Michael Wex - Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

BORN TO KVETCH

A LSO BY M ICHAEL W EX

Shlepping the Exile
Die Abenteuer des Micah Mushmelon,
Kindlicher Talmudist

YIDDISH LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN ALL ITS MOODS

Michael Wex

ST. MARTINS PRESS
NEWYORK

BORN TO KVETCH . Copyright 2005 by Michael Wex. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wex, Michael.

Born to kvetch : Yiddish language and culture in all its moods / Michael Wex.1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-30741-1

EAN 978-0-312-30741-7

1. Yiddish languageHistory. 2. Yiddish languageSocial aspects. 3. Yiddish wit and humor. 4. JewsCivilization. I. Title.

PJ5113.W482005
439'.109dc22

2005046589

First Edition: September 2005

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Sabinae Filiae
Nunc scio quid sit amor

10. A Slap in the Tukhes and Hello: Y IDDISH L IFE FROM B IRTH TO
B AR M ITZVAH

11. More Difficult than Splitting the Red Sea: C OURTSHIP
AND M ARRIAGE

I ts impossible to thank everybody who contributed to this book. Many of the phrases and expressions that follow first came to my attention as responses to my impertinent questions and youthful misbehavior by people whose names I never knew. Theyand my long-suffering familycan at least look down from wherever they are now and know that I was listening to their admonitions, even if I never acted upon them.

Far more direct thanks are due my friend Seth Rogovoy, who hooked me up with my agent, Gareth Esersky. Jane Rosenman accepted the project on behalf of St. Martins Press and then passed it into the more-than-capable hands of Ethan Friedman, whose patience I have tried on more than one occasion.

Thanks are also due to Henry Sapoznik and Hy Goldman for giving me the opportunity to develop much of the material here as lectures at Klezkamp and Klezkanada, respectively. Also to Michael Alpert, who first came up with the brilliant idea of hiring me to teach language and ethos in West Virginia many years ago. Eleanor Levine, Helen Zukerman, and Abe Goldstein have both done more than their share to help this project see the light of day, while Heiko Lehmann has taken care of business in Berlin.

Finally, my daughter, Sabina, has been a source of endless love and trust, silly fun and complete delight. My wife, Marilla, has made our home a much larger and brighter and happier place. She came looking for romance and got a snootful of Yiddish; without her, this book would not be here. Her love is on every page and zi hot gehat, as theyd say, a sakh oystsushteyn.

T he material presented in this book does not always correspond to the way in which Yiddish is sometimes portrayed in the more popular English-language media. Together with what weve come to see as typical Yiddish earthiness and typical Yiddish humor, there is a good deal here that is neither pretty nor politically correctand theres almost nothing that could be described as nave. Like the Talmud, which lies at the root of so many Yiddish attitudes, Yiddish is a lot of things, but innocent isnt one of them. As a definitive cultural phenomenonas the main language of a whole societyYiddish can be said to have flourished from the First Crusade to the end of World War II, give or take a few years on either end. As far as attitude and influence are concerned, it is entirely fair to say that well be looking at a language and culture that were born in one massacre and died in another.

Since a historical approach to such material could easily prove depressing, Ive chosen to present a portrait rather than a biographya series of portraits, to be strictly accurate: heres Yiddish talking about food; heres Yiddish dealing with sex and death; heres Yiddish posing with some relatives. Enough background will be provided for the reader to grasp the words and idioms in the same way that someone living in a Yiddish-speaking world would have. Some portraits might take the form of X-rays, but that doesnt make them any the less portraits.

In order to frame things properly, though, we have to start with a look at Judaism in general, and those features of Jewish life and faith that were crucial to the development of Yiddish. If the first , its because the Bible and Talmud are to Yiddish what plantations are to the blues. The only difference is that blues left the plantations behind, while Yiddishtry as it still sometimes doesnever escaped from the Talmud.

The Yiddish that appears in this book has been transliterated according to the system of YIVO, the Yidisher Visnshaftlikher Institut. Its the only system in general academic and scholarly use, and has been adopted by virtually all libraries that hold Yiddish-language materials. The main points to watch out for are:

1. The letter e at the end of a word is not silent; its pronounced like a very short English e. For example, has two syllables, ka-and -she. It rhymes with Sasha.

2. The hard h soundas in the first syllable of Chanukais rendered with kh. The YIVO version of the holiday comes out as khanike.

3. Ey in this system is pronounced like the Canadian eh? Kley, which means glue, sounds just like the English clay.

4. Ay is the same as the English long y. Fray, the Yiddish for free, sounds just like the English fry.

Ive diverged from the YIVO system when using well-known Yiddish words in the English text. So Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, kvetch, and bar mitzvah all look like this when mentioned in English. When used in Yiddish, theyre transcribed according to the rules above: rosheshone, yom kipper, kvetsh, bar-mitsve.

All other translations not otherwise credited are my own.

Standard biblical translations are based on the Revised Standard and Jewish Publication Society versions.

In a book of this sort, aimed at a general audience, there isnt much point in providing a bibliography when virtually all sources are in Yiddish. Still, mention has to be made of four seminal works that I have used no less than anyone else working in Yiddish: Uriel Weinreichs Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary; Alexander Harkavys Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary; Nokhem Stutchkoffs Oyster fun der Yidisher Shprakh (Thesaurus ofthe Yiddish Language); and Max Weinreichs Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Shprakh, available in English as History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago, 1980).

BORN TO KVETCH

A man boards a Chicago-bound train in Grand Central Station and sits down across from an old man reading a Yiddish newspaper. Half an hour after the train has left the station, the old man puts down his paper and starts to whine like a frightened child. Oy, am I thirsty.... Oy, am I thirsty.... Oy, am I thirsty....

The other man is at the end of his rope inside of five minutes. He makes his way to the water cooler at the far end of the car, fills a cup with water, and starts walking back to his seat. He pauses after a few steps, goes back to the cooler, fills a second cup with water and walks gingerly down the aisle, trying to keep the cups from spilling. He stops in front the old man and clears his throat. The old man looks up in mid