"I don't want a niche – I want an empire!" – Michael Wex, Globe and Mail
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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...)
...In contrast, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (St. Martin's Press, 2005), by Michael Wex, among the finest living translators of Yiddish literature and a humorist to boot, is, well, a hoot. If you can stop laughing long enough to finish it, Wex distills enough idiosyncratic insight about Yiddish to make any true admirer of its uniqueness kvell. (more...)
If you asked me whether I enjoyed Michael Wex's hilarious and learned book, Born To Kvetch, I would find myself in an impossible quandary. To admit the rare pleasure I derived from reading it would be to violate what Wex argues is the very essence of Yiddish sensibility: a stubborn, cynical and often maddening refusal to concede satisfaction, with anything. (more...)
