"Can you speak Ashkenazis to me?!" my roommate called. I was at my desk in my room. I walked out and found her in the common room, going through my high school yearbook, which was filled with pictures of famous rabbis that hadn't taught at my all-girls' yeshiva followed by photos of the graduates, a study in straightened hair, high collared black shirts and pearls (these were our shidduch pictures, after all). And then, alongside our names, Hebrew adages.
"Read this," she demanded, pointing to the phrase next to my photo.
Now, she didn't want me to read it because she can't read Hebrew. After spending four years studying at a Jerusalem yeshiva, it's safe to say that her Hebrew is better than mine. What she wanted me to do was to translate the Hebrew into Ashkenazis, which is a language that shares some similarity to Hebrew in etymology but has completely different diction.
The verse next to my yearbook photo, in Hebrew reads: "Chachmat adam ta-ir panav." (A man's wisdom lights up his face).
Beautiful, right?
In Ashkenazis: "Chochas adom sair panov."
The slight differences- the softening of the "Tt" sound into a "Ss" sound; the underpronouncing of the "Aah" so it sounds like an "Oh"- all of these morph modern Hebrew into Ashkenazis. It is a language I grew up speaking in Brooklyn where the hard "T" is discouraged in order to distinguish the good heimishe yids from the Israelis and Sephardis.
I've worked long and hard to enunciate clearly, to speak modern Hebrew but sometimes I get tired and lazy and I lapse into Ashkenazis, which means that I start sounding like an old rabbi. This is something I'm ashamed of.
But when my roommate beckoned me with, "Speak Ashkenazis to me," I began to think differently about my mispronunciation.
Could this be a tool of seduction? A different way of talking dirty? Could this be a way of getting men?
Surely there are Jewish men at there who want their "Tt" ignored and their "oys" to come directly from the diaphragm.
For more Ashkenazis, call 1-900-FRUMBOY
1 comments:
does the fact that this is posted as humor and absurd mean you're not serious about it? just wondering
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