Yiddish Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself. ~ Golda Meir

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If they want to see me, here I am. If they want to see my clothes, open my closet and show them my suits. ~ Albert Einstein

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

A German or a Russian mamaloschen (mother tongue) pedigree made for two wildly different translations of the same verse by the American Yiddish poet H. Leyvik.

"Dos turemdike lebn in der turemdike shtot", translated "The towering life of the towering city" (Yiddish turem, "tower," of German origin) became in another version "The imprisoned life of the prison city" (via turme, "prison", from Russian).

I discovered this old "plot" in a recent lecture, a volume on American Yiddish Poetry, by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. One of those gentle epiphanies that only apparently obscure footnotes or references could reveal.

In a frivolous gesture, I concocted an improbable rendition based on both translations, a slice of contemporary universal metropolitan spleen:

The imprisoned life of the towering city. ~ Harshav

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

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

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

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

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

KVETCH:(Yiddish) verb: to gripe or fret; noun: a chronic complainer, a whiner ~ Jon Winokur

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn't stop thinking about that hand, gone mottled seemingly overnight. Even at ninety, his nails were clean and square. Though I'd never watched his hands purposefully, I realized I knew their habitual gestures better than my own: the way the shelf of his pinkie moved crumbs around on the tablecloth while he spoke on the phone; the way he kept his palm on his forehead as he slept, occasionally opening it as if reasoning with someone, or calculating the make on a deal; the way he spat on his fingertips when he was counting money. Sometimes he dismissed things by pushing air away with four fingers, as if hey weren't worth the trouble of an impassioned rejection. Sometimes by smacking the air left to right with the back of his hand. And sometimes, he ridged his hand as if he was about to shake someone else's but then rotated it and opened the fingers slightly in a Yiddish-like gesture that meant Just look at that a*****e. ~ Boris Fishman

I wrote my first book, I published it in 1955, it was in Jiddish and it was called And The World Was Silent. ~ Elie Wiesel

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 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

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

Grinning, he grabbed his fisherman's cap and coat. "I love you," he whispered quietly. "Ikh hob dikh lib." He kissed Evie's head. She rustled in her sleep, turning away. "Fine. I see how it is. I just wasted my best Yiddish on you," Sam joked to himself. ~ Libba Bray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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