May 01, 2007
Welcome to the eighth 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, an exclusive chance to get a rare edition of Michael's book Micah Mushmelon, an article from the Jewish Week, Wex's Kvetch of the Month and much more. Enjoy!
News
Your Chance to Get a Rare Edition of
Micah Mushmelon
We are very excited to announce that Michael's book The Adventures of Micah Mushmelon, Boy Talmudist is to be published by Quattro Press this fall. This means that the copies in our online store will be taken off the shelves forever at the beginning of June. THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GET YOUR HANDS ON THESE SOON-TO-BE COLLECTORS' ITEMS! Take full advantage now of this unique opportunity to acquire a rare edition of Wex's work for just $11.99 by clicking here or on the image above.
Exclusive Micah Mushmelon Extract
He was a Mushmelon on his father’s side only. His mother had been a Dovshinsky, the daughter and only child of Rabbi Yoysef Yerakhmiel Dovshinsky, Grand Rabbi of the Holy Congregation of Hipst.
Over the course of the next day and a half, what with my own urgent interest and the suddenly loosened tongues of my parents — it isn’t every day that every boy is offered a scholarship out of the blue, and when that boy has been a social leper, a Georgy-Porgy, a shmuck, a shmendrik, a shmegege, a hobbledehoy addicted to crossword puzzles and comic books for all his eleven years (so much so that his parents, whom he could overhear at night, would happily have sacrificed ten or even twenty percent of his astoundingly high school average for just a drop, a dollop of normal childikkayt, be it even botl bi-shishim, voided sixty times over by his remaining quirks) — when said boy is not exactly your Jew next-door’s Berele ben Shmerele from Blutepolsk, the simkhe, the joy, in the house is like Purim and Simkhes Toyre, the Rejoicing in the Law, combined with New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras. My father phoned in my acceptance even before I was supposed to have known of the offer. He bought a bottle of slivovitz, and he and my mother toasted their brilliant son, the two parents shlepping nakhes. They had no friends either. And as they drank, they spoke. Louder and louder, magnifying their praise of the holy Hipster dynasty. Between my parents’ talk and my father’s books on hasidic history — not to mention my mother’s storybooks on the same subject, Fantastic Wonder Tales in Yiddish — I managed to get a bit of a picture of what I was getting into.
Exclusive Micah Mushmelon Merchandise
Quattro Press has not yet decided on a cover design for Micah, so we thought we'd give you a chance to get merchandise emblazoned with the cartoon of the title character, designed by the wonderful artist Graham Robson. This may be your only opportunity to get these potentially rare items, so grab them now while you can! There are many more choices at the store - click here or on the images above to check them out.
You Say Noo, I Say Nu
Thank you to all of our readers who took the trouble to write to us at the website and give your opinions on the spelling of the title of Wex's new book - Just Say Nu was the clear favorite and we're pleased to say that this is, indeed, the official title, due out in the fall. Start bugging your local booksellers now or pre-order by clicking on the Amazon link below:
Exclusive first peek at the Born to Kvetch 2008 Day-By-Day Calendar!
Wex has just finished editing this great desk calendar - available in the fall, now you need never go without your daily kvetch! Again, this item is available for pre-ordering through Amazon by clicking on the link below:
Where's Wex?
Articles
It happens every year. The lines in the Passover-shopping section last night awakened long dormant memories of Roller Derby and kheyder. There was plenty of shoving in both, but the Roller Derby players made a better living than my rebbes, even though they all engaged in behavior that would have landed them in the Haggadah had they done so anywhere else.
The Yiddish version of Jimmie Rodgers' "He's in the Jailhouse Now" would be Er zitst in khad gadye itst. As anyone who has ever made it to the end of a seder knows, khad gadye means "one kid"--that's kid as in baby goat--and is the title of the song that ends the seder. Said to be the earliest known instance of the The-House-That-Jack-Built motif in western literature, Khad Gadye is an allegorical rendering of the history of the Jews and includes events that have still not come to pass.
The one thing never mentioned in Khad Gadye’s catalogue of retribution and deliverance is prison or confinement; its slang meaning has more to do with Poland than with prayer, and provides a clearer-than-usual illustration of the way in which aspects of non-Jewish culture are translated into Jewish religious terms for the sake of a laugh.
Goat in Polish is koze, and koze is also slang for jail. In a humorous reversal of fartaytshn, the translation and explication of the Bible that formed the basic technique of traditional education, a piece of Polish slang is “translated” into a well-known piece of loshn-koydesh, which then takes on the meaning of the Polish slang term — the more incongruously, the better.
For a guide to Yiddish pronunciation, click here.
And Finally....Wex’s Kvetch of the Month:
I recently saw something that I wouldn’t have believed existed, a dry shiva, a perfect example of how life sometimes imitates rhetoric. The original meaning of the phrase “Jews don’t drink” was not that Jews abstain. It didn’t even mean that Jews don’t get drunk. It meant that Jews don’t stay drunk: they don’t drink to the exclusion of all else, and such drinking as they do isn’t an end in itself but an accompaniment to other activities, often quite pious in nature.
Jews, in other words, don’t drink without a pretext, and there was once no such thing as a Jew who couldn’t come up with one. The generations have grown weaker, though, so weak that many Jews today no longer understand the meaning of the phrase. They have fallen into a trap in which no real Yiddish-speaker ever gets caught: that of taking words at their face value. The priggishness with respect to alcohol seen in so many middle-class Jewish homes has a great deal to do with the fact that the religious activities with which so much drinking was associated have fallen by the wayside (and in the traditional Jewish world, weddings and other such festivities are celebrations of mitsvehs, not life-cycle events). If you’ve never seen a chapter of the Mishna, you can’t have a drink to celebrate having studied it. If you don’t know what the traditional blessings are, you can’t appreciate their presence in informal Yiddish speech.
Look out for your next edition of Vekslblat in June.