My great-grandmother used to say a phrase something like "Yatz Gatz Spetagamie" (totally NOT spelled correctly) when she was frustrated at someone/something. We have mimicked this for generations without knowing what it really means or how it is really said if it is even accurate or Polish. Maybe she just made it up! If anyone knows what it means and how it is really said and spelled, please let me know. Thanks!
Perhaps and it's just perhaps the second part sounds like 'z pętakami' - with brats /with annoying people but I have no idea about the first part. It does sound kind of yiddish but that's just am impression probably with the proper pronunciation lost.
The first word might have been jak -how The second łgać- lie but then the whole phrase wouldn't make sense at all.
Milo, Paw meant that he was unsure if J.J's grandmother's first language might have in fact been Yiddish, rather than Polish! Such was common among principally shtettl Jews living in Poland who often spoke minimal, if any, Polish whatsoever.
Lyzko, does it often happen in the USA that people discover their Jewish roots of which they have had no idea, e..g, after 50, 60, 70 years? Is it possible there?
Such sudden and uexpected findings happen in Poland due to complicated history of Jews in Central/Eastern Europe, hence my question to the OP.
All the time, often even among quite famous people too. Problem is, in a country like Poland, Jews were so segregated, so isolated from mainstream society for ever so long, Christians couldn't look upon them as "Poles" in the same way as they could one of their own majority fellow citizens!
This thinking irks American Jews such as myself no end, since in the US, being born here automatically grants or confers the honor of citizenship, even if one's parents came from elsewhere. I'm an American, but also a Jew.
However in Poland, typically until quite recently with rampant assimilation, being a Jew born in Poland scarcely qualified such a person to automatically consider them self Polish.
Some spoiled brats quite ignorant as to facts tell stories and those narration is Jews enteral victims. Go and have a good one. Just stop your whine you are not a victim and never were.
What really irks the practicing American jews is the non practicing jews such as yourself that try to speak for them by riding the practicing jews shirttails.
Prewar Poland was multicultural. There were ethnic Poles, Germans, Russians, Ruthenians and more. Quite often one's religion was a question of identity. All took part in the mainstream society. Take Lodz and Lodzermenschen or show business. They were buried close to one another like the cementary of seven religions in Suwałki or the cementary of four religions in Sosnowiec. Just like they were buried close to one another at Monte Casino or Katyn. Churches and synagogues were often located in the same area.
Thre's this wonderful letter written by Tuwim that explains a lot. There were Jews who wanted to integrate and those who didn't.
Of course, kaprys, there were numerous ones who wanted to, and did! Look at Boleslaw Lesmian, Julian Tuwim, Jan Brzechwa (his mother), the internationally renowned tenor Jan Kiepura, the mathematician Lobaczewski (part-Jewish), Tadeusz Rozewicz, the great theater director Kantor, along with many others.
@Ironside, only a fool would believe that any single group or ethnicity actually seeks victim status. You give decent Polish gentiles a bad name. Maybe you ought to follow the example of heroes such as Socha, Sendler, Jan Karski or Wojtyla, instead of isolationist rabble-rousers such as Mieczyslaw Moczar and his followers.
only a fool would believe that any single group or ethnicity actually seeks victim status.
You are not a victim Lyzko and neither is any given Jew living today under the age of 85. Yapping about past and portraying Jews as eternal victims I just wrong. Besides it give bad name to all the Jews not only those who spew that self - center crap.
You are not a victim Lyzko and neither is any given Jew living today under the age of 85.
Of course not, counting is your weak point. It is enough to have been born Jewish in 1945 and lost parents/family in final stages of the Holocaust to have the right to consider oneself a victim. It makes 74 years. 11 years isn`t a lot to some people, to others it is eternity.
How about being born much after the war as a child of Jews who survived the Holocaust but it left such terrible trauma in their psyche they couldn`t help transfering it on their offspring, too? Isn`t it possible? When were you born? E..g, I can say I am such a victim on the Polish side. My mother was so scared of Germans during the Cold War she made me start learning German at the age of 6 because she claimed only those who knew the language and were able to communicate with German occupiers could avoid death. She told me terrifying stories with examples to motivate me. They will haunt me to the end of my life.
My mother was so scared of Germans during the Cold War she made me start learning German at the age of 6 because
I was sorry to hear your story, Pawian. But such a background can never be a good motivation to learn a language. Have you succeeded to learn any German?
