HURA! HURA!

WISSE, RUTH

HURA! HURA! RUTH WISSE There is a kind of art that runs in the family. One drops a perfect phrase, another picks it up in a different context, and before long it is a saying, a proverb, a piece of...

...Montreal...
...Repetition wears the joke away until only the punch line remains, a nugget in the family hoard...
...How do you feel after all that...
...I also plead guilty to love of purity...
...linguistic dislocation has interrupted the smooth transmission and dissemination of family lore...
...She is the author of THE SCHLEMIEL AS MODERN HERO, a study of contemporary Jewish literature, published by the University of Chicago Press that evening...
...My uncle reports that he too felt worst on his third post-operative day, and improved steadily thereafter...
...The mother began tidying the house, and when at last she saw the dust of an approaching carriage in the distance, she shooed the children off their potties, lest the doctor come upon such an unsavory scene...
...In my father's usage, the family maxim or quip is an instrument of pacification...
...He gave what guarantees he could, but losing his temper at last, bellowed: "A fat piece of meat doesn't burn...
...None of the home remedies availed...
...But she makes nothing as fancy as pineapple chicken, so this special day I have taken the task on myself...
...Ich hob shoyn nisht kayn koyekh tsu shrayen hura...
...He is also trying to soothe me, to make light of his pain...
...She was raised in a family of whistlers and singers, and her talent was nurtured by appreciative audiences at home, in her school, among her friends...
...The outcry is the sole, limited solace, affirming as it does one's unsullied, vigorous good faith...
...Like the others, I am miffed by the slight to my calling, and hence to me...
...hurrah...
...But the gentile doctor had been out on a case, and the child had fetched his replacement, the feldsher, after all...
...The clarity of his intent distinguishes him from the wily interloper, and allays our fear of allowing him in...
...The line must condemn itself out of its own mouth...
...A fete kotlete brent zich nisht tsu...
...A M m.s we are often reminded, the formal work of art, the poem, has an autonomous life, independent of its creator or readers...
...he answers to calm us both, "hura...
...hura...
...And the punch line, which has obviously long enjoyed an independent existence, needs the vulgarity for that extra edge of anger that calls it into play...
...I don't have the strength left to shout hurrah...
...A Yiddish expression, quoted in full, is in no danger of being mistaken for anything else...
...A fete kotlete brent zich nisht tsu," I repeated for him and then with him until he had it quite easily and firm...
...It's OK," 1 tell him, "just an old family saying...
...I am self-conscious when I sing, but the sayings of my childhood leap into my speech without invitation to catch a precise feeling or to clinch a point...
...Thus self-assured, I do not have to compromise my style...
...One day the baby became ill...
...He had remembered the story of my paternal grandfather, a wise and witty man, who, when once arranging the final details of a partnership with a rich fellow textile merchant, tired of the man's repeated need for reassurance that the enterprise would succeed...
...At a certain point, a saying may pass successfully beyond the confines of the family and into the folk, but at that very juncture its source is obscured and the intimate shorthand reference is lost...
...A saying is used to puncture an argument that has reached the bursting point, or to release the tension of a painful scene...
...had the reference been to Spanish or Russian literature, would he not have felt compelled to verify his source...
...Unfortunately, there was a sudden change of plans, and mother came into his room to tell him the visit was put off...
...One has only the aesthetic comfort of the final word...
...No time for dinner...
...He is lying in the hospital, pale and in great pain, three days after what the profession calls a minor operation...
...I ask, anxiously...
...he cried: "And here am I with my neck scrubbed...
...Billy, whose Yiddish does not quite cover this ground, looks at me a little apprehensively...
...We now call our neighbor "di fete kotlete," which makes him almost endearing, and almost alleviates my fears that our past will have no future...
...she sighed within hearing of one of my ancestors, "Ich hob shoyn nisht kayn koyekh tsu shrayen hura...
...Sorry...
...Sometimes I teach my children an expression or proverb, first weaving it into a story and then plucking it out for repetition, as a keepsake...
...Thanks, Mom," he answers, concludes the call, and tells me he will be picked up in five minutes...
