Yiddish Cocktail

At the end of a long, informative, and amusing discussion of Yiddish words and phrases used in relation to alcoholic beverages, Daily Forward columnist Michael Wex adds an unusual cocktail recipe, which I have not previously encountered:

The Yiddish Mixed Drink

The single most Jewish liqueur ever known — at least back in my youth, when it was all the rage with the ladies who bar mitzvah — is Cherry Heering, a brandy-based cherry liqueur with a name that inspires confidence at any event at which Yiddish might conceivably be or have been spoken. Real cocktails, though, have never been developed. There is but one:

Alter Kaker (invented by Paul Lewis of the Joffrey Ballet)

1.5 oz. Old Grand-Dad
5 oz. Prune Juice

Pour into highball glass over ice cubes.

Stir well.

Enjoy.

I don't think I'll be the first to belly up to the bar to order that one, but I'd be curious to learn if any of my readers have tried it. If so, how was it?

Setting the Alter Kaker down on a cocktail napkin, I should at least mention a potentially useful phrase that Wex drops into his article:

Mevisem can also be used of other intoxicating substances. As Ray Charles would have sung on “Modern Sounds in Yiddish and Western”:

LOmeer GAYN meVIsem VERN

(You can look it up.)

Useful Conversational Distinctions

Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu, has a monthly language column in the Jewish Daily Forward. In his latest piece, he points out a distinction of some importance in spoken Yiddish, since making the wrong syntactical choice could prove to be quite embarrassing. Here he is pointing out basic terms for polite conversation about the weather:

Basic Precipitation

RAIGN
rain

ES RAIGNT
It’s raining

SE PLYUkhet IN DROYSN
It’s pouring out there

DIner
thunder

BLITS
lightning

BLITS-POST
e-mail [lit., “lightning post”]

SHNAY
snow

ES SHNAYT
It’s snowing

AN aVAYreh A HINT aROYStseTREIBM
Not fit for a dog outside [lit., “It’d be a sin to put a dog out”]

EIZ
Ice

GLITSHN ZAKH
to slip, slide, skate

Then he adds:

A distinction that shouldn’t be overlooked:

MEER IZ HAYS
I’m hot

MEER IZ KALT
I’m cold

but

IKH BIN HAYS
I’m horny

IKH BIN KALT
I’m frigid

There’s nothing more embarrassing than sitting in a stuffy room and saying, “Am I the only one here who’s horny?” without even knowing that you’ve done so.

If I recall, both German and French have similar pitfalls. In German, the word "warm" means, in most contexts, what the word "warm" means in English. But to say "I am warm" or "It is warm," one says, in German, "Es ist warm." (I am reaching back to German 101 in college, so I am open to correction.) If one says, in German, "Ich bin warm," (literally, "I am warm"), the colloquial meaning is "I am homosexual (gay)."

Oops! Be careful if you say that in a steam bath.

As for French, a BBC web site provides this useful information:

In France, I popped into a restaurant to cool down as it was boiling hot and I had just been on a bike ride and was sweating like mad. When I tried to explain to the waitress that I was hot - Je suis chaud - she looked outraged and marched off, refusing to take my order. It was only later that I realised that I had said I was hot ... for her!

Editor's note: One to definitely look out for! To say you're feeling hot, in the context of temperature, you need to use avoir chaud, ie. j'ai chaud. Using être with chaud implies you're feeling 'horny'!

This item elicited comments from readers to confirm the point:

Similarly, if one is feeling cold, one mustn't say in German ich bin kalt, which means "I am frigid". The correct phrase is mir ist kalt.
Sent by: Mariam

I am really glad to have discovered this. I have told my French neighbour's wife many times that je suis chaud and worse still, I have said it to her husband and her son.
Sent by: Ped

In Québec, je suis chaud can also mean 'I'm drunk'.
Sent by: Sam

* * *

You need to watch out with the hot vs. horny in Spanish as well; a friend of mine, sitting in the livingroom of her Spanish parents in law, declined an offer to have tea with No gracias, estoy caliente. What she should have said was Tengo calor.
Sent by: Julia

I lived in Germany and was sick one day, so wasn't thinking properly. I said Ich bin heiß, ich muss ins Bett gehen, hoping to say 'I'm feverish, I need to go to bed' but instead saying 'I'm horny, I need to get to bed.'
Sent by: Heather

I wonder what kind of response Heather received?

