Can you really get thrown out of the club for saying “putz"?

In the truly bizarre Cartoon Network show Sealab 2021, there’s a notorious episode where the crew joins the underwater secret society of the Neptunati, locked in an eternal struggle with their sworn enemies, the notorious “Five Jew Bankers.” They blather on about these men who rule the universe, until finally a character in full Hasidic regalia arrives with a cafeteria tray and shouts,

“Hey! Enough with the tchotchke kosher mohel meshuggah! Dreidl!"

For the uninitiated, I shall translate: There is no translation.

It makes no sense at all, just a bunch of funny Yiddish words strung together. Tchotchke has many spellings and about a dozen meanings, including a plaything, a little bit of nothing, a prank, or a sexy broad who’s brainless; kosher means food that’s pure or something done the right way; a mohel is the guy who performs the circumcision at a bris, which is a Jewish baptism ceremony; meshuggah means crazy; and a dreidl is a toy, a spinning top that was a popular Hanukkah gift for children. String it together for yourself; it doesn’t mean bubkes.

But it’s still funny, isn’t it? Yiddish just plain sounds funny.

Despite the fact that languages are something of a hobby with me, I never could bear the sound of German. A Korean friend of mine said he loved English and hated his own language; he claimed that when Koreans name their baby, they overturn the silverware drawer, “K-chang, T-ching, G-chong,” and that’s what the poor kid’s stuck with. But me, I hate the cacophony of the Hun. Even Alan Rickman doing his Colonel Brandon voice couldn’t make it sound like they’re not spitting out “Juden raus!” That’s why it’s so strange that one of my most beloved languages, Yiddish, is a bastard child of German. And I’m not even Jewish, more’s the pity.

Yiddish was brought to America by Jewish immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe in the 19th century. There have always been several dialects of it, most notably the Western, Ashkenazi Yiddish, mostly annihilated in the Holocaust, and the Eastern, Slavic-influenced Yiddish, which of course took quite a hit of its own. The language is a patois, a mix of elements of German, Hebrew, Aramaic and various Slavic languages, and even a little French and English, written with Hebrew letters. For Jews shut out of the cultures of these various nations, it was their language with one another. Millions spoke it then; about a million and a half do now. Hebrew is the official language of Israel, and many Yiddish speakers, especially in America, lost it by cultural absorption. But in Yiddish’s glory days, from out the slums of Five Points and the Lower East Side, numberless words have worked their way into the American idiom; many people don’t even know the original meaning, or the fact that it was, or is, off-color. Yiddish made its way into the language, especially into some of the tough street slang.

That’s because, on the lower East Side of Manhattan, growing up side by side during the depression with the Italian mafia was the “Kosher mob,” its most ruthless commanders being Bugsy Siegel and the far saner but equally ruthless Meyer Lansky, the closest friend of Lucky Luciano, head of the Five Families. A Jewish mob? This was a shock in those days. Nice Jewish boys just didn’t do this sort of thing. Their parents tried to keep them away from those awful Italian boys, without much success. How you gonna keep’em down on Delancy, now that they’ve seen 42nd Street? Consequently, a colorful percentage of mob slang came straight out of the Russian Pale.

In the great American noir films of the 1940's, epitomized by The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon, Yiddish pops up all the time. My favorite, for being so obscure to the uninitiated, is in The Maltese Falcon. The three men who are after the “Black Bird,” these being played by Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr., have a definite preening air about them that, in those days, was a way of suggesting homosexuality somewhere in the brew. Poor Elisha Cook, who always seemed to end up dead by the middle of any film he was in, plays the piss-boy for Gutman, the Greenstreet character. At any rate, the Bogart character, the immortal Sam Spade, refers to Cook contemptuously as Gutman’s “gunsel.” Most people just scratch their heads and go on watching a great flick. After all, it was the forties, the glory days of American slang.

Of course, it’s Yiddish. The word gunsel was born out of German for goose (gendzel) or gosling, as in an annoying little bird who followed the mother around. In Yiddish it became genzel, with early use as a slang word for a boy who helped the rabbi at Temple, and moved from there to be a pejorative for a young kid who followed along after one of the Kosher mob, usually with a gun to protect his hero, becoming eventually, of course, a word for his personal hoods, with the convenient “gun” prefix telling it all. From there, it sort of fell, as these things do, into implying that the gunsel was the boss’ piss boy, if not his butt boy, thereby attaining, by the 1940's, a whiff of homosexuality to go with the violence.

It wasn’t a very nice thing to say.

What’s even more important and far less understood is how much of the rhythm of so much American slang comes from Yiddish, filtered mostly through the “Borscht Belt” New York comics who played the predominantly-Jewish retreats in the Catskills of upstate New York every summer, and slipping from there into books, movies and common usage. An incredible roster of America’s comedic giants got their start there, many continuing to work these beloved venues all their lives: Henny Youngman, Don Rickles, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen - the total list would need a web site of its own.

But the influence doesn’t stop with the classic Jewish jokes: “Take my wife - please,” or “Did you hear the one about the rabbi knocked down by a streetcar? They asked him if he was comfortable, and he said, ‘I make a nice living.’” There are so many ways in which we express comical ideas, particularly sarcastic ones, that invoke a Yiddish tone that wouldn’t have been understood by an American two centuries ago. The simplest example would be the classic “affirmation/disbelief” syntax used on your 32-year-old son living in your basement: “Suuuure you’re gonna get a job.” More apt to the overall rhythm, however, would be an exchange from the hysterically funny and grossly underrated TV show F-Troop. All the Indians, the entire Hekawi tribe (a clean play on the old gag about the “where the Fuckarwe” tribe) are all Jewish. So the Native-American Yiddish flows like Mogan David over maze. The medicine man says, “It happened many moons ago. Many moons. Many, many, moons. So many moons you wouldn’t believe it.” At which point Chief Wild Eagle snaps, “Enough with the moons already!” Classic Yiddish timing. Absolutely musical.

And so, in this spirit of gratitude to the glorious Yiddish tongue, I’ll give off now and again with a great term from this language that’s slowly dying, but has left on us such an indelible mark. Starting with my personal favorite, because it’s my blog, and I can do as I damn well please.

Pisher - My absolute favorite, particularly in our Age of the Almighty Bureaucrat. There’s even a diminutive, pisherkeh, a little pisher. It comes from the German word “pissen,” which is the verb for taking a piss. Same in French, actually; the word for dandelion in French is pissenlit, “lit” being a bed, because dandelions were a natural diuretic.

A pisher, pronounced pretty much like it looks, is what an American might call a “little shit,” but it’s really so much more. It implies a young man, wet behind the ears, a nobody, often a nobody with a job that makes him think he’s a somebody. So, next time you want to cuss out some IRS weasel and you don’t dare swear, hope he’s not Jewish and call him a little pisher. Remember to put that emphatic Yiddish “p” sound at the opener; if you spit on the guy, you’ve probably got it right.