June 19, 2007
Welcome to the ninth 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 removed 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, four articles from the Jewish Week, Wex's Kvetch of the Month and much more. Enjoy!
News
Born to Kvetch Wins Jewish Book Award!
We are very proud to announce that Wex won the Abe and Fay Bergel Memorial Prize in Scholarship on a Jewish Subject from the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards Committee. Unfortunately the Wexes are unable to attend the awards ceremony, to be held at the Leah Posluns Theatre in Toronto on June 21st, but we're thrilled that our dear friend Eleanor Levine will be accepting the award on Michael's behalf.
New Garments Available in our Online Store!
Cafepress, who hosts our online store, has just introduced a new junior jersey t-shirt for your groovy teens (like the pink one above) and new black and white maternity shirts, with the images hilariously displayed on the belly area. We couldn't resist. There are many more choices at the store - click here or on the images above to check them out.
Where's Wex?
Articles
The list of what to send to camp with my daughter arrived this week. They want her to bring a lacrosse stick.
Tsaytn derlebt, as my parents used to say, “Look what we’ve lived to see”: a Jewish camp where they play lacrosse, a sport that exists only in order to realize all of my mother’s worst fears for my health. I’m from Canada and I know from lacrosse: you could poke an eye out, break an arm or leg or, God forbid, do yourself something before you even knew what hit you.
The one time I went to camp, there was no such thing as lacrosse. They were afraid of what we might do with the sticks. The camp, for delinquents from religious homes, was called Shoymer Pesoyim (the name comes from the Psalms; it means “the Lord looks out for idiots”) and was primarily devoted to Talmud under the open sky. The athletic program consisted of water sports; every Friday afternoon, each boy got five minutes alone in the mikveh with a snorkel.
The only thing we had that even resembled anything they have at my daughter’s camp was arts and crafts. They used to let us whittle. Every boy got a knife and something to carve, and we used to sit there in the moyel workshop, just us, the knives and carrot after carrot after baby carrot.
We ate nothing but salad and tsimmes. I’m so glad my daughter will be playing lacrosse.
Thanks to its frequent coupling with oy, gevalt (sometimes transliterated as gevald, which reflects Yiddish spelling rather than pronunciation) is among the most popular words in Yiddish. Oy gevalt can mean anything from “Heavens above” to “Oh, damn,” “Fantastic,” “Far freakin’ out,” or “I’m about to reach a climax,” and is probably second only to oy vey as the Yiddish phrase best-known to people who don’t speak the language. I still treasure the memory of a friend shaking his head in wonderment and yelling, “Gevalt, Jimi!” after a particularly blistering solo at a 1968 Hendrix concert.
Gevalt itself means “force” or “violence”; something done mit gevalt is done violently or with force. Gevalt comes to mean “a cry for help,” “a scream,” and also becomes the actual word for “cry for help.” Someone yelling “Gevalt” can be taken as hollering “Scream!” somewhat like a character in a highly self-conscious comic; to go one step further, though, and say gevalt geshrign, “gevalt has been screamed; a hue and cry is being raised” is to cross over to either the prissiness of “land sakes” or the slight vulgarity of “Jesus H. Christ.”
The adjective gevaldik means “vast, mighty, powerful”; it’s in frequent use in Orthodox English to mean “great, fantastic, excellent”: “she gave a gevaldik talk on the need for increased modesty.” “He’s a gevaldik cook.”
Now that Shavues has put an end to the enforced sobriety of the omer period, my relatives––many of whom still dress in leisure suits designed in eighteenth century Poland-–are getting their glad rags out of mothballs in preparation for Jewish wedding season.
A man who is overdressed for any occasion, let alone the one at which he finds himself, is said to oyszen vi an almen nokh shloyshim, "to look like a widower after the thirty days of compulsory mourning." Official mourning periods for anybody other than your parents last for only one month, and Jewish religious law considers it meritorious (though by no means obligatory) for a man to remarry within a year after the death of his wife. The image behind oyszen vi an almen nokh shloyshim is of a man who is all duded up and ready to party. Someone who looks like this kind of widower--who is clearly not too disturbed by the loss of his wife--is usually dressed a little too loudly, sporting spats and a rakishly tilted toupee, “a regeleh Casablanca,” as they used to say in Yinglish. The female equivalent, oysgeputst vi Khavele tsum get, “tarted up like little Evie at her divorce,” implies too much make-up and too little cloth--dressed up to get messed up. You can see it all, but you really don't want to. The female phrase is the more pejorative—a divorced woman is supposed to wait ninety-one days before taking another man, but the widower has managed to hold out until the end of the shloyshim.
Oys businessman! I’m sick of the business world, much of which now seems to be run by people who behave like adolescents— or even fully-grown children––who are busy doing any one of a number of nothings:
He’s lying around like he’s in his father’s vineyard
when his cell phone begins to ring. Typically for someone
(who doesn’t dip a finger into cold water [thoughtfully provided in a bowl beside his couch in the vineyard],
he looks at the ringing apparatus, cups both hands around his lips and yells, “Ma! Der cell phone klingt, my cell phone’s ringing!” His mother, who’s somewhere in the basement doing battle with her darling’s soiled linens, finally loses it and yells back up:
Nu, are you too sick to push the button, you plague of psoriasis?
The medical motif is particularly strong in such a sentence. In such contexts, krenkst means “Are you suffering from some serious but unspecified disease that renders it impossible for you to perform the action that I’m about to name [and is usually something difficult like answering the phone, opening the door or doing the dishes]?” The questioner already knows that the answer is no; the fact that the verb krenken (“to be ill”) is being used tells everybody that the person to whom you’re speaking is in perfect physical health.
For a guide to Yiddish pronunciation, click here.
And Finally....Wex’s Kvetch of the Month:
For once I've got a real complaint, and about something relatively serious. As just anybody who subscribes to this newsletter already knows, I published a novel in 1993 called Shlepping the Exile, a book that magically went into a second printing last year without my knowledge or approval, years after the publisher had assured me that I hadn't received any statements or royalties in nearly ten years because there had been no sales. He'd even offered to sell me the remaining copies. Mit a mol a second edition of the book that never sold appears. Please note: I have never received a cent for this book (it was published without an advance). He's been in arrears since 1993 and has never forwarded money owing from any translation of the book, either. The current edition is illegal and unauthorized; purchasing it only provides the publisher with more money to try to dodge the Canadian justice system. So please, for the time being, don't buy Shlepping the Exile, unless you're buying it second-hand.
Have a wonderful summer - we sure plan to! Look out for your next edition of Vekslblat in July.