October 06, 2006
Welcome to the third 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 Wexs 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.
For another free offer make sure you read to the end of this newsletter!
This edition of Vekslblat includes news, website additions, interviews, articles, Wex's Kvetch of the Month and much more. Enjoy!
News
Wex's Shmooze Essentials is nearly finished!
It's not entirely pretty, I know, but this is a fairly accurate portrait of how Wex looks right now. In between teaching, travelling with speaking engagements, giving lectures, appearing at book signings promoting the publication of the paperback version of Born to Kvetch and doing the school run he's been writing his new book, the working title of which is Wex's Shmooze Essentials. It's really Son of Kvetch, a phrasebook full of the sort of juicy, useful Yiddish you might need in a kosher butcher shop, whilst driving in heavy traffic or when holidaying in Germany. It will be coming out at the end of Summer 2007.
Where's Wex?
The crazy Autumn/Winter touring schedule begins in a couple of weeks. Michael will be visiting Indianapolis, Indiana and Rochester, New York at the end of October. November is nearly all about California - San Gabriel, Berkeley, Osher Marin, the Contra Costa Jewish Book Fair and finally San Francisco. Then on November 15th he goes to Davie, Florida. Click here to see where else Wex will be appearing in the coming months.Born to Kvetch t-shirts special offer!
We are offering all Vekslblat subscribers a Born to Kvetch t-shirt at the special price of $15 including shipping and handling! They are available in adult sizes Medium, Large or Extra Large. Click here to check out the sizes. If you would like to buy a t-shirt at this special price please reply to this email letting us know how many you would like and what sizes and we will arrange to receive payment and ship them as soon as possible.
If you would like to see the full range of products we offer at our on-line store, please click here.
Articles
The following are two articles previously published in Wexs Kvetch column in the Jewish Week.With the midterm elections approaching almost as quickly as the Days of Awe, politicians are making promises about their behavior for the next four years while Jews prepare to offer the Lord a convincing account of their own recent actions.
Performed honestly, these are noble pursuits, but self-interest can often cause them to be corrupted by the less-than-strictly-kosher activity called aroysshteln a kosher khazer-fisl, sticking out a kosher little pig's foot. The pig's foot, of course, is the legitimate-seeming come-on to something that isn't quite what it seems and might even be illegitimate or unkosher, as when the leg of veal offered to the sweet young heroine of a Yiddish-language silent movie is shown to be connected to a suspiciously curly tail or a concern for animal welfare turns out to mask a campaign against kosher slaughtering.
More usefully for Rosh Hashanah and the elections alike, the phrase can also mean to show only the good parts: when your blind date is described as having "a real personality," that's the kosher khazer-fisl. (Hes very good to his mother is already a whole suckling pig.) The image goes back to Leviticus 11:
And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed, but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you (Lev. 11:7).
Because it fulfils the most visible prerequisite of kashres, a pig can look kosher from certain angles. A popular medresh (Bereyshis Rabbo, 68) describes how that swine of a pig lies on its back, waving its cloven hooves in the air while crying, "Eat me, I'm kosher."
I know that God cannot be fooled, but lets hope that the American electorate takes a look at the whole hog before it decides what to bite in November.
Two days of Rosh Hashanah, two nights of eating tsimmes. As Jewish as any food this side of kugel, tsimmes is far more likely to glow in the dark. Described by Uriel Weinreich as a vegetable/fruit stew, the tsimmes comes in nearly as many varieties as there are fruits and vegetables to stew. There is the plum-tsimmes, the raisin-tsimmes, the apple-tsimmes and the pear-tsimmes. There are tsimmesn to make kids' hair stand on end: parsnip, garbanzo, green bean and farfl. Although I've never seen one, there is nothing to stop an adventurous or sadistic cook from preparing a lima bean or turnip tsimmes or even, God help us, a rutabaga stew. A lychee-tsimmes might even taste good. But the classic tsimmes, the tsimmes of record, is the carrot tsimmes. As the almost inevitable side-dish at every Rosh Hashana dinner, the carrot-tsimmes is familiar even to those who dont eat it on Friday nights: peeled baby carrots; thick, sweet, orange-colored goop; and, in what must surely be a North American innovation, canned pineapple chunks, can after can of pineapple chunks, to assure us of a sweet and happy year and make us yearn to move our exile to Hawaii. There are generations already with us for whom canned pineapple--Del Monte, Dole, or the ultra-kosher Festive--is a quintessentially Jewish food. May they live to lead us into an age of mangos.
