NY Times Article:
At the Bar; Oy! One misused Yiddish word in court, and just listen to all the kvetching going on.
By David Margolick
Published: Friday, June 26, 1992
Santiago v. Sherwin-Williams et al. had already droned on for four years when counsel for the defense filed its umpteenth otherwise unmemorable motion in the case last August. “It is unfortunate,” it declared, “that this court must wade through the dreck of plaintiff’s statement of undisputed facts.”
Jonathan Shapiro of Stern, Shapiro, Rosenfeld & Weissberg in Boston, one of the plaintiff’s four lawyers, was startled by the choice of words. Dreck, he knew from his grandparents, was Yiddish for doo-doo, though a tad more tart. Even by the standards of the nareshkaytn normally filed by opposing lawyers, he thought such chutzpah intolerable. So last September he and a co-counsel, Neil Leifer of Boston, resolved to talk takhles with Judge Joseph L. Tauro, the tsadik hearing the case.
“For almost four years now, plaintiff and her attorneys have been subjected to constant kvetching by defendants’ counsel, who have made a big tsimis about the quantity and quality of plaintiff’s responses to discovery requests,” it stated. “This has been the source of much tsores among plaintiff’s counsel and a big megillah for the court.”
It was hardly balebatish , the lawyers complained, to call a fellow lawyer’s work “dreck,” particularly “in view of the khazeray which they have filed.” Finally, “since not all of plaintiff’s lawyers are yeshiva bokhers ,” it was presumptuous as well. “Plaintiff prays that the court put an end to this mishugas and strike “dreck,” he concluded.
Ever since the motion was filed, yentes at law firms have been photocopying and faxing the Shapiro-Leifer broadside throughout the country. In a way, the memo has challenged all of the bobe mayses about the death of Yiddish.
The offending memo was written by Karen DeSantis, an associate at the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis of Chicago. But it was signed by makhers from three other firms — Goodwin, Proctor & Hoar and Bingham, Dana & Gould in Boston and Popham, Haik, Schnobrich & Kaufman in Minneapolis. And, Mr. Shapiro asserts, the word “dreck” was retained at the specific insistence of lawyers at Bingham, Dana.
Lawyers at Bingham Dana at first tried to make Mr. Shapiro’s request sound like bobkes . “We find it difficult to believe you would seriously have us all shlep to court to argue such a meshugganah motion,” Meghan Magruder, a partner, wrote Mr. Shapiro. Had he called only to kibitz , she continued, he would have learned that the scriveners of the offensive motion “are all goyim ” who innocently misused the word.
Were Mr. Shapiro enough of a mentsh to withdraw the motion, she went on, the defense would happily stipulate that dreck be changed to “morass.” “As the taxpayers must ultimately pay to resolve such a motion, it would be a mitzvah ,” she concluded. “Moreover, your shtik may be lost on the court.”
But when he ruled on the motion last December, Judge Tauro showed the defense lawyers no rakhmones . “Any further use of inappropriate language in any proceeding before this court will result in the imposition of sanctions,” he wrote in stern and unadulterated English.
In the meantime the authors of the memo continue to get nakhes . Stanley G. Feldman, vice chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Arizona, awarded the Shapiro-Liefer collaboration his prestigious “motion of the year award.” And in an article entitled “Plain Yiddish for Lawyers and Judges,” in Trial magazine, Ralph Slovenko of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit quotes the memo at length.
“With the almost complete extermination of European Jews during World War II, many scholars prophesied the end of the Yiddish language,” he noted. Instead, he continued, with its “peculiar mix of toughness and compassion,” Yiddish is “finding new and unprecedented application in American law.”