Yiddish loanwords in colloquial Polish

Having lived for millennia in the midst of the nations, the Jews stubbornly preserve their identity. To safeguard Hebrew, they have nonetheless used, for their profane needs, the languages of others. Those of Central Europe thus forged Yiddish on the basis of medieval German, onto which they agglutinated swathes of vocabulary taken from Hebrew, then from the surrounding peoples. In particular, numerous borrowings from the Slavic languages enriched the lexical stock and inflected the grammar, and Yiddish is a model of flexibility, accepting wide variations of vocabulary and pronunciation according to the region in which its speakers live.

All this is well known. What seems to me less commonplace is the inverse inquiry: do the languages of the peoples among whom the Jews live, in their turn, reflect this presence through symmetrical borrowings?

The question may surprise, and even seem absurd to the French reader. To be sure, the Christian liturgy did make wide borrowings from Hebrew, from “amen” to “hosanna”; to be sure, learned language drew “tohu-bohu” and other “behemoths” from it — but this has nothing to do with daily cohabitation, nor with the everyday speech of the Jews. The borrowing followed other paths. At first glance, the French took nothing either from Yiddish or from Judeo-Spanish. As for the banalization of words like “ghetto” or “diaspora,” which have their source in the history of the Jews, it bears witness to the travels of ideas, not to linguistic transfers.

It is interesting to make, in passing, a fertile digression to glance at the borrowings the French language has made… from Arabic. These were integrated by two paths: learned or technical terms accompanied, in the Middle Ages, scientific or technological “imports”: needless to recall that amiral, alcool, algèbre (admiral, alcohol, algebra) were at the time received with the same naturalness as laser or quasar are in our day… Much later, the colonial conquest brought Arabs and French to rub shoulders in daily life, and our everyday language drew from it “toubib” (doctor), “kif-kif” (all the same), “chouia” (a little), or “bezef” (a lot). Not to mention the culinary borrowings, with their own vocabulary, and the insertion of the merguez into the folklore of the Hexagon. For this second strand, however, a very close and prolonged cohabitation of the two communities was required. As we have said, unlike the words come from Arabic, French received words taken from the Jews only by way of the learned side of the language.

It is interesting, however, to examine whether the situation was not different in other circumstances and in other regions, where the presence of the Jews was more massive, where their language spoke louder. If that were so, there would be a kind of “critical mass” of the minority, indispensable for this diffusion against the grain to appear, this reverse osmosis — to go on borrowing from the vocabulary of the scientists.

Now, this was notably the case in Poland, between the 13th and the 20th centuries. And indeed, common life, despite antisemitism and rejection, inserted into Polish words whose origin today may not be clear even to those who still use them. The number of these words is, moreover, dwindling, since the memory of them is no longer kept up by dealings with Yiddish-speakers.

My reflection is neither exhaustive nor learned; it rests above all on personal recollections, necessarily incomplete. It is subjective in its appraisal of the real place of this or that term in the language, all the more so as that place evolves over time. I have probably sinned through indulgence. A more systematic study of the vocabulary of everyday Polish would be opportune, supplemented by readings meant to restore at least in part the swathe of vocabulary fallen into disuse. This could be a thesis subject to be defended at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków… Let us leave it to time to whisper the idea to some student-linguist of my country of origin.

Borrowings of this kind were more numerous and more varied in those parts of the country where the Jewish presence was particularly strong: in the eastern regions, in Galicia, in Volhynia, in Polish Lithuania. As for the western part of the country, it is the street slang of the great cities, Warsaw or Łódź, where the influx of poor Jews was considerable, that incorporated a few Yiddish words.

In what follows I have endeavored to transliterate into French the Polish pronunciation (which may differ slightly from the pronunciation of the same words by Yiddish-speakers, for the phonetic principles differ); the conventional Polish spelling is given afterward in parentheses.

— In the villages of Galicia, when two peasants drank a glass of vodka at the inn (and where to make linguistic borrowings, if not from the Jewish innkeeper?), one could hear: Shioulim! (siulim) — rather than “lekhayim,” which became for the Poles “khaïm!” anyway, but which was stranger to pronounce. And if the peasant spent too much time at the tavern, it was perhaps because he had no wish to go straight home, which could be a real khekdish¹ (hegdysz), especially if his wife was bound to call him there a shmondak (szmondak), a good-for-nothing. Yes, in truth he could miets moïra (miec mojra), be afraid²… Especially if he were drunk to the point of being unable to get home alone, and a baligouwa (baligula), a carter, had to throw him into his cart to bring him home.

