It’s a bit of a red-letter day here in Wexelheim, where preparations for the summer 2014 Grand Prix of Insolvency have progressed from feverish to ardent. This morning, while trying to decide whether to use the money owing me for Shlepping the Exile to take care of the balance owing on my 2012 income tax or offer it as an initial instalment for some of the dental work that might keep my teeth from having to leave their gummy home, I opened my e-mail in-box to a record fifteen–that’s one-five–requests for short translations, definitions of Yiddish words, information on “how would you say,” quick listens to a couple of sound files with which the writer was having some trouble, an equally quick read-through of someone or other’s comic novel just to make sure that the Yiddish is correct, though if the mood should strike me, I should feel free to include a laudatory blurb–not one of them from anybody I know.

I get four or five of these most weekdays and today was unusual only by dint of volume. I’m not talking about stuff from friends and colleagues and people with whom I’m working on some sort of project–I mean demands for free labour from people whom I have never met, never corresponded with, and never been hired by who don’t seem to understand that Yiddish, for all intents and purposes, is my profession and that my ability to speak it no more obligates me to the Jewish people than a similar facility in English does to the descendants of Hors and Hengest.

But it’s only Yiddish and it’s only a little. And nobody’s born an expert. My knowledge and, in the case of the blurb hounds, my name, are clearly worth something, but that something doesn’t seem to be money. “It’ll only take a few minutes;” “It’s very short;” and my all-time favourite, “What have you got better to do?”

But doctor, it’s only a little tumour.

I used to waste my time writing back, giving people hourly rates for such work. Responses ranged from “I know people who will do it for free,” to “This should only take you five minutes, so I’ll give you a twelfth of that.” No one ever offered to pay what I asked for.

We had a word for this kind of behaviour at home. We used to call it yandes. If you want to know what it means, you’re best off to learn the Hebrew alphabet, pick up a copy of the Beinfeld-Bochner dictionary and hope they give a phonetic spelling. Otherwise, you can reach me via Paypal.

The fabulous Georgia White sums up my feelings in musical form: