Using Yiddish curses effectively isn’t a matter of yelling out bad words; the trick is to put good ones together in the most damaging possible way. It’s a pastime, an invitation to a dialogue, a form of recreation that lets standard Yiddish thought and speech run wild. Many curses involve a reversal of fortune; the [...]
Author Archive | Wex
The rules of mourning
Now that Shavues has put an end to the enforced sobriety of the omer period, my relatives––many of whom still dress in leisure suits designed in eighteenth century Poland-–are getting their glad rags out of mothballs in preparation for Jewish wedding season. A man who is overdressed for any occasion, let alone the one at [...]
Staying on the dairy bench for Shavuos
In anticipation of Shavuos, my favorite Yiddish idiom this week is blaybn af der milkhiker bank, “to stay [be left] on the dairy bench.” A bank, literally “bench,” was what would now be called a counter or food preparation area, and every kosher home had both a milkhike and a fleyshike bank. To be left [...]
Shlok this way
I received an e-mail recently from a reader who says, “My parents both came from Russia and I grew up in Brooklyn. I spoke nothing but Yiddish at home and I like to think that I can still speak it pretty well. My question is about the word schlock. I know what it means in [...]
Too much matzo on Pesach
The idea crops up periodically, generally on Passover, when the khomets-starved brains of certain West Coast executives––addled, some say, by a surfeit of matzoh-brei––go into overdrive and begin to smell money where the rest of us see nothing but Nyafat: “Why don’t we do a Jewish version of The Godfather?”