Wex's Guest Blog for Powell's Books
The following are five blog entries Michael was invited to write for Powell's BooksMatzohs with the Fuehrer
September 18th, 2006
It's been quite a while since I attended shul synagogue with any regularity. Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, holidays that feature memorial prayers, and the anniversaries of my parents' deaths are about the only time you'll find me there these days, other than for weddings, bar mitzvahs and similar celebrations. And work let's not forget about work. I've been lecturing on Yiddish and associated aspects of Jewish culture for close to twenty years now, but since the publication of Born to Kvetch I've started to find myself in synagogues two, three, sometimes four times a week, often at the pulpit and always with a yarmulke on my head, as if there'd been a sudden halachic emergency, a question about Jewish law that just couldn't wait, and I was a highly trained shock-rabbi who'd parachuted onto the scene:
"Rabbi! Rabbi!" It's the same tone of voice that calls out "Medic!" in war movies.
"I'm not a rabbi."
"Fine, don't be a rabbi. Just help me."
"Nu? What can I do?"
"The skullcap box in the lobby is empty. The synagogue's run out. I don't have a yarmulke and I didn't bring a hat, but I am wearing a toupee. Am I cool? Does it count?"
I take one look at the man's head and know exactly how to answer. "Ets hot a yidishn kop, Mister, you've got a Jewish head, and a Jewish man's head is like the quality of justice in one respect at least."
"Only one?"
"Only one that concerns us here. For just as justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done, so must the Jewish male head not only be covered, it must also be seen to be covered. Whether it's a skullcap, a derby, a baseball cap or a foam dome, any kind of head-covering is valid, so long as everyone can tell that it isn't part of your head."
"So you're saying..."
"I'm saying that you are cool. A toupee is perfectly acceptable in place of a yarmulke as long as it's clearly a toupee. The cheaper the toup, the worse the rug, the more likely it is to slip out of place or slide off altogether, the better-suited it is for ritual use."
"So it's 'Bad toupee kosher; good toupee treyf [non-kosher]?'"
"That's right. And you, sir, are as kosher as they come right now."
No one actually asks me ritual questions since I'm not a rabbi, my answers would have no authority but people in synagogue and other Jewish community audiences sometimes come out with Yiddish idioms or proverbs that I've never run across before and that haven't been noted in any articles or reference books. Given the age of surviving Yiddish-speakers from pre-WW II Europe, it's entirely possible that the person using the phrase was the last living being to have heard it before he or she brought it up at a lecture or reading, usually in the form of a question of the "have you ever heard the following?" sort.
I ran into a great one on Saturday, though not while I was at work. A friend decided to hold his son's bar-mitzvah at the kind of synagogue that Daniel Pinkwater once described as a "your basic, Orthodox, bare-knuckles shul" in downtown Toronto. It's probably the last of its kind in the city, a working class place that still runs largely in Yiddish and which I once attended on a daily basis. Its only really Orthodox congregants are born-again non-Yiddish-speaking youth in their forties and fifties for whom the old-timers most of whom seem to believe that their attendance at synagogue exempts them from all other forms of religious observance have no time at all.
I got there early on Saturday, a good couple of hours before the bar-mitzvah boy would be doing his thing, ready to soak up some Yiddish in one of the few public places where it's still spoken as a matter of course. After a few minutes, another guest came in and sat down on the bench the word "pew" is a little too grand in front of me. He was wearing a madras-patterned tallis (prayer shawl) with a flock of skullcap-wearing teddy bears frolicking on the back in Judaism-can-be-fun appliquι. The old man sitting next to him looked, snorted, gave the tallis a tug, and asked, "What kind of tallis is that?"
