Kvetching Up With the Yiddish Language

I identify as Jewishish. I’m a shikse, but I’ve always been interested in Jewish culture. My fondness for sprinkling Yiddish words into conversation (and my blog title) is just one sign of this. I can make challah, knishes and kugel, and I dream of joining a klezmer band one day.

So I was thrilled when I found a copy of Michael Wex’s Born To Kvetch: Yiddish Culture In All Its Moods sitting in a pile of discarded books on the sidewalk. I have mixed feelings about leaving books on the street. I’ve found some great stuff there, but if it rains, it ends up being a terrible waste of books. But this was a good find, and I even found out a little bit about its owners. (Nicole and Gerry, if you’re reading this: Dave and Diane were lying when they said they liked your gift.)

This book won’t teach you how to speak Yiddish, or even provide a comprehensive history of the language. As the title suggests, it’s a sardonic look at the ways in which the Yiddish language has shaped Jewish culture and humour, and how Yiddish vocabulary has worked its way into English. It’s not a serious book, nor a particularly cheerful one. It is, however, a darkly funny book. All of Yiddish’s moods, as far as Wex is concerned, are spite, indignation, and self-pity.

Wex divides the book into chapters based on function; there are sections on food, money, cursing, sex, and death. Each chapter is full of vibrant Yiddish words and phrases, along with detailed descriptions of how and when they’re used. The effect isn’t so much to teach the reader a lot of new Yiddish phrases, but rather to give a detailed portrait of what the language feels like. I only picked up a few phrases from it, though I’m sure I’d learn more if I read it again. Born To Kvetch mainly focuses on how Yiddish speakers play with their language, and the role these witticisms play in daily life. There is a small glossary in the back, so if you need to know how to say toilet paper (asher yotsir papir), calamity (umglik), or nice boobs (sheyne moyshe ve-arendlekh, literally “pretty little Moses and Aarons,”) Wex has you covered.

The best parts of the book come when Wex is explaining Yiddish phrases. It’s a highly idiomatic language, and the phrases draw on so many sources and work on so many levels that they’re difficult to translate or even explain. Wex does a good job of it, though. The best new phrase I learned from the book is lign in dr’erd un bakn beygl, which means “lying in the ground, baking bagels.” Wex describes it as the sort of ultimate complaint, a way of saying that not only are things going badly at the moment, but they’ll continue like this forever. It’s a complaint in itself, and a way of setting the stage for all future complaints. Being dead is bad enough, but you’re stuck baking bagels that no one will eat or buy (because everyone else around you is dead and probably busy baking their own bagels.) As Wex puts it, it’s the Jewish myth of Sisyphus. Death isn’t an escape; it will just give you more things to kvetch about.

Parts of the book can be dry: there are passages on vowel shifts and differences between dialects, but these are easy to skim over if you want to. Most of the other phrases explained in the book have just as many layers and nuances as baking bagels in the afterlife, and the explanations can be a little hard to follow at times. But as Wex points out, the complexity of the language goes a long way towards explaining Jewish humour: Jews are used to dealing in multi-layered puns.

In addition to (or in spite 0f) the traditional Jewish jokes and wordplay, the book has a decidedly modern flavour to it. Wex is a pop culture junkie, and there are references to figures ranging from Orwell and Chaucer to Jerry Garcia and Courtney Love sprinkled in between stories from Eastern European shtetls. Born To Kvetch is a quick, funny read, and while it’s not the most complete depiction of Yiddish culture, it paints a engaging, endearing portrait of a people who love to curse and complain. But that’s enough about that. Now it’s time to hak mir nisht ken tshaynik (talk about something else for a change.)

The Anne Frank Effect

Miep Gies died on Monday at the age of 100. She not only helped hide Anne Frank and seven other Jews during World War II, but she also returned Anne’s diary to her father after the war. The diary ended up being one of the most significant pieces of literature about the Holocaust, and such a staple of middle school English classes that reading it is almost a rite of passage.

Photo: www.annefrank.org

Monica Hesse has a great article in The Washington Post about how Anne Frank was a major influence on a lot of young girls. I was one of them, and Hesse’s article captured the way I felt the first time I read Anne’s diary.

I was eight years old, and Anne was a girl that I could relate to, a girl who was a bit older than me when she was writing (and who would have and should have grown up to be my grandmother’s age.) Anne was funny. She liked reading and wanted to be a writer when she grew up. She was, in some ways, a spoiled brat. She was the first writer that I really empathized with, and that’s what made the knowledge of what happened to her all the more horrific.

I reread the book again and again when I was eight and nine, hiding it from my parents so they wouldn’t think I was too morbid. I bought a book of short stories and essays Anne had written when she was in hiding, and I envied her writing skills, which were considerable for someone so young.

I’m convinced that the popularity of diaries among young girls owes a lot to Anne Frank’s influence. I started my own diary several times (I could never keep it going for more than a few weeks), and almost found myself wishing that some horrible event befall me so that my diary could live on as a historical document the way that Anne’s did. It was the twisted but childish thought of a comfortably bored fourth-grader who wanted more drama in her life. Of course I was relieved when nothing did happen, and my diaries remained in the safety of a box under my bed.

Miep Gies’ death got me thinking first about her incredible bravery and selflessness, and then about the influence she had on future generations by saving the diary. I’ve been meaning to read the book again for the first time since middle school, but I almost don’t want to because I’m afraid it won’t have the same effect that it had on me as a child. But I do know that it was one of the first “grownup” books that I really loved, and one of the ones that made me want to be a writer.