Knaidel/Kneydl

Jun 12, 2013

By JONATHAN BRENT
Executive Director, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Much ink has been spilled over the knaidel/kneydl quasi-controversy since it erupted in the wake of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on May 30, veering from the ponderous and scholarly to the frivolous and silly. While no YIVO scholar was consulted, expert opinion has been cited from the YIVO Institute, as has the hoary authority of Merriam-Webster.  Culinary and orthographic precedents have been invoked from generations past. The history of Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe on the one hand, and the kitsch of the Borscht Belt have chimed in. “My Little Matzoh Ball,” sung by Little Rita Carol Age 12, a popular song from the 1950s, has begun to circulate on the internet thanks to the sound archivists at the YIVO Institute. The Carnegie Deli has enjoyed the spotlight again for what many might consider a dubious, commercial product. Fox News, TIME, The New York Times, Urdu language blogs in Pakistan and India, The Jewishpress.com, and esoteric Yiddishist blogs around the world have all joined in this celebration of—what? A word? A mystery of spelling?  Other such mysteries of spelling and transliteration abound: gray/grey; theater/theatre; travelling/traveling; Czar/Tsar; Tchekhov/Chekov/Chekhov.  Chances are that if the final question posed to young Arvind Mahankali were “theater,” it would have been prefaced with the injunction to provide the American spelling; or if of the word “Czar,” to provide the primary American spelling. No such caution occurred with “knaidel.” Why?

The incident in my opinion is not about correctness but about identity. It tells us something of the uniquely anxious place of Yiddish culture in American life—accepted but not entirely; understood but not deeply; pervasive, taken for granted yet with a bit of a chip on its shoulder. One can see the mavins of Yiddishkeyt (or is it Yiddishkayt?) shrug and mutter about all this coverage—the fools! What do they know?—but with an almost smug glow of pride at being finally—at last!—recognized. Imperfectly, to be sure; incorrectly, no doubt; but still, really and truly and authentically part of American life. At last, after the Marx Brothers and Molly Picon, after Al Jolson and the Three Stooges, after Leo Roston and Fiddler on the Roof, after the Chagalls hanging over Lincoln Center and the chutzpah (or is it the choot-spa?) of Michelle Bachman. Recognized at last. And, think of it, in The New York Times of all places.

And the result: grumpy disputation, arcane potshots from the world of Yiddish philology, mixed with the joy of seeing this tiny bit of old world cuisine suddenly come into the spotlight. Would variant spellings of pad thai or rogan josh have evoked this response? I doubt it. Go into ten different Indian restaurants and you will find more or less identical dishes spelled differently.  So what is the fuss about?

The fuss, it seems to me, stems from the peculiar circumstances of East European Jewish culture, by which I mean largely Yiddish speaking culture, which today can be found for the most part only outside of Eastern Europe. The Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia from which the ancestors of so many American Jews came no longer exists. Apart from the new Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw, there are almost no physical or temporal markers—no Eiffel Tower, no Tower of London, no Kremlin, no monument to St. Vladimir—that memorialize the one thousand year Jewish presence in those lands. The culture is therefore outside and inside at the same time—a continually evanescing reality.  Survivors of the Crimean Tatars, so cruelly deported from the Crimea by Stalin, could eventually return to the Crimea; Poles living in Chicago can return to Poland. The Jews of Eastern Europe have nowhere to return to. Made out of words, gestures, interpretations—a way of doing things, saying things, thinking things and, yes, cooking things—our culture is permanently divorced from a homeland and is largely invisible to the eye. And this is why the spelling of a word, even as mundane as knaidel/kneydl, has meaning to us today.

But this is not the whole story either. The dispute over knaidel/kneydl suggests that this East European culture continues to occupy an ambiguous place in 21st century American life as well, pitting the august Merriam-Webster against the venerable YIVO Institute.   “Live, go, do. This is dayn Amerike,” my father used to say. “Here you can be anything you like.” And invent and reinvent our grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers did. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall; Emmanuel Goldenberg became Edgar G. Robinson; Belle Miriam Silverman became Beverly Sills; in my own case Shmuel Brodsky became my father Stuart Brent. Words possess powerful, talismanic meaning in this world. They can awaken the Golem or put him back to sleep. They are a sign of authenticity or of our distance from home.

“Yesterday,” Franz Kafka wrote on Oct. 24, 1911, in his Diary, “it occurred to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter’, to call her ‘Mutter’ makes her a little comic (not to herself, because we are in Germany), we give a Jewish woman the name of a German mother, but forget the contradiction that sinks into the emotions so much the more heavily, ‘Mutter’ is peculiarly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with the Christian splendour Christian coldness also, the Jewish woman who is called ‘Mutter’ therefore becomes not only comic but strange. Mama would be a better name if only one didn’t imagine ‘Mutter’ behind it. I believe that it is only the memories of the ghetto that still preserve the Jewish family, for the word ‘Vater’ too is far from meaning the Jewish father.”

One hundred years later, the indistinct voice of Kafka’s discomfort persists, a sign that this culture, cut off from all that should give it living vitality, still lives.

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Mazl tov (Mazel tov in Merriam-Webster) to Arvind Mahankali for winning the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee!

For other commentaries on Yiddish transliteration and the debate over how to spell kneydl, see:

Jewish Identity, Spelled in Yiddish,” by Dara Horn (The New York Times, 6/4/13)  “A linguist’s take on the knaidel/kneydl controversy,” by Sarah Bunin Benor (Jewish Journal, 6/10/13)