On the other side of the country, among the toughs of Warsaw, one did business, guesheft (geszefty). To this day the Poles designate by the pejorative term gueshewtsiaj (geszefciarz) a maker of… shady deals — in a word, a “wheeler-dealer.” Moreover, a deal that was not quite legal was said to be tref (curiously, the word “kosher,” which is beginning to gain currency in French, does not seem to me to have taken root over there). A deal of this kind was often a “scheme,” a makhloïke (machlojka) as the makhers (macherzy) used to say, and those among them who were Jewish must no longer have remembered themselves the original meaning of this Hebrew term.³ But, tref or kosher (koszer), everyone was on the lookout for a “metsyïah” (mycyja), a good bargain. To unearth it he was ready to turn this way and that, to dreïkatsh (drejkac⁴), to “spin like a top”… Here we are back in eastern Galicia, in the land of the shtetlekh, where the luftmentshn had to dreyen (twist and turn) a great deal to make ends meet. But if ever the makhloïke succeeded, then all was guit (git)⁵ — the word is the exact equivalent of O.K.; the deal might become a real tsimes⁶ (cymes), a delight… and bring in some parnousse⁷ (parnusa), enough to feed the mishpoukha (myszpuha), the family.

Of course, more often than not, to succeed one needed nerve, khoutspa (chudzba), or else to beg a favor, a toïva (tojwa), from someone, or else to team up, to look for a partner, a shitev (sitew). Deals were then done in partnership, do sitwy. The association could be mixed, Judeo-Polish, but two Poles could perfectly well do something do sitwy, if only to drink a bottle of vodka together. In any case, on returning home, each was free to bring back from town a shmontsès (szmonces), a trifle⁸…

To unwind in this way the skein of words come from Yiddish, Polish takes on a particular fragrance, an air at once familiar and old-fashioned, now rendered only by the few nostalgic novels and tales that, in Kuśniewicz, in Konwicki, or in Miłosz, evoke the eastern marches of prewar Poland; leafing through them, Polish readers of a certain age suddenly find themselves dreaming of the times when all this was true and alive, of the times when the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert spoke Yiddish in the streets of Lwów with his little playmates — he who is not Jewish, but whose companions were Jewish enough that he naturally knew and used the great handful of words to be exchanged in the course of their games. As for younger readers — the great majority of readers, in truth — they do not always understand the words they read, and take them for borrowings from some local idiom unknown to them; is it Ukrainian? Lithuanian? Tatar? Ah yes, it’s Yiddish… what a funny language!

Let us return to our phantoms of another time, and to their daily cares, to their makhloïkes… These did not always succeed; a cop or some other sort of official personage might get mixed up in it — a Khaman (Haman) in any case, who made everything fall through, who provoked an oumglick⁹ (umglik). A misfortune, in short. Then, farewell calf, cow, pig! There began a veritable sadny dzien, the Polish translation of “Day of Atonement,” which in this language means a great uproar, a hubbub with raised voices.¹⁰ One was still lucky if one could get home, hide under one’s iberbet, one’s eiderdown (one rather said it in the plural, iberbety), and wait for the storm to subside — before trying one’s luck again, possibly through the intermediary of another mishoures (miszures): a word that, in Volhynia, designated a go-between in business affairs.¹¹ If the failure was due to malice, one could go so far as to organize a dintoïre (dintojra), an unofficial tribunal, and judge the guilty party. Unless he had acted out of foolishness, unless he was a meshougue (meszuge), a poor madman. In which case one was content to exclude him from the khevra (chewra), from the company.

To console oneself or to take one’s mind off things, one could always tell khokhma (chochmy) among friends: anecdotes, witticisms, shpass (szpas), vitz (wic). Although this last term might just as well have come from German directly… But one mustn’t make too much of one’s khoukhem (chuchem), one’s clever fellow — the term had something pejorative about it. Like that of besservisser (beserwiser), which to this day designates the “know-it-alls,” the presumptuous. Finally, one could also set about flirting with a shiksa (siksa), a young girl. The term, current today, may come from the notion of “little pisser” in Polish, but it may also come from shikse — a term designating, among the Jews, a goy young woman.

One sees: the handful of words that have come back to me are borrowed either from the domain of business or from that of conviviality, the fields of social life where the two groups naturally met. There certainly exist many other words that have not come to my mind, and this little lexicon asks only to be usefully completed thanks to a few competent readers.

And then, as indeed in other languages, there is a whole family of words in Polish that designate objects, figures, or activities that do not concern the Poles and that therefore do not apply to the goy (goje): words designating manifestations proper to Jewish life, such as matsa (maca — unleavened bread), khazan (chazan — cantor), shames (szames, the “sexton” of the synagogue), shabès (szabes — shabbat) with, of course, its shabès-goï¹². And of course rabine (rabin — the rabbi). And finally a word whose origin I cannot make out: kirkout (kirkut), which specifically designates the Jewish cemetery, the “good place.” Here are words that were not really transferred into everyday Polish, since in this language they are assigned to the Jewish domain and do not apply outside it.

Three dozen words… It is far more than I imagined when I began my quest; it is paltry if it must be the only memory, in the process of fading, of the nearly thousand-year presence of the Jews in Poland. What will they do with it? And this thing I am doing here — is it a mitzvah (mycwa)¹³ against forgetting?

Notes