Wolf Younin's Yiddish Language and Folklore Column "SHPRAKHVINKL

• In Event: Popular Yiddish Prose

Abstract

Wolf Younin’s Yiddish Language and Folklore Column “Shprakhvinkl”
Itzik Gottesman (University of Texas at Austin)

This paper examines the weekly column Shprakhvinkl (language corner) in the Yiddish Forverts newspaper written and edited by Wolf Younin (1908 – 1984) . The paper will begin with a review of other folkore columns in the American Yiddish press such as Chana and Yosl Mlotek’s long-running column “Leyners dermonen zikh lider” (“Readers remember songs) in the Forverts and A. Litivin’s 1920s columns in the Poalei-Zionist periodicals. Younin was a Yiddish journalist, poet, playwright, lyricist and teacher from Vilna. In America, he actively collected Yiddish folklore both through his Shprakhvinkl in the newspaper and through field research. Shprakhvinkl had originally appeared in the New York Tog newspaper and was then continued in the Yiddish Forverts newspaper in the 1970s after the Tog ceased publication. The column consisted mainly of folklore materials that the readers of the paper sent in. Younin asked his readers to contribute a wide range of folklore genres: legends, folktales, songs, jokes and especially proverbs and idiomatic expressions. Sometimes readers would send in longer descriptions of customs and shtetl life and these ethnographic accounts, usually in first person, comprise a rich source of Jewish ethnography in Eastern Europe. Younin’s particular interest in the Yiddish language led him to emphasize idioms and expressions. For example, he asked his readers for proverbs using the words “leygn” (to lay), “redn” (speak), “shpiln” (play), “khapn” (catch) and “zogn” (say).This resulted in the collection of hundreds, if not thousands, of idioms. Readers also turned to Younin to explain the history of Yiddish words and expressions, and though he was not academically trained, he knew many languages and his comments are noteworthy.. No doubt if one were to assembe all the proverbs, expressions, jokes that were printed in Shprakhvinkl it would reach the thousands, and in the conclusion, the column and its accomplishments will be put into historical perspective regarding Yiddish folklore collections.

Author

• Itzik Gottesman, University of Texas at Austin