July 30, 2007
Welcome to the tenth edition of Vekslblat – The Yiddish World of Michael Wex's monthly e-zine. If this is the first copy you have received, as a special gift to thank you for subscribing to this newsletter we would like to offer you a free download of the e-book version of Wex’s classic The Kugel Story, a Jewish folktale for the 21st century. Please click here to download the e-book. This link has been disabled since the e-book is only available to Vekslblat subscribers. Don't forget to check out the back-issues of Vekslblat.
This edition of Vekslblat includes news, two articles from the Jewish Week, Wex's Kvetch of the Month and much more. Enjoy!
News
First Glimpse of the Just Say Nu Cover!
We are very excited to let our Vekslblat readers have the very first peek at the cover for Michael's new book Just Say Nu due out on 16th October. After much back and forth we are all very pleased with the final version. We're thrilled to be able to tell you that the pre-sales for the book are fantastic (ptui ptui ptui) - if you'd like to pre-order and make sure that you have your copy before anyone else, please click here
.Celebrate the Publication of Two New Books with Merchandise in our Online Store!
Want these cute designs on a summer tee, mousemat, mug or pin? No problem - simply click here or on the images above to grab your exclusive Micah Mushmelon, Just Say Nu, and Born to Kvetch merchandise.
Where's Wex?
Articles
I’ve been lifting weights like a madman lately, trying to work off the winter’s tsholnt before bikini season hits, and so far all I’ve got is a kileh, the most-beloved Yiddish word for “hernia.” Old school Yiddish-speakers will be quick to tell you that the two afflictions that once characterized Yiddish and were apparently endemic to its speakers, are the hernia and hemorrhoids, which both enjoy a prominence in the language far out of proportion to their seriousness as diseases.
In older slang, the hernia was known as zeks-in-ZEKHtsik, “sixty-six,” and appeared in this guise in many smart-aleck idioms and low-level curses, such as Ikh’l dir gebm zeks-un-zekhtsik (“I’ll give you sixty-six”), that are becoming ever more obscure. Sixty-six is the gematria, the numerical value of the letters in the Hebrew phrase kee lo which means “because to him,” as in the well-known Passover song, “Ki lo no’eh, ki lo yo’eh, Because it is becoming to Him [God], because it is fitting for Him,” where the first two words of each phrase would be pronounced in Ashkenazi Hebrew as kileh: Kileh noo’eh, kileh yoo’eh, “a hernia is becoming, a hernia befits.”
A hernia is treated with a brokh-gartl––a rupture-belt or truss. In the days when the Jewish Daily Forward was really a daily, ads for these products used to occupy a prominent place in its pages, much to the delight of young readers everywhere, especially during the pre-Passover sale period.
Summer, when people who have been dragging themselves from exile to exile for nearly two thousand years inexplicably betake themselves to airports, where they seem surprised to find themselves chanting, almost compulsively davening, the Yiddish monosyllable of universal disapprobation—feh.
It means: “It stinks.”
Feh is not to be confused with its near relative, fnyeh, which means “nothing special, so-so,” but tending toward the wrong “so.” If someone asks, “How was the in-flight movie?” and you respond with fnyeh, you’re saying that while it might not have stunk, it was certainly no rose. What it was, is parve—not terribly good, not even terribly bad, with a slight but unmistakably unpleasant aftertaste—somewhat like most kosher airline food. Better than a trip to the dentist, but not so good that you’d hate yourself for dozing off at the climax.
Feh and fnyeh are generally accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand, intended to help push the memory of the thing in question as far away from the mind’s eye as possible. The wrist, generally the right, bends until the fingertips are parallel to the floor, but only after the whole arm, starting from the shoulder, has been moved far enough to the left to bring the crook of the right elbow into line with your nose at precisely the second when the wrist goes down—as if you were forcing whatever you’re talking about into a very deep pit of oblivion.
For a guide to Yiddish pronunciation, click here.
And Finally....Wex’s Kvetch of the Month:
For the second month in a row I've got what to kvetch about. As the first Wex to set foot on Polish soil since my grandfather's eleven brothers and sisters were killed with their children in the nineteen-forties, I'm disappointed to have to admit that I had a wonderful time at the Krakow Festival of Jewish Culture. The people were nice, the audiences intelligent and enthusiastic--they didn't seem to realize that it was supposed to suck. I was supposed to hate it and write a couple of articles explaining why. And I had-to-go-and-have-a-good-time. Bastards! Aside from some happy memories, all I came home with was a wooden figure of a hook-nosed hasid counting money.
There's some things you never forget.
Enjoy the rest of your summer! Look out for your next edition of Vekslblat in August.