Authors: Michael Wex
ISBN-13: 9780061173233, ISBN-10: 0061173231
Format: MP3 Book
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Date Published: March 2006
Edition: Unabridged
Novelist, lecturer, and translator Michael Wex is one of the leading lights in the revival of Yiddish, and author of the New York Times bestseller Born to Kvetch and its follow-up, Just Say Nu.
As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive persecution: they never stopped kvetching about God, gentiles, children, and everything else.
In Born to Kvetch, Michael Wex looks at the ingredients that went into this buffet of disenchantment and examines how they were mixed together to produce an almost limitless supply of striking idioms and withering curses. Born to Kvetch includes a wealth of material that's never appeared in English before.
Mr. Wex, a Yiddish translator, university teacher, novelist and stand-up comic, has many such examples up his sleeve, but Born to Kvetch is much more than a greatest-hits collection of colorful Yiddish expressions. It is a thoughtful inquiry into the religious and cultural substrata of Yiddish, the underlying harmonic structure that allows the language to sing, usually in a mournful minor key.
1 | Kvetch Que C'Est? : the origins of Yiddish | 1 |
2 | Six feet under, baking bagels : Yiddish in action | 29 |
3 | Something else to kvetch about : Yiddish dialects | 47 |
4 | Pigs, poultry, and pampers : the religious roots of Yiddish | 59 |
5 | Discouraging words : Yiddish and the forces of darkness | 91 |
6 | You should grow like an onion : the Yiddish curse | 117 |
7 | If it wasn't for bad luck : Mazl, misery, and money | 141 |
8 | "Bupkes means a lot of nothing" : Yiddish and nature | 159 |
9 | Making a tsimmes : food - kosher and treyf | 175 |
10 | A slap in the tukhes and hello : Yiddish life from birth to bar mitzvah | 197 |
11 | More difficult than splitting the Red Sea : courtship and marriage | 221 |
12 | The good for the goyim : sex in Yiddish | 249 |
13 | It should happen to you : death in Yiddish | 265 |