"My kind of tallis," answered the guest.
The old man nodded. The guest wasn't doing too badly at least he came up with an answer. "Nu." The old man turned around and addressed himself to me. "Zug eym, Michael. Tell him that that kind of tallis is as out of place here" where every tallis is white with black stripes "aza tallis toyg du vi matses in berchtesgaden, it's as out of place here as matzohs in Berchtesgaden."
And that's why I never complain about spending any time in synagogues. "Matzohs in Hitler's summer home" it took a silly-looking ritual appurtenance to draw this jocular insult out of the mouth and memory of the Holocaust survivor who said it on Saturday. Had I not been lucky enough to have come to shul early, the phrase would have vanished as soon as it came out of his mouth and none of us would know it now.
Can't Keep From Kvetchin'
September 19th, 2006
I'm working desperately to finish a book manuscript in the next four to six weeks, so accounts of my day-to-day adventures in the world at large, not to mention life in the fast-paced Yiddish lane where Polident seems to be replacing KY as the gel of choice don't tend to feature much in the way of incident. Today, for instance, I got up, drove my daughter across town to school, and took my car in for a check-up. A Hebrew book about scandals in the hasidic world arrived in the mail, as did two unsolicited film scripts e-mailed to me care of my website: "I'm sure you'll get a kick out of this"; "From one Yiddish fan to another." I can't imagine how desperate these people must be if they think that someone like me has the shlep to get their work produced.
The kicker came late this morning, though, after I'd been driven home in the car dealer's courtesy van because whatever's wrong with the car is going to require a good half-day's labor to fix. The wife of a guy I know the kind of acquaintance you bump into a couple of times a year, usually at some public event had called me in the summer. "I have this story I wrote a few years ago. It's about Jewish people. It's really funny. It's touching, too. Steve" the acquaintance "says it's as good as anything in a book. He thinks I've got a lot of talent." She giggled. "I was gonna call you a few months ago, but I had to go into the hospital."
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."
"It happens," she sighed, "whenever I go off my meds." I didn't ask any more questions.
She did, though. "Can you help me get it published?"
I told her that I'd need to see the story. I explained that no publisher is going to publish a book of short stories on the strength of a single unpublished piece by someone with no track record at all. I was quite emphatic about the fact which really is a fact that I don't know any editors at any magazines that publish fiction, so have no one whom I can ask for a favor. I pointed out that I'm not an agent and reminded her of the fact that I had yet to read the damned story.
"Don't worry, you're going to love it. Part of the problem is that it's a hundred and fourteen pages. I thought maybe someone could publish it as a book with pictures. I have a friend who's a really good artist, and once you've finished marking it up and making suggestions, she can get right to work. But why tell you about it? I'll bring it over right now."
I suddenly recalled an important appointment. "I'll just leave it in the lobby, then."
"Don't do that; it'll probably get stolen." Which is probably the truth.
"Can I mail it?"
Can I stop you? "Sure, but remember what I told you. I'm not going to have a chance to look at it until after October. If you don't mind waiting, I'll be happy to read it. But I still think you're gonna have an incredible amount of trouble trying to publish a hundred-and-fourteen page short story."
She was a little more brusque now. "Give me your address."
I left town the next day, together with my wife and daughter, for a long-planned road trip through the Hudson Valley and New England. Among the pile of letters waiting for us when we came back four weeks later was the hundred-and-fourteen page short story, with smiley-face stickers on the front of the envelope and exhortations to keep the Sabbath holy on the back. There were also six or seven phone messages from my acquaintance. He'd taken the voicemail greeting that explained that I was out of town and wouldn't be checking my messages as a personal affront, and told me in no uncertain terms to phone him as soon as I got back to town because, meds or no meds, my behavior as if I were a naughty teenager and he and his wife, who are both in their late fifties, were my long-suffering parents my behavior was about to drive his wife back into the hospital. I put the story right where I'd said I would, in the pile of stuff that's going to have to wait until November, and didn't return my acquaintance's calls.