...Someone comments, unfavorably, on a particularly sloppy reference to Yiddish literature in the work of a scholar with otherwise impeccable academic credentials, and wonders how anyone so precise could in this case be so careless...
...The talk sounds professional, but the good listener can catch, here and there, the normal undertow of passions, heavy and light, that informs and inspires all gossip...
...Better take some money and a jacket...
...You remember, about the fat meat Perplexed for a moment, I suddenly realized what he was saying, and the miser, the lake, all was forgotten in a wave of perfect joy...
...The nurse drops by to check father's temperature and pronounces him fit as a fiddle...
...Everyone uses it in his own way, for his own dramatic purpose...
...My mother's favorite medium of expression is the song...
...Someone else wonders why anyone so precise should have been so careless...
...It was my wish to tell him that although his arguments still seemed to me unconvincing, I was nevertheless persuaded of his conclusions...
...The voice rendering this exclamation is disappointed and incredulous in equal parts...
...When he was a boy of five or six, the family lived in Czer-nowitz, with a maid and a governess and many rules of cleanliness and behavior...
...How can our children confidently handle Yiddish phrases if their tongues are not accustomed to curling over those sounds...
...The mother was very concerned, and sent her oldest child to town to fetch the doctor, not the Jewish doctor, mind, who was only a barber-surgeon, a jeldsher, but the real gentile doctor with a diploma and a reputation of success...
...One drops a perfect phrase, another picks it up in a different context, and before long it is a saying, a proverb, a piece of family lore...
...A forced burst of enthusiasm that manages to register its protest, the exclamation provokes my laughter, and gives my father the satisfaction of having won it...
...He has just been telling me that something is not healing as it should, and predicting a second operation, when a barrage of good tidings befalls him: Mother has heard from the intern that the patient is doing very well, and will be home within the week...
...Un ich shtey do mit dem gevashenem haldz...
...I am in the kitchen, mixing the soya sauce and cornstarch for the final stage of pineapple chicken, a delicacy all the children adore and which has been ordered by Billy, our oldest, to mark his final day of classes for the year...
...The saying originated with my older brother...
...but among ourselves, when there is no one to judge us, why, let the children crap where they may...
...Billy answers the phone and after a brief, excited exchange, asks whether he can go to the ball game Ruth Wisse teaches Yiddish literature at McGill University...
...I had come, after many years of holding a different position, to a political opinion that he had long defended and often argued...
...Jacob recognized in the country miser that rich old manufacturer, and in my hostility my grandfather's impatient edge...
...Because my husband vehemently opposes the use of any private tongue in the presence of children, Yiddish does not even serve us in that limited function...
...I stare at him numbly and find myself muttering...
...And since only one person laughs, everyone else stares at me in wonder, I have to tell them the joke...
...Fortunately, he was not doing too well...
...A friend has an extra pair of box seats...
...One day he was promised an outing, briefed on decorum, and scrubbed down from head to foot before being dressed...
...How dare anyone treat our inner world so rudely...
...the reports are so much at odds with his wan face...
...Begrudging him any gains, as I did, I was very angry...
...Most recently the remark occurred to me in relation to its originator, my brother, now maddeningly silent in his Montreal grave...
...After several hours of enthusiasm, an old Jewish woman in the crowd was told that the royal carriage was in sight...
...Un ich shtey do mit dem gevashenem haldz...
...How easily he could have checked his references and done the work properly...
...hurrah . . . ! My father, in short, is not a wholehearted party to the celebration, but he is registering his dutiful ecstasy...
...In 1913, when the Romanoffs were celebrating the 300th anniversary of their reign, parades were held throughout Russia, and people lined the streets to see the processions of soldiers, officials, and royalty...
...One can appropriate only what one needs...
...For my father, it is a way of bringing us into an atmosphere of greater amity and calm...
...The fate of our family — or folk — lore, by contrast, hangs solely on its utility and appeal...
...I agree, to his obvious delight...
...It's just like that thing you told us about your zeyde," said Jacob, the middle child, our chronicler...
...OK...
...I'll explain when you get back...
...In Yiddish the same word stands for both the language and the nationality, for both "Yiddish" and "Jewish...
