“Ooftish”: Writing, Orality, and the Specter of Yiddish in an Early Poem by Samuel Beckett

Abstract

This article discusses the 1938 poem “Ooftish,” Beckett's only work to use a Yiddish term. Its title derives from the expressions . The significance of these expressions, and the fact that Beckett only approximates their idiomatic usage, prompts a consideration of foreign-language titles in his early Anglophone poetry; this strategy signifies the deterritorialization of Beckett's English writing and figures the challenge of creating a poetic discourse between the abstractions of thought and the tangibility of experience. That dialectic finds resonance in the poem through a conflict between Jewish and Christian connotations of Scriptural allusion.