Wex

What makes a pauper rejoice?

“Ven freyt zikh an oremen?” asks the Yiddish proverb. “What makes a pauper rejoice? Az er farlirt un gefint, When he finds something that he’s lost”––because a pauper can’t afford a replacement. This is especially true when what’s been lost is one’s youth. I was interviewed last week by a journalist whom I’ve known since we were in high school. Though never close, he and I have always...

Wex

A person of the Book

This is the fourth of five guest blog posts I wrote for Powell's Books. Michael Wex - not a rabbi. I could never see any point to getting out of school. Coming from a family that occasionally clawed its way into the lower middle-class for up to two years at a time, I was acutely aware of the fact that the kind of jobs available to people like me embraced nothing that anybody ever dreamed of being: general...

Wex

Where does “nu” come from?

I’ve been doing a great deal of research lately into the origins and history of the Yiddish word nu and have made a discovery that has changed my whole outlook on life. If you think that nu comes from German, you’re wrong; if you try to trace it back to Slavic, you’re going to hit a dead end. As I’ve just found out, we’ve been nu-ing since we were slaves in Egypt, and maybe even before. It turns...

Wex

Gimme a pigfoot

This is the third of five guest blog posts I wrote for Powell's Books. Minibrix was about as handy as Wex ever got... Anybody who's ever seen me try to hammer a nail into a piece of wood or build a scale model of the Temple of Solomon out of kitchen matches and popsicle sticks will know what I mean when I say that forcing me to sit through two years of shop class just because I happened to be born with a...

Wex

Wex the luftmentsh

Traveling from town to town on the Jewish Book Fair circuit, I’m beginning to feel like part of the great collective known as orkhe-porkhe--hoboes, vagrants, yidishe bindlestiffs like Stuffy Derma, the tramp on the old Milton the Monster Show. The term comes from the Hebrew oreakh poreakh, "a flying guest,” one who's here today and gone tomorrow. Unlike those of us who collect royalties, real...