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...

Marilla

Kvetching for the Huffington Post

Wex's piece for the Huffington Post was published today. "How do you make a writer kvetch?" "Publish his book." When you're pining for an empire, but they're giving you a niche it's time for any writer worth his or her salt to start honing their kvetching skills. Without becoming a shmuck, naturally. It's all about remembering where you came from - the crappy jobs you've done while hoping for a break -...

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...

Wex

Looking like a beaten out willow twig on Sukkes

Between ritualized gluttony, ritualized fasting, hours and hours of ritual prayer and almost as many hours of trying to sleep in a Succah (often preceded by even more hours of ritual cursing while trying to build the Succah), the average observant Jew looks and feels vi an opgeshlogene heshayne, a beat-out willow twig, by the time Hoshana Rabba rolls around. The idiom is based on one of the plants used as...