...There were many small children, a fretful, busy mother, and a tailor-father who traveled to outlying farms and was never at home...
...Or highlighted so boldly they retain their foreign status...
...But, of course, I had come round too late: "Un ich shtey do mit dem gevash-enem haldz...
...I normally leave the meals to the babysitter, who claims she enjoys their preparation...
...Success has heretofore been meager, but happily, it takes very little to shore up my hopes...
...In this instance, however, the vulgarity of the punch line is precisely what lends it force...
...He probably knows, from my tone and expression, that he is in no imminent danger, but I see him wondering about the degree of the curse...
...A reluctant cook...
...hura...
...hura...
...Jetween morning and afternoon sessions at an academic conference for Yiddish studies, I sit with some fellow professors, gossiping happily about the state of the field...
...As I dislike crude English borrowings in Yiddish, so I object to Yiddish substitutions in English, unless they are grafted so subtly onto the host language that the marks don't show...
...In our home, words for sex, sexual organs, and bodily functions grow rusty behind comfortable euphemisms, and if we know them at all, it is from Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary...
...When the dust cleared, and the mother saw who was at her door, she called to her children reassuringly, 'Kakt, kinderlekh, kakt, der yid-disher dokter kumt.' " The vulgarity of this punch line stands in sharpest contrast to the utterly refined, genteel Yiddish spoken in our home...
...T Mhis past summer, we were discussing a country neighbor, an exceptionally wealthy and no less parsimonious old man who had bought adjoining lakefront property in order to subdivide and sell off lots...
...I, however, was bitterly insistent that the wicked would prosper, that anyone so mean would surely squeeze out a profit...
...An expression may enter like a visitor on a visa, whose stay will be brief and limited, will enrich our economy, and will end in polite withdrawal...
...Cleanliness, gentility, a sense of decency — all these we reserve for strangers...
...As I mix in the last ingredients, check the rice, prepare to call the family to dinner...
...Many people, whose knowledge of Yiddish derives from the borscht belt, assume the language to be as crude as that source, but the quasi-Yiddish of the Catskill comedians represents normal Yiddish usage about as well as the English of Lenny Bruce represents the language of middle America...
...So I freely drop my sayings, and hope they may take root and spread...
...Of a working repertoire of more than two hundred and fifty songs, she has taught us many dozens, but if we sing at all it is usually in the car, on a long, cramped drive, when only the liveliest, most rhythmic of her melodies are fit to rouse our flagging energies and spirits...
...and sacrificed this partnership as he had done several others before...
...The doctor shoos us out for a brief examination and then calls us back to say that everything is going splendidly...
...A guest comes to dinner and tells a new joke...
...It was unseemly for that scholar to relax his usual criteria when he thought they did not matter, and it needs the invocation of that joke to show up his vulgarity for what it was...
...I regret the loss of so much else, but though sentiment prompts me to tape her treasures, it does not make them mine...
...The language of our home — my husband's and mine — is English...
...One has been clearly wronged, but there is no recourse to argument since the delivered verdict is final...
...Once there was a poor family that lived far outside a shtetl, in a hek, an almost-abandoned village...
...While the adjectival "yiddish" of "yiddisher dokter" clearly refers to the nationality, not the language, the line always occurs to me in its more limited sense, as though the world of Yiddish bore the same relation to the larger Jewish world as Jews do to the gentile sphere, and Yiddish is the all-too-homey place where Jews can abandon their standards even in relation to other Jews...
...Unprotected by copyright, it is always being modified and adapted according to shifting taste and circumstance, for as long as it remains serviceable...
...We sing some of my mother's songs, but expressions have to find their way into daily, undifferentiated usage, making them more difficult and clumsier to integrate at will...
...As long as it remains inside, the saying trails its origins, intersecting with the present at a certain angle of irony or pathos, reminding family members of the history they make and share...
...You know what it is," I pronounce, "It's kakt, kinderlekh, kakt, der yiddisher dokter kumt...
...Oy...

Vol. 1 • December 1975 • No. 5


 
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