S’PAHST NISHT it doesn’t fit
S’TOIGT SHOYN UF A KAPURA it is worth a sacrifice; not worth much
TAKEH indeed; TAKEH EMES indeed true
TALMUD rabbinical commentaries on the Torah
TANTA aunt
TATEH father
THALLIS prayer shawl
TOCKIN indeed
TOKHTEREL daughter
TOV good
TREIFE nonkosher
TROMBENYIK ne’er-do-well
TSEEGEKHAPPEN fornication
TSEVORFEN, TSEVORFENEH scattered
TSIMMES sweet dish of stewed fruit or side dish of vegetables and fruit; dessert
TSITSES habitually goes “Tsk-tsk”
TSURIS troubles, worries
TSU VELKHE KLYASSES to which classes
TSVEI’N DREIZIG thirty-two
TUKHIS AFIN TISH ass on the table
TUMMEL commotion
TVILLIM phylacteries
TZADDIKIM righteous men, holy men
UHMEIN SELUH Amen, so be it
UND and
VEHR VEIST who knows
VEITIG sorrow
VERBRENT burned out
VERENEKEHS fried pastry made of rounds of dough filled with jelly, fruit or meat
VERFALLEN lost
VERFLUKHTEH damned
VERFOLLEN ZOLL ER VIE E LIKT may he rot where he lies
VERSHTINKENEH foul
VEY sorrow; VEY IZ MIR woe is me
VIDDER again
VIE A TOITEN BANKEHS cupping a cadaver
VIE ZOY how come?
VI M’GEYT UN VEN M’GEYT TSU HERN DI PROFESSORS how and when you go to listen to the professors
V’IM LO AKHSAV, MATAI? if not now, when?
VIR HUTZIKH TSEGEKHAPT we grappled
VONNEH bath
VUS HEIST what does it mean
VUS I’DIS what’s that
VUS MACHT IHR? how are you?
VUS MACHT SIKH what’s up?
VUS YUKSTEH why are you rushing
WUNDERBAR wonderful (German)
YAPONCHIKIS Japanese
YEET Jew
YELED boy
YENEMS belonging to that other person; bummed cigarettes
YENTA shrewish or gossipy woman
YESHIVA rabbinical college; also an Orthodox Jewish high school for both secular and religious study
YIDDISHER KUPF Jewish head; intelligent or wily person
YIDDISHKEIT Jewishness, Yiddish life or culture
YIDLEKH little Jew
YINGLE little youth
YINGOTCH overgrown youth
YISGADAL, V’YISKADASH, SH’MEY RABO first lines of the Kaddish: “Magnified and sanctified be the name of the Lord”
YOLD fool
YOM KIPPUR Day of Atonement, most solemn Jewish fast day
YUKSTEH to rush
YUNTIFF holiday
ZAFTIG full-figured
ZE VUN SIKCH BALT GESHLUGEN TSIM TOIT they almost killed each other
ZEY HOBN GEMAKHT A GITTEN SHIDDEKH they’ve made a good match
ZINDLE child
Z’MISHT confused
ZOLL DIR GOTT HELFEN may God help you
ZOL ER GEHARGERT VERN may he be murdered
ZOL GEHEN MIT MAZEL may you go with luck
ZOLST GEBENTSHT VERN may you be blessed
ZOLST GEHEN GESINT may you go in health
ZOLST SHOYN ELTER VERN may you not grow any older
ZUG speak
ZUS VERFOLLT VEREN you should rot
ZUZIM coins (archaic; occurs in song KHAD GADYO)
ZVICKER pince-nez glasses
ABOUT THE ARTIST
MARTIN LEWIS, born in Australia in 1881, was considered one of the greatest chroniclers of American urban life. His ability to capture adverse weather conditions and obscure light sources, coupled with a keen sense of composition and technical skill, made him one of America’s greatest printmakers of the twentieth century. Arriving in the United States in 1900, he was by 1909 living and working in New York City, and his earliest etchings date from 1915. He produced more than 147 drypoints, etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, and lithographs between 1915 and 1953. His first success was as a watercolorist, but he also worked in oil. He died in 1962.
Jacket: Bay Windows. Drypoint and sand ground, 1929.
Volume I: Arch Midnight. Drypoint, 1930.
Volume II: Relics [Speakeasy Corner]. Drypoint, 1928
Volume III: Glow of the City. Drypoint, 1929.
Volume IV: Late Traveler. Drypoint, 1949.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HENRY ROTH, who died in 1995, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of eighty-nine, had one of the most extraordinary careers of any American novelist who lived in the twentieth century.
He was born in the village of Tysmenitz, in the then Austro-Hungarian province of Galitzia, in 1906. Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1909. He briefly lived in Brooklyn, and then on the Lower East Side, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep is set. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem, first to the Jewish section on 114th Street east of Park Avenue; but because the three rooms there were “in the back” and the isolation reminded his mother of the sleepy hamlet of Veljish where she grew up, she became depressed, and the family moved to non-Jewish 119th Street. Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. With Walton’s support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930. He completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934 to mixed reviews. He contracted for a second novel with the editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s, and the first section of it appeared as a work in progress in Signatures, a small literary magazine. But Roth’s growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer’s block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream.
In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artist’s colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer. They fell in love; Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War Two, Roth became a tool and gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then in 1946 to Maine. There Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor, while Muriel also taught and eventually became principal of a grammar school.