’s profession is,” Nowersztern asked me, speaking in Yiddish. “No,” I replied; it’s never stated in the story,and I was just as bewildered as the narrator. In fact, the whole story didn’t make sense to me; perhaps, being a less-than- fluent reader, I’d missed something? Blushing, Nowersztern explained: “Er iz an alfonz” (He’s an alfonz—a Yiddish word I didn’t know). “Vos iz an alfonz?” I asked. Nowersztern turned redder. “How do you say it in English? He’s a pimp.” “He is?!” I exclaimed—and Nowersztern reminded me that, at the time Sholem Aleichem wrote the story (it was published in 1909),Buenos Aires was a byword for white slavery among Yiddish-speaking Jews in eastern Europe and that Jews then figured prominently in running—and populating—the city’s brothels. What is now a largely forgotten (or deliberately ignored) episode of Jewish history was, a century ago, the subject of urgent, heated discussion among east European Jews contemplating immigration. Stories of Jewish women who had been duped into becoming prostitutes circulated orally and appeared in the Jewish press. The original readers of Sholem Aleichem’s story, Nowersztern explained, would have recognized the profession of the man from Buenos Aires straightaway. The fact that the narrator could not figure it out would have been a source of growing amusement, as the story progresses and the hints become more and more telling (including how the man from Buenos Aires seems to be charming the narrator in much the way he would procure naïve young women). Today, though, for...

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