The Twisting Tale of the Yiddish Term for B—-

Rochelle Mogilner writes:

The Israeli television series Shtisel uses the word klafte a number of times in its Yiddish dialogue. As a Yiddish speaker, I know this means “bitch”—a woman who, to say the least, is not pleasant. Although it is part of the Hebrew lexicon here in Israel, my son in New York, who knows Hebrew very well, says he isn’t familiar with it. He thought it might be related to Hebrew kalba, a female dog, but I highly doubt it. I would guess it is of Slavic or Germanic derivation. What do you think?

Shtisel, for those of you who don’t watch Israeli television, is a Hebrew sitdram set in the ḥaredi community of Jerusalem, some of whose characters occasionally speak Yiddish. But klafte, which means exactly what Rochelle Mogilner says it does, did not enter Yiddish from a Slavic or Germanic source. It did so straight from the Aramaic of the Talmud, and thereby hangs a tale—or, if you prefer, a tail.