How to Bottom in Yiddish

• In Event: Weakness as Resistance in Hebrew Literature and Beyond

Abstract

ZIKH UNTERGEBEN is the Yiddish term linguist Mordekhe Schaechter offers for “bottoming” in his vocabulary of Yiddish sexuality. Moving beyond the definition of UNTERGEBEN as “surrender” (offered for example by Harkavy’s dictionary), Schaechter brings together a common Yiddish word with an English language based vocabulary of Sado-Masochistic sexuality, giving new meaning to the Yiddish original. This is part of his larger project, what was to be a lexicon of Yiddish love, and now remains an unfinished English-Yiddish archive of sexual vocabulary. But of course, even without the English vocabulary, Yiddish has its own history of Sado-Masochistic expression, which has been passed down to us in the form of traces in both literature and scientific writing, of which Schaechter’s linguistic project is a part. My paper will consider this UNTERGEBEN, the desire for submission and the celebration of weakness known as “bottoming” through Celia Dropkin’s Yiddish poetry, as well as a rare manuscript of an English language poem found in her archive. Beyond offering Dropkin’s poetry and Schaechter’s linguistic projects as evidence of deviant sexuality, I will use them to think about how we might negotiate the weakness of the current state of Yiddish and the threat of Yiddish’s ultimate failure (to survive, to be passed down through the generations). Moreover, through the idea of masochistic pleasure and invoking the QUEER ART OF FAILURE, I will ask how might embrace this weakness and enjoy it.

author

• Zohar Eeda Weiman-Kelman, University of Toronto