"I don't want a niche – I want an empire!" – Michael Wex, Globe and Mail
Born to Kvetch was published in England for the first time a couple of weeks ago and has just received its first review in the Jewish Chronicle.
Some academics have been complaining about Born to Kvetch. This is, after all, a book that has zero inhibition regarding vulgarity. It is, moreover, quite politically incorrect and provocative.
For example, there is plenty and more on the traditional anti-Christian motifs embedded in many Yiddish phrases, enough to make a modern Jewish person (or Yiddish teacher of “multicultural” students) want to tsiter (tremble), khalesh (faint), pretend the book doesn’t exist (nisht geshtoygn, nit gefloygn), or makhn pleyte (run for it), as if from a sreyfe (fire).
But none of that is the fault of the author, Canadian-born Michael Wex, whose book renders him heir to Lenny Bruce, Leo Rosten and your favourite Yiddish teacher, all rolled into one. (more...)
Most children watching "The Three Stooges" didn't realize it, but an understanding of Yiddish was required to get a lot of the jokes. In one episode, when Larry hears that Moe is heading to a hockshop, he says, "While you're there, hock me a tshaynik." What must have sounded like pure nonsense to most viewers was a Yiddish pun, one that Michael Wex, in his wise, witty and altogether wonderful Born to Kvetch, lays on the table for analysis. (more...)
It’s been called folksy and quaint. It’s been labeled a dialect and dismissed as “jargon.” Even its defenders tend to admit that it died 50 years ago. Yiddish, nebekh, has suffered so much defamation of character that it could probably win a libel suit.
If Yiddish ever does sue, its first expert witness will be Michael Wex. (more...)
In Born to Kvetch Wex straddles both the high and low end of that spectrum in a work that manages to be simultaneously entertaining and erudite. Wex explains Yiddish culture by unraveling, in great detail, the words and phrases used by Yiddish speakers in the various areas of their lives. In doing so, he draws deeply on the complex traditional and religious roots of Jewish culture while engaging in what can only be called national psychobiography. (more...)
Let others be born to be wild, born to run or born under a bad sign. According to Michael Wex, Jews were Born to Kvetch.
Wex’s tome is more than just the standard-issue listing of the 97 ways to say “idiot” in Yiddish. It's a reverse-engineering of the spirit of Eastern European Judaism via the Yiddish language. By analyzing the words and phrases of everyday Yiddishkeit, Wex paints a detailed portrait of the way of life Hitler and Stalin almost completely erased like the shaking of a societal Etch-a-Sketch.
And it doesn’t hurt that he’s stunningly, uproariously, laugh-out-loud-and-make-everyone-on-the-train-think-you’re-a-lunatic funny. (more...)
