Quotes & Sayings About Yiddish

When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it. — Mel Brooks

Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too. — Hannah Ware

The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat. — Billy Crystal

All the pools are going batshit like you wouldn't believe ... Batshit ... It's a technical term ... Fleidermausscheisse, okay?
Fleidermausscheisse? Kelly silently mouthed the word, and as silently clapped her hands. With a dictionary and patience, she could read scientific German. Thanks to fragments of Yiddish from her folks, she could make a better
not good, but better
stab at speaking it than most of her anglophone peers. But she knew she never would have come up with that particular terminus technicus in a million months of Sundays. — Harry Turtledove

I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' — Michael Chabon

Six Lines

I know that in this world no one needs me,
me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

Only what is hopeless on this earth has beauty
and only the ephemeral is godly
and humility is the only true rebellion — Aaron Zeitlin

If you want your dreams to come true, don't oversleep. — Nicky Gumbel

I have heard from my father and mother all the answers that faith in God could offer to those who doubt and search for the truth. In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper. In spite of all the disenchantments and all my skepticism I believe that the nations can learn much from those Jews, their way of thinking, their way of bringing up children, their finding happiness where others see nothing but misery and humiliation. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

A wise man hears one word and understands two. — Anonymous

The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of The Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah, Talmud, Mussar, Cabala. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living. — Amy Bloom

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish. — Mike Myers

They decreed that rabbis were no longer to function as rabbis, that they could not teach, or decide Jewish questions in rabbinical courts, or be paid by their community. Each of them had to announce in the Yiddish press that he had ceased all rabbinical duties and that no one was to consult him about anything. This was to be the end of hundreds and hundreds of years of religious life. — Lucy Beckett

Isaac Singer always wrote in Yiddish. He was so unsure of his English at the beginning that he was easy to edit and he learned fast. — Robert Giroux

What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time. — Etgar Keret

There is an old Yiddish phrase I find apropos - but not by choice: "Man plans, God laughs." I am a prime example. My life was pretty much laid out for me. I was a basketball star my entire childhood, destined to be an NBA player for the Boston Celtics. But in my very first preseason game, Big Burt Wesson slammed into me and ruined my knee. I tried gamely to come back, but there is a big difference between gamely and effectively. My career was over before I hit the parquet floor. I — Harlan Coben

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

The one thing an audience always has in common with a comedian is troubles. The Yiddish word for that is tsuris. You're always putting your tsuris on stage whether you like it or not. No one is untroubled, unless they're just, you know, an imbecile. — David Steinberg

The tongue-in-cheek Yiddish-English "translation" for R.S.V.P. is "Remember to Send Vedding Presents. — Anita Diamant

What concrete steps can I take now?" I asked the voice, and it replied: "Go to a house of prayer and pray."
"Without faith?" I countered, and the voice said: "You have more faith than you know. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

heard in America's streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills. Jewish humor — Paul Goldberg

When he thought of the word mercy, it was the Yiddish word that came to his mind: rachmones, whose root was rechem, the Hebrew word for womb. Rachmones: a compassion as deep and as undeniable as what a mother felt for her child. — Julie Orringer

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

Often, the teachers would ask me what language we spoke at home. This was a not-so-subtle way of discovering if we spoke Yiddish (which we didn't) and were therefore Jewish (which we were). — Edith Hahn Beer

Like 90 percent of the television they watch, it comes from the south and is shown dubbed into Yiddish. It concerns the adventures of a pair of children with Jewish names who look like they might be part Indian and have no visible parents. They do have a crystalline magical dragon scale that they wish on in order to travel to a land of pastel dragons, each distinguished by its color and its particular brand of imbecility. Little by little, the children spend more and more time with their magical dragon scale until one day they travel off to the land of rainbow idiocy and never return; their bodies are found by the night manager of their cheap flop, each with a bullet in the back of the head. Maybe, Landsman thinks, something gets lost in the translation. — Michael Chabon

Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region. — Israel Shenker

Bringing you 'raisins and almonds' and words (from a Yiddish lullaby — Rona Simmons

Vilnius was once known as 'The Jerusalem of Lithuania' because of the number of prayer houses and scholars there; in the first half of the 20th century, it became a center of Yiddish-language scholarship. — Elizabeth McCracken

True poverty does not come from God. — Lyndon B. Johnson

I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time. — Carlos Santana

There is a Yiddish saying: If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' and 'Wonder Boys' and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay' and 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' — Cathleen Schine

And my friend Karen remembers
as a little girl
studying Hebrew she inquired
of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard
and said in Yiddish "if there is a god
or if there isn't a god
a Jew studies"
isn't that a good story
beloved, but the woman in me
says that the poet lies
the poet can afford to lie — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

I'm Italian, but some people think I'm Jewish because I work the Yiddish. I also work the Italian, by the way. — Joy Behar

I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on. — Saul Rubinek

In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From — Michael Chabon

Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater. — Mandy Patinkin

If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor could make a wonderful living. — Yiddish Proverb

