Marilla

“Born to Kvetch” New York Times Review

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Most children watching "The Three Stooges" didn't realize it, but an understanding of Yiddish was required to get a lot of the jokes. In one episode, when Larry hears that Moe is heading to a hockshop, he says, "While you're there, hock me a tshaynik." What must have sounded like pure nonsense to most viewers was a Yiddish... Read more here

Marilla

“Born to Kvetch” – Jbooks Review

It’s been called folksy and quaint. It’s been labeled a dialect and dismissed as “jargon.” Even its defenders tend to admit that it died 50 years ago. Yiddish, nebekh, has suffered so much defamation of character that it could probably win a libel suit. If Yiddish ever does sue, its first expert witness will be Michael Wex.In his extraordinary and important new book, Born to Kvetch, Wex debunks a... Read more here

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“Born to Kvetch” Washington Post Review

In Born to Kvetch Wex straddles both the high and low end of that spectrum in a work that manages to be simultaneously entertaining and erudite. Wex explains Yiddish culture by unraveling, in great detail, the words and phrases used by Yiddish speakers in the various areas of their lives. In doing so, he draws deeply on the complex traditional and religious roots of Jewish culture while engaging in what... Read more here

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“Born to Kvetch” review in J Weekly

Let others be born to be wild, born to run or born under a bad sign. According to Michael Wex, Jews were Born to Kvetch. Wex’s tome is more than just the standard-issue listing of the 97 ways to say “idiot” in Yiddish. It's a reverse-engineering of the spirit of Eastern European Judaism via the Yiddish language. By analyzing the words and phrases of everyday Yiddishkeit, Wex paints a detailed... Read more here

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“Born to Kvetch” review in the Chronicle of Higher Education

...In contrast, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (St. Martin's Press, 2005), by Michael Wex, among the finest living translators of Yiddish literature and a humorist to boot, is, well, a hoot. If you can stop laughing long enough to finish it, Wex distills enough idiosyncratic insight about Yiddish to make any true admirer of its uniqueness kvell. Whereas Kriwaczek is the... Read more here