Wex

Nebekh

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Nebekh, an interjection meaning "the poor thing, it's a pity, alas," is one of the oldest Slavic words in Yiddish, one of the few to have penetrated the Yiddish of Western Europe, where the non-Jewish population did not speak Slavic languages. "Nebbish" is a Germanized pronunciation of nebekh, which is usually spelt nebbich...

Wex

Jews and punch buggies – how times have changed

I knew that the world I grew up in was gone for good when I noticed three of four Volkswagens and a couple of BMW’s in the parking lot of my daughter’s Hebrew day school, all of them utterly unmolested. When I was a kid you couldn’t park such a car at any Jewish institution and expect to come back to windows that were intact or tires that hadn’t been slashed. It was bad enough that...

Wex

Oy daddy, it’s good!

The mid-term election results have left many a Yiddish-speaking liberal echoing the title of an old klezmer tune and saying, “Oy, tateh, s’iz git, Oh, Daddy, it’s good.” In such a phrase, tateh—a familiar or affectionate term for “father”— is a way of avoiding the use of the Lord’s name in vain, while its diminutives tatenyu and tateleh, both of which mean “little father,” are...

Wex

Bar mitzvahs and prayer shawls

I’m afraid that my nephew’s about to get married. My sister got him a tallis for his bar mitzvah last week. In the traditional environment in which we were raised, the tallis is worn only after marriage. An unmarried male wears one only to go up to the Torah or lead prayers, and you can imagine the stigma attached to not wearing one after a certain age. Indeed, the tallis was considered the sign par...

Wex

Nu?

Scandals? Lies? Financial meltdowns? Nu? It’s time to go Yiddish on all that hot air and prick those balloons with the sharpest verbal pin in the language. Roughly translatable as “so?” nu conveys so very much more. In the context of political debate it means: “What you’re saying is either irrelevant or painfully obvious. Maybe you’d like to get to the point”; or, “So why have you still not...