A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Even though I loved the song [My Yiddish Momme] and it was a sensational hit every time I sang it, I was always careful to use it only when I knew the majority of the house would understand Yiddish. However, you didn't have to be a Jew to be moved by 'My Yiddish Momme.' 'Mother' in any language means the same thing. — Sophie Tucker

Becky, are you studying conversational Yiddish? — Shannon Hale

Yiddish, the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bear the marks of our expulsions from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of the generations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are the undried, uncongealed Jewish tears. — I.L. Peretz

I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish. — Mandy Patinkin

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn't seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently. — Luke Rhinehart

The prejudice is still there, but it's breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union. He's a writer who's determined to break down genre barriers. He's done amazing things. — George R R Martin

It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor. — Jerry Leiber

God made man because He loves stories — Yiddish Proverb

Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again? — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish. — Linda Barnes

I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense. — Dara Horn

A Jewish deli should specialize in, first and foremost, Yiddish foods, the foods of the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. So, if it's a place that specializes in pizza or chicken wings or diner food and then does a corned beef sandwich on the side, it's not a Jewish delicatessen. — David Sax

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. — Stephen Greenblatt

One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yiddish is a cheerful language of not so happy people. — Boris Zubry

I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she'd start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to "make believe" ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock. My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote "Misty", Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well. — Richie Havens

The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits. — Mandy Patinkin

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not. — Nathan Englander

Well, you have children so you know: little children little troubles, big children, big troubles - it's a saying in Yiddish. Maybe the Chinese said it too. — Grace Paley

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window. — Steven Pinker

Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:
Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker. — Michael Chabon

Something always happened, you see. A Yiddish song on Hanukkah, a British rabbi's prayer on the radio, some kindness on a train or in the street that reminded me, no matter how far I retreated, no matter how deep into self-denial my fear drove me, that the Jews would always be my people and I would always belong to them. — Edith Hahn Beer

In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution - an unprecedented role for a foreign national. — Masha Gessen

We today can recognize the antiquity of astrology in words such as disaster, which is Greek for "bad star," influenza, Italian for (astral) "influence"; mazeltov, Hebrew - and, ultimately, Babylonian - for "good constellation," or the Yiddish word shlamazel, applied to someone plagued by relentless ill-fortune, which again traces to the Babylonian astronomical lexicon. According to Pliny, there were Romans considered sideratio, "planet-struck." Planets were widely thought to be a direct cause of death. Or consider consider: it means "with the planets," evidently a prerequisite for serious reflection. — Carl Sagan

There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about. — S.J Perelman

I don't care if you care, I retorted. But in my religion, we're taught to admit our mistakes and to apologize for them ... Oh, and there's one other thing I'm sorry about, I added. I should've spit in your eye and called you a szhlob weeks ago. — Amy Fellner Dominy

Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on "Fox News" where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him. — Lawrence O'Donnell

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies. — Roy Blount Jr.

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. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93. Yiddish's — Diane Ackerman

At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim. — Michael Caine

Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whatever — Howard Fast

Romanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler — Zero Mostel

The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a — Lyndsay Faye

In one of the extras that come with the DVD version of the movie (Groundhog Day), Danny Rubin, who came up with the original idea and then wrote the script, says that the movie is about "doing what you can do in the moment to make things better instead of making them worse." Which might not sound like very much, but it's just about all you can do in life.

Which only proves that the world itself runs on Yiddish-speaking principles: the best way to get what you want and make all those bastards out there so jealous that they'll want to poke their own eyes out is to go out of your way to be nice to those bastards. That's the way to show them. That's how a mentsh gets revenge. — Michael Wex

My sister and I used to act as maids and waitresses at my great aunt and uncle's cocktail parties, which were very much sort of retired, minor stars of the Yiddish theater and the Yiddish opera. — Amy Bloom

Az men krigt zikh miten rov, muz men sholem zein miten shainker," Avi had said when he first put the rifle in Jacob's hands. The old Yiddish proverb could be roughly translated as, "If you're at odds with your rabbi, make peace with your bartender." His uncle offered no explanation, but as Jacob had chewed on its meaning, he had concluded that Avi meant something like, "Always be prepared" or "Have a plan B." The problem was, Jacob didn't want a plan B. He didn't want life to change. He wanted things to be the way they had always been. — Joel C. Rosenberg

My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that. — Ashley Bell

To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

He was distressed to learn that the Pottery Barn Kids gift registry did not extend to children's books in Italian or Yiddish. — Sylvain Reynard

His eyes reflected a softness I had already forgotten in America. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

On a crowded bus in Israel, a mother was speaking to her son in Yiddish. An Israeli woman reprimanded her. "You should be speaking Hebrew. Why are you talking to him in Yiddish?" The mother answered, "I don't want he should forget he's a Jew." — Kirk Douglas

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew. — Anne Lamott