Wex

Yiddish and the Dave Clark Five

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Early last week I found myself using the Yiddish phrase kosher fardint without any hint of irony. This doesn’t happen often. Although there’s no necessary reason not to use kosher fardinen (the infinitive form) to mean exactly what it appears to mean, “to earn in a kosher way, to obtain something by means of honest toil...

Wex

The worst thing you can say in Yiddish

Someone recently asked me about the worst thing that you can say in Yiddish. After weeding out all the obvious contenders, I realized that the final frontier of Yiddish cursing also involves the ultimate reversal of any victim’s expectations: Zolst onkumen tsu mayn mazl, "you should have my luck.” In other words, “The worst thing I can wish on you is...that you should be me.” Ale tsuris vos ikh hob...

Wex

Religious snow in Toronto

We’ve got very religious snow this year in Toronto; it turns up every Monday, Thursday and Saturday, whenever the Torah is read in shul, and woe to the week with a two-day Rosh Chodesh that starts on Monday night. We’ve got what Yiddish would call shney durkh tir un toyer, “snow through door and gate.” Normally, you’d say shlimazl durkh tir un toyer, "bad luck through door and gate," but our...

Wex

Living in Sin

I was recently asked how Yiddish refers to people who live together without what used to be called “benefit of clergy.” The short answer is, as infrequently as possible. Indeed, as soon as the news gets out, the woman’s older relatives will all nod sagely and whisper that they’d always suspected that the girl shpint nisht ken tsitsis dortn, “isn't spinning [i.e., knitting, weaving] any tsitsis...

Wex

Pesach in January

After twenty-five years in an apartment previously occupied by Glenn Gould, I’m about to move into a beautiful, roomy house in one of Toronto’s most impeccably gentile neighborhoods, ten minutes by foot from the nearest shul. Looking the place over while the previous owners were still in residence reminded me of one of my mother’s favorite terms of opprobrium: shlimazlnitseh, a bad housekeeper, the...