Gay Stories with Odd Angles

Tomorrow's edition of The Forward features a report on the large number of gay men and lesbians who exhibit an interest in Yiddish culture, including especially klezmer music.

The author, New York attorney Kathleen Peratis, asks:

Never heard of the Queer Yiddishkeit movement? Until last summer, neither did I.

Then, an Israeli friend told me he had learned from his (straight) daughter, a doctoral student in women’s Yiddish literature at Berkeley, that a large proportion of her colleagues are gay. Really? Interviews over the next several months of past and present YIVO staff members, klezmer performers, Yiddish scholars and others confirmed it: Gay Jews have flocked to Yiddish and klezmer.

Peratis suggests some possible explanations for this connection:

The affinities between gay people and Yiddish, and especially bundist, culture are, when you think about it, obvious: both are staunchly secular, cosmopolitan, progressive and often marginalized. “Queer Yiddishkeit gives me permission to go back to the world of my grandparents without leaving myself behind,” juggler Sara Felder said.

“It’s about alienation from the Jewish religious establishment,” said Alisa Solomon, a former staff writer for The Village Voice. “There’s a kind of analogy people make with the marginalized status of Yiddish itself. It’s an outsider stance.”

She also writes that the association is not exactly recent, pointing to articles from the 1980s and 1990s that make a similar connection. But it goes back even farther, she says:

The presence of gay people and gay themes in Yiddish culture, however, is not new. Queer Yiddishists tell us, for example, that Yiddish cinema in the 1930s contained “encrypted messages” on homosexuality — think Molly Picon in her trouser role in “Yidl Mitn Fidl,” what Eve Sicular calls “cross-dressing in the service of family values.” She refers to the “gay subtext of Yiddish cinema during its heyday, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, which reveals distinctly Jewish concerns of the time” such as “conflicted identity, passing, and same-sex attachments.”

Now I know why I spent Thanksgiving weekend last year reading Michael Wex's fascinating book, Born to Kvetch.

On another topic entirely, the March issue of Details magazine -- which appears on newsstands on February 27 -- reports that

America's most desirable managers all have one thing in common: homosexuality.

In the article, correspondent Danielle Sacks cites a recent academic study:

In The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders . . . and What Every Manager Needs to Know, author and USC business-school professor Kirk Snyder argues that gay bosses embody a style of personalized attention that allows high-maintenance Gen Xers and Yers to maximize their performance. "Gay executives tend to look at how each individual brings unique abilities, and they see their job as figuring out how best to take advantage of those skills," he says.

In fact, during Snyder's five-year study of American executives, he stumbled on some startling findings: Gay male bosses produce 35 to 60 percent higher levels of employee engagement, satisfaction, and morale than straight bosses. This is no small achievement: According to human-resources consulting firm Towers Perrin, only a measly 14 percent of the global corporate workforce are fully engaged by their jobs. And the Saratoga Institute, a group that measures the effectiveness of HR departments, found that in a study of 20,000 workers who had quit their jobs, the primary motivator for jumping ship was their supervisors' behavior.

So what makes gay bosses different? It may have to do with the way they survived high school. "Gay people are constantly having to dodge and weave and assess how and where they're going as they grow up," says Snyder. "And that manifests itself as three huge skills: adaptability, intuitive communications, and creative problem-solving." In other words, your boss is cool with your leaving a little early one day a week to pick up your kid from school, or happy to offer a learning experience that helps you close a crucial deal.

What could all this mean? Perhaps it means that when you mutter under your breath something about your boss being a "first-rate c**ks**ker" (this is a workplace-friendly blog), you're really expressing your admiration and envy of him.