Page 56 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Another language, Yiddish, played a part in his stay in Switzerland. Not in love with the food available around the school, Dad somehow found some local Jewish families who were happy to provide dinner for him on occasion. They, of course, spoke Yiddish, which was spoken along with English at my father’s home in Brooklyn. He was fond of pointing out that in a German-speaking canton, potato was pronounced “po-dadt-do,” whereas in a French-speaking canton, its Yiddish render- ing sounded a lot like “pumm-duh-tair.” Thus, Yiddish was adaptable, as were, apparently, my father’s forebears.
Though not what I would call a reader, Dad loved language and would constantly seek out oddities in the world of words. (“Why is it ‘inflammable’ and not ‘flammable’?” “How would you intone or punctu- ate the tailor’s sign ‘My Name is Fink and What Do You Think I Do Your Clothes for Nothing’”?) Dad also sprinkled his conversations at home with Yiddish words and phrases. I can hear him saying, for exam- ple, the following, which, to the best of my ability, I render phonetically: “Nebuch, bahld, ah-levie, macher, tsimes, alter cocker, a bissel, bupkes, chazerei, gay avec.” And here, perhaps, was his favorite admonition to me: “Don’t be such a gantseh k-nocker!” (which I took to mean “big shot”).
My father’s father was an immigrant who, I was told, came from the same town in western Russia (or was it Poland?) that my grandmother, Rosa Dickholtz, came from. Dad would joke that his family preferred it when Poland rather than the Tsar was in control of their town, because the Russian winters were horrible. Based upon, among other things, the fact that my grandmother regularly attended meetings of the “Mizricha Society,” I believe that the town was actually Mie,dzyrzec, which is in the province of what is now Lublin in Poland.
Although he was an immigrant without any formal education that I’m aware of, my paternal grandfather, Harry Yaverbaum, after whom I was named (at least according to my mother), managed to make a lot of money prior to 1929 through his ownership of residential real estate. If the stories are to be believed, Grandpa Harry Yaverbaum had done well enough to have had his own chauffeured limousine, the ideal car to transport my beloved and obviously tough grandmother, Rosa (the best
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