The education lasted till my uni years when I chose German as SFL. I learnt at home with a private tuitor all that time. Later I dropped it and decades passed, but i`ts obvious a lot of things have remained in my memory. E.g, I remember irregular verbs and sometimes recall them teaching English ones.
But such a background can never be a good motivation to learn a language
Despite hearing various stories from the war told to me by the relatives, I have avoided associating German with the Hitler occupation of Poland. Basically, I find the German language neutral on the emotional level and I find it quite pleasant as a language to learn. I also find the language intriguing because - I am told - a substantial part of its vocabulary dates back to the pre-Indoeuropean period, thus retaining the 'old European' substrate.
I know of a case when a German soldier warned the inhabitants of a small Mazovian town (or better say, a bigger village) on the eastern side of the Vistula river in the summer of 1944 that the town would be burnt to the ground the following day ("miasteczko będzie palone" - was the exact phrase remembered by my grand father). The warning had been delivered to a clockmaker of the town who could speak German.
How about living under Soviet Boot after being decimated by Germans and Soviets? Surely trauma didn't stop after 1989. WTF Are you talking about? I'm talking about American Jews who never lost their parents or grandparents during the WWII and they claim a victim status ... just because. I don't know DNA/tribe.
I'm talking about American Jews who never lost their parents or grandparents during the WWII and they claim a victim status
Yes, the majority of contemporary Jews are like that. However, there are still many who can claim victim status. Are you going to check each old Jew`s credentials whether they have the right to such claims or don`t?
German has always reminded me of the "prehensile tail" of modern English, having, so to speak, lost almost all of its cases from the Old up through early Middle English period. I must though gently caution the rest of us NOT to judge ANY language, including our native tongue, by the cheap 'standard' of conventional entertainment, above all, Hollywood WWII movies, which desecrate nearly every foreign language, turning for instance German into the perennial "harsh, militaristic" stereotype, Italian into the wildly gesticulating operatic screaming match of crazies, French the "language of lovers" (oh, please let me puke now or forever hold my peace!), Russian, a slovenly-sounding ooze of some ancient LP played backwards etc. ad nauseum.
German is deep in quite tangible emotion, Polish reflects a far different experience and perhaps, less darkly cynical view of life, leavened by an unswerving Christian faith, long since absent from the modern German experience, for reasons already worked through to death here on PF:-)
Are you going to check each old Jew`s credentials whether they have the right to such claims or don`t?
I don't need to. Just dismiss those claims allthoghter. They are BS anyways, All humanity not this or that tribe suffered one time or other. Claiming exclusivity for being a collective victim and to attach suffering as a possession of the one particular tribe is a pure racism.
Inheritance of that status as it seems to be is just nothing short of BS.
And if the tables were turned and it had been Germans wantonly murdering gentile Poles with the same systematic, assembly-line fashion of the Holocaust, would you be quite so philosophical or would you be out for blood?
And if the tables were turned and it had been Germans wantonly murdering gentile Poles
IF?They in fact were doing it.
would you be quiteso philosophical or would you be out for blood?
Now, after so many years has passed and no people involved are alive what would be the point? the People do not inherit guilt nor can be held responsible for the deeds of their fathers. The only reason Germany as a state has been held accountable for those deeds was the fact it was done by the German state. Ah and another factor - they totally lost the war.
So regardless of the fact that Germans were killing the Polish people, civilians. I don't look at a German and think hey has his grandfather done this or that. That sick and very unhealthy attitude. Revenge after three of four generations is not OK.
What I find worse and totally insane are people who have no direct connection with those killed during the war but they still they somehow feel connected. Even though when in comes to American Jews their forefathers at the time just choose to be bystanders and done absolutely nothing to help those in Europe they now claim kinship with. That level of sick and perverted mindset need medial help.
Wait, we have even worse. People who are either criminally insane or just shameless scumbags. They take one or two people who done something bad and they blame for it a whole nation.
Iron does` t seem to realise the difference between traditional feuds by tribes or nations
Baboon doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that a genocide, ethnic cleansing and so on wasn't a modern innovation.
Although carrying a grudge clearly isn't healthy, being aware of the past might well prevent an identical atrocity from being perpetrated in the future!
Dictators rely on the almost predictable collective amnesia of the average person, so that the precedent for a future genocide cannot be recalled and those who mastermind it can do so without nagging protest of the people, mostly willing to sit by idly as such atrocities are being committed.
Lyzko, have you heard of the Intelligenzaktion? And a list of thousands of Poles to be murdered at the very beginning of the war? You keep forgetting (or just don't want to remember) that gentile Poles were victims, too.