I got back from the car dealer's late this morning to find my wife in tears. Steve and his wife had both called, demanding to know who I thought I was which my wife couldn't answer and why they hadn't heard anything about the story. My wife explained once again that I've been busy and assured them that I'd be reading the story as soon as my manuscript was sent off. Then Steve or his wife apparently said that at this time of year, right before Rosh Hashana, I should be giving a little more thought to my behavior there it is again and trying to improve it.
I fixed them, though, I fixed 'em good. With me, you don't start up. I took the envelope with her story and shoved it into my pile for the second week of November: They made my wife cry, the bastards? Let 'em wait until Armistice Day.
Gimme a Pigfoot
September 20th, 2006
Anybody who's ever seen me try to hammer a nail into a piece of wood or build a scale model of the Temple of Solomon out of kitchen matches and popsicle sticks will know what I mean when I say that forcing me to sit through two years of shop class just because I happened to be born with a visible locus of circumcision was one of the greatest blunders in the history of Canadian education. Forty years later and I still can't manage the most elementary carpentry. Forty years later and I still keep tools that I don't know how to use in the toolbox that came out of that class; a beautiful piece of work, one that anybody would be proud of. Especially Herman Zylberszlager, the guy who actually made it.
Herman lived across the street from our yeshiva, where his parents seem to have sent him only because it was close; they sure weren't religious. Old man Zylberszlager who was probably about forty at the time used to sit on their stoop in nice weather, smoking cigars on the Sabbath when smoking is strictly forbidden and glowering at us as we came out of services. He was said to have escaped from a concentration camp and even to have killed a couple of people Nazis, hostile Poles, it depended on who was telling the story barehanded. He had a beat-up station wagon stuffed with plumbing fixtures, costume jewelry and dirty magazines, and nobody knew what he did for a living. Herman, my classmate, spoke English like Edward G. Robinson and Yiddish like he'd just got off the boat; he was the only kid ever to turn up at yeshiva in three-inch Cuban heels.
Herman and I had an arrangement. He'd rescued me from some gentiles in Cuban heels at a bus stop one day and we'd been sort of friends ever since not that we ever did anything but homework together. I helped him with Talmud and math, he did my shop assignments, and we were both looking forward to the end of eighth grade.
I guess we all looked the same to the shop teacher, because he never twigged to what was going on. I'd hunch convincingly over a workbench while Herman did my work, generally whipping off a letter perfect example of whatever we'd drawn in our teacher-approved specs (which Herman had also done on my behalf), and then go on to create a masterpiece of his own, something that inevitably involved lathes and fancy chisels and special, secret varnishes that smelled, as some other kid put it just before Herman punched him, like pizem-pish, muskrat pee.
I still regret that I couldn't write Herman's math tests or rush in to help him when the Talmud teacher asked him to clarify the differences among four interpretations of the meaning of the term "contract." He did manage to pass, though, and hung around school until he was old enough to quit. He must have got over his troubles with math; he's now a major figure in property development.
I, on the other hand, would have been better off in home ec. There were no girls in yeshiva, of course, and boys couldn't take home ec even in the public school system, but it might have come in handy in later years, particularly during muffin season. I really love the idea of home economy a redundant phrase, given that the Greek oikonomia already means "household management" of balancing the value and price of one thing against those of another and then figuring out exactly how to manage them to your best advantage particularly things with no physical dimension. Every year around this time, immediately before the High Holidays, I become obsessed with ideas of moral profit-and-loss. Does failing to commit a fairly serious sin give you leeway to commit one or more lighter ones? Is there a balance of imperfection that must be maintained if human life isn't to cross over into the angelic?
From the point of view of the average Jewish person, this kind of bargaining centers entirely on ritual. We all know that murder is murder, lying is lying, theft is theft; we might tell ourselves that we had good reason to commit these sins, but we never forget that it's us that we're talking about there's no excuse for anyone else. No, real Jewish bargaining revolves around things that no one worries about but Jews: Since I've stopped smoking, which is a danger to myself and everybody around me, can I trade cigarettes in for pork? After all, I used to smoke on Saturdays, which is no less forbidden than eating ham, so why can't I simply move my illicit activity from one arena to another? I'll be a better person, and nothing will really change. Bad as eating pork might be, it's nowhere near as harmful as smoking (unless you're the pig), so aren't I making moral progress? Nu, aren't I? Or have I just talked myself back into shop class, with no Herman to bail me out.
A Person of the Book
September 21st, 2006
I could never see any point to getting out of school. Coming from a family that occasionally clawed its way into the lower middle-class for up to two years at a time, I was acutely aware of the fact that the kind of jobs available to people like me embraced nothing that anybody ever dreamed of being: general clerk, payroll clerk, file clerk, shlepper. Some yearbook entry, that: "Michael looks up to Lord Buckley and Rabbi Joseph Rozin of Rogchow. His pet peeve is weekend hippies and he hopes to become a shlepper."
Continuing in yeshiva would only have saddled me with smikhe, rabbinic ordination, after which even shlepper would have been out of reach. I would have had to become a yeshiva-teacher myself, at a time when the staff of a number of prominent yeshivas had been striking for wages that sometimes hadn't been paid for up to two years: these teachers were owed nearly six thousand dollars. In view of the fact that it was people like my father and the other students' fathers who hadn't been paying those wages, we already knew that studying for the rabbinate was something you did because you were too religious not to or too stupid to do anything else our world had no room for the kind of pulpit rabbis produced by accredited institutions. "Be a rabbi," as my mother said, "but don't try to make a living from it."
I violated both of her commandments and ended up in graduate school instead. Terrified of spending the rest of my life as the same cab driver or custodian I'd been since graduating with a bachelor's degree in English, I decided to pursue the most complicated, least practical course of study open to somebody with no ambition, no prospects, no math or physics and no desire work. I became a medievalist, specializing in Old and Middle English lang. and lit., with a minor in Old Norse just in case. What's weird is, I was good at it, winning scholarships, socializing with my professors, and eventually ending up at Massey College in the University of Toronto, so high-falutin' a live-in college that we not only wore gowns to dinner (where grace was said in Latin), but had maids, actual human beings who used to clean our rooms our private rooms, I might add and even make our beds. Imagine this a year or two before, I'd been cleaning the kinds of places in which I was now a guest: no goddamned way in hell I was ever gonna graduate a millisecond before I absolutely had to.
In order to further this negative ambition I'd like to produce a series of books, CDs, and live seminars designed to teach Americans a sure-fire way of avoiding all goals I learned how to sleep. And sleep. Any time of the day or night, for periods of twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours no fatigue necessary. Just knowing that wakefulness meant having to slog through yet another monograph on a series of telling inconsistencies in the use of the subjunctive in the C-text of Langland's Piers Plowman in German, yet, with most of the footnotes referring to something in Dutch, and all too likely to nudge me a little bit closer to graduation was enough to keep me snoring away in my gown, while my colleagues labored like Hercules to increase the stock of human knowledge.
My crowning achievement was the fire alarm. Something, somewhere had tripped it one morning. The fire department came, looked around, found nothing amiss. The alarm, though, had been going for about three-quarters of an hour when someone noticed that I wasn't huddling in the quad with everybody else. A bunch of them started to knock at my door. No answer. Somebody thought to phone me. No answer. They knocked some more; the same result. "But I saw him going in, even wished him good night." The person in the next room was pretty sure that I'd spent the night in college.
"What if something's happened to him?"
"The shock of that alarm could give anybody a heart attack."
"O my God, get an ambulance. Wex just had a heart attack."
This has to be the way it played out, because I was awakened by a pair of ambulance attendants. The alarm was still sounding. "We're glad that you're o.k., but how the hell can you sleep through forty-five minutes of that farshulggener alarm?"
I sat up on my bed, as proud of myself as Jethro Bodine when he graduated from the sixth grade. "I got me a education," I said.
Windows of the Soul
September 22nd, 2006
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight, and for me possibly the only person in the world who looks at the High Holidays this way it's time for window wars, pitched verbal battles over whether the windows in the synagogue I described in Monday's blog should be kept open or shut. Those of us who still find themselves on the list of people to be called at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. when someone needs a minyen and in this place a quorum means ten men, real men, the kind who can wind phylacteries while half-asleep, rattle off a morning service that takes forty-five or fifty minutes in most synagogues in less than half that time, gulp down a shot of rye, eat a Manischewitz Tam Tam cracker, drink another shot, and be on the way back home or to work before the clock's struck seven people who have maintained some ties with the place over the years tend to look at it as a sort of church-of-your-choice counterpart to Anthony Quinn in Requiem for a Heavyweight and to think of themselves as an army of loyal Mickey Rooneys in prayer shawls; the born-again orthodox guys the ones who did nothing but smoke dope and chase women until they realized that someone else was on the verge of having fun are the villains in this scenario, constantly plotting to sell the shul out and turn it into a downtown branch of one of the outreach organizations with which they're all associated. We Mickey Rooneys would like to see it a little healthier, a little happier, but we all know that nothing will ever really change: hardly anything has, except for the people inside, since it opened in 1903.
The shul is close to the university, which has thousands of Jewish students, but its insistence on separate seating for men and women has cost it dearly in the competition for shul of choice in downtown Toronto. The egalitarian congregation two blocks away is mobbed on an average Saturday; our shul isn't even full on Yom Kippur, despite the fact that it's just about the only place in town that will let you in without an expensive High Holiday ticket.
Separate seating isn't the only problem, though. The place simply doesn't conform to North American which means Anglo-Saxon standards of decorum. Three years ago, I finally managed to convince the guy who serves as rabbi and cantor when he isn't praying, he runs a long-distance trucking firm to take down the bilingual sign that had hung on the east wall for as long as anybody could remember:
NO SPITTING DURING SERVICES
as if it were o.k. to do so if you were just hanging out. No one had actually spit for years, not even after services. The passage where you're supposed to do so "They bow down to emptiness and vanity and pray to a god who delivers them not" had been cut out of the synagogue's prayer books by Czarist censors.
"But that sign's always been there."
"Then at least white out the English, people shouldn't get the wrong idea."
Worse than potential expectoration, though, was the regulars' propensity to get into fights with each other, generally over opening or closing the windows. Mendel would open, Velvel would close; Mendel would open, Velvel would close. This had been going on for so long that nobody at shul could remember ever having heard Mendel and Velvel speak a word to each other or ask anyone else how they wanted the window.
They were in the midst of their usual routine last Yom Kippur. The cantor, whose name is Sheldon, was intoning, "Are all heroes not as nothing before You, and celebrities as if they did not exist," when Velvel slammed the window so hard that the pane rattled in its frame, then fell to the floor and broke, scattering shards of glass onto a number of hapless worshippers and miraculously injuring nobody. The praying came to a halt. The window was closed, but it had no glass in the pane everybody should have been happy. But no. Mendel smiled with triumphant mockery and, to everyone's amazement, addressed himself to Velvel. "Zeyst? You see? You think you're somebody here? You think you're something? Look at that window. It's open forever now. You're nothing! You wanted, and look what you got. Nothing. Because even by God you're nothing... Khazn" cantor, he said, turning to Sheldon "Davnt vayter, pray on."
Nobody stopped Mendel, nobody stepped in to stand up for Velvel, who was fighting back tears. We went back to our prayer books and begged for forgiveness.
A Happy New Year to everybody out there in Powells land and everywhere else, and big thanks to Dave Weich and Chris Bolton for getting this blog my first ever to happen.
For a guide to Yiddish pronunciation, click here.
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And Finally.....Wexs Kvetch of the Month:
Why me? I dunno--nobody forced me to work in Yiddish. An interviewer recently asked me to name the Yiddish phrase heard most often in my childhood home. When I told her the truth--that it was my father pounding on the door and screaming, "Bist araangefaln? Did you fall in?"--she accused me of trivializing the language. I don't think the old man would have agreed with her.Look out for your next edition of Vekslblat in the first half of November! And gut yontef - we hope it doesn't rain on your sukke.