Wex

Summer weddings in Yiddish

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!The Fourth of July was the second day of rosh-khoydesh Tammuz, which means that there’s a sudden rush on weddings before the mid-summer hiatus that we call the dray vokhn, a period of mourning during which all celebrations are banned. Wedding planners and anxious mekhutonim are busy busy busy uniting Jewish children before...

Wex

Sweet, sweet Summer

Zimer-leyb, as Mendele Moykher Sforim used to say, “Sweet, sweet summer”; me’ shikt di kinder avek in di kontris, the children are off in the country, rusticating under the watchful eyes of experienced, specially trained college students from Europe and the Antipodes, while you have opted to stay in the city, pretending to be on a diet while actually skipping every second meal in an effort to save up...

Wex

Feh and fnyeh

Summer, when people who have been dragging themselves from exile to exile for nearly two thousand years inexplicably betake themselves to airports, where they seem surprised to find themselves chanting, almost compulsively davening, the Yiddish monosyllable of universal disapprobation—feh. It means: “It stinks.” Feh is not to be confused with its near relative, fnyeh, which means “nothing special,...

Wex

The rules of mourning

The Dapper Dans 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 which he finds himself, is said to oyszen vi an almen nokh...

Wex

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 on the dairy bench is to be shut out of something, unjustly excluded on the basis of a very...