November 17, 2021
The Legend of Colin Powell’s Yiddish
By PhilologosThe late statesman's supposed knowledge of Yiddish bordered on the mythic. And myth it was, for his admirers routinely exaggerated his facility with the language.
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In my last column, I tried to answer some questions from reader Seth Gitell about bits and snatches of Yiddish phrases that he remembered hearing as a child. One of these was “Ma Hobetsky’s,” which Mr. Gitell thought referred to “a remote or arcane store of some kind.” From this I spun the theory that “Ma Hobetsky” was perhaps a Yiddish-speaking general store owner who answered “ikh hob dos,” “I have it,” to requests for even the unlikeliest items.
My comedown arrived a few days later in the form of another communication from Mr. Gitell. “Ma Hobetsky,” he had been informed by an acquaintance who shared his childhood milieu, was a garbled memory of the words meylekh sobetske or “King Sobetzky.” When I wrote back explaining that Jan III Sobieski was king of Poland from 1674 to 1696, and asked how the Yiddish expression fun meylekh sobetzkes tsaytn, “from the days of King Sobiesky”—that is, “as old as old can be”—could possibly refer to a store, Mr. Gitell replied: