Help: My Husband Passed Away, and I Want to Reconstruct the Bedtime Prayer He Taught our Children

Cindy Peyton writes:

My husband just recently passed away, and my children remember a prayer that he and their grandmother recited to them at bedtime. I’m trying to determine the words of it. As best as we can reconstruct them, they were, spelled phonetically, something like Gutta got lasmulech schoffen unt gutta sucha vochen. Any help would be appreciated.

Whatever the words of this prayer are, they clearly have become blurred in Mrs. Peyton’s and her children’s memory. Still, enough is recognizable to establish without a doubt that they are either German or Yiddish. Guter Gott means “good God” in both languages (in English we would say, in addressing the Deity, “dear God”), in which there are also regional variations. In wide areas of Eastern Europe, for example, Yiddish speakers said giter Got, while the final “r” of words like guter is dropped in many German dialects, as it is in Mrs. Peyton’s version. Of course, this is not proof that the prayer in question is in German dialect. Speakers in many parts of America regularly drop their final “r”s, too, and this habit could have affected the Peyton family’s memory.