"I don't want a niche – I want an empire!" – Michael Wex, Globe and Mail
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I finished my new novel "The Frumkiss Family Business" (due for release in Canada at the end of September) a couple of weeks ago and am laying low until it's time to start editing.....
You call this a vacation? I’m so tired that I don’t even know how to describe myself. Am I oysgemutshet un oysgematert, “run down and weary, exhausted and exhausted?” Don’t ask me. Mutshet comes from Yiddish’s Slavic component, matert from the German; there is no real distinction between them because we’re all too tired to remember the difference.
Maybe, though, I look like a hon nokh tashmish, “a rooster after the hens have been trod.” Anyone who's spent any time on a chicken farm or read Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale knows that a rooster will service any number of hens in a single night, thus giving the rooster's owners a chance to sleep in the next day. (more...)
The audio version of my book, Just Say Nu, recently won an award and I found myself confronted with the same problem that I had to face after Born to Kvetch won something: How could I let people know? How was I to say something nice about myself without calling down an evil eye and very likely destroying the very good fortune that I wanted to talk about? How are you supposed to spit three times at the end of a press release? (more...)
We were sent this by Theodore Bikel - our dear, dear friend.
It was just too damned good to keep to ourselves. Mary Tyler Moore producer Stan Daniels does Old Man River as an old Jewish guy. Enjoy! (And if you receive this via email and can't see the YouTube player, just click on the link to bring you to the website and you can look at it here.)
The yeytser horeh, the evil inclination, is still alive and well among our children. My thirteen year-old daughter just informed me that a friend of hers has been grounded after coming home from what was supposed to have been a Yom Ha’Atzma’ut party with “a hickey the size of a matzoh ball.” (more...)
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 and effort,” it seems to be used more often in the sense of “it serves him right, she got what was coming to her.” Last week, though, I’d have had to say yasher koyekh had I been at the scene of the fardin.
Musically-inclined readers have probably guessed that I’m talking about the long-overdue induction of the Dave Clark Five into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. (more...)
