קולטור

Potatoes

In this lesson’s movie, Nomi sings a fragment of a song to Yankl: Zuntik kikhelekh, montik kikhelekh… She has adapted a well-known folk song, changing the words to suit her little brother's love for cookies. The original song is about potatoes:

This song describes a diet consisting only of potatoes: potatoes every day of the week, potatoes at every meal! The original folksong more accurately reflects the atmosphere in the past in many poor Jewish households, where the main concern was not the question of eating healthy, as in our current lesson, but rather of having the means to put bread (or potatoes!) on the table.

Yiddish folklore has its roots in this milieu, and so it is rich in themes of dayges-parnose (concern for livelihood).

Different Words for the Same Thing

In ‏1.2 קולטור we noted an example of lexical variation – different Yiddish words for ice cream. For the ubiquitous potato, linguists have noted scores of synonyms and variants. Besides bulbe, the term kartofl is very widespread. We have chosen to use the latter in YiddishPOP, starting in the next lesson, 3.3.