"What am I, chopped liver?" According to Wikipedia, this Jewish-English expression signifies frustration or anger at being ignored on a social level because the mushy gray dish may not be appreciated by everyone.
An alternate explanation for the etymology of the expression is that chopped liver was traditionally served as a side dish rather than a main course. The phrase, therefore may have originally meant to express a feeling of being overlooked, as a "side dish."
Whether or not you like chopped liver, actress-comedienne Shifra Lerer has made a funny cooking video, No Shmaltz, with Khayim Wolfe, singing and joking through preparation of falshe gehakte leber (mock chopped liver, a vegetarian dish from The Low Fat Jewish Vegetarian Cookbook by Debra Wasserman.
You may have seen Lerer in our blog post last July about Shvitz --the Yiddishe Workout Video. She is the first Argentine-born Yiddish actress to star on the American stage. She is an international actress and comedienne who has appeared on the Yiddish and English stage, and in such films as Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry" and Barry Levinson's "Avalon", and in the Yiddish film, "God, Man and Devil".
On the Yiddish stage, she has appeared in productions of New York's Folksbiene Theater, and in productions with Ida Kaminska, Jacob Ben-Ami, Sygmund Turkow, and in musical theater with A. Lebedeff, Shimon Dzigan and Ben Zion Witler. She was the winner of two "Goldies" awards for best actress in 1986, and was awarded the Zhitlovsky Prize in 1989 for her artisitic contribution to the Yiddish theater.
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I wanted to cry because it has been so long since I heard by Bubby and great aunts and uncles speak yiddish! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
ReplyDeleteMichelle