Wex

Driving in Yiddish – Part 2

Three of the most common and effective epithets hurled at the competition by Yiddish-speaking drivers are yold, shmendrik, and kuneh-leml. Yold (often pronounced yolt when it’s meant to be emphatic), which now means primarily “sap, sucker, dupe” and once in a while, “yokel, rube, hick,” comes from the Hebrew and originally meant “well-born boy, scion of a wealthy family,” whence it developed...

Wex

Driving in Yiddish – Part 1

Henry Ford might have been one large, cuddly bundle of Jew-hatred–he did write the preface to my copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion–but he also helped to enrich the Jewish people with the one thing for which it had been yearning since the publication of the Bove Bukh, a verse epic about a Yiddish-speaking knight: Henry Ford helped give us armor. Not for us the clank of mail as we struggle...

Wex

A barracks should collapse on you

Whenever people find out that I work in Yiddish, they almost inevitably ask me to tell them my favorite Yiddish curse. These days it’s a kazarme zol af dir aynfaln, "a barracks should collapse on you.” Having a building of any kind collapse on top of you is never pleasant, but if that building is a barracks, then you're probably in the army--the last place any East-European Jew wanted to find himself....

Wex

Nebekh

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 when transliterated into German. A nebbish is called a nebekhl in Eastern Yiddish,...

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...