March 25, 2008
Welcome to the fifteenth 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, articles from the Jewish Week, a very special offer via our website, Wex's Kvetch of the Month and much more. Enjoy!
News
The Library of Wex
Yes, the boxes are finally gone and the library shelves are up and Mr Wex has his study and Mrs Wex doesn't have to look at books on every wall anymore. Everyone's happy!
Pesach is coming!
Yes, just when you've finished celebrating one Jewish holiday, another one pops up. Passover is only a couple of weeks away and Mrs. Wex is once again looking for good recipes. If you have a favorite kosher-for-passover recipe that would help make everyone's life a little easier we'd be glad to put it on the website. For great ideas we've already gathered from friends and family, go to our Passover Recipes page. If you'd like to submit a recipe to the site, go to our Contact Us page and send us the details. Don't forget to include your full name so that we can give you a credit!
Where's Wex?
Wex's Interview for Harper Collins
Articles
After twenty-five years in an apartment previously occupied by Glenn Gould, I’m about to move into a beautiful, roomy house in one of Toronto’s most impeccably gentile neighborhoods, ten minutes by foot from the nearest shul. Looking the place over while the previous owners were still in residence reminded me of one of my mother’s favorite terms of opprobrium: shlimazlnitseh, a bad housekeeper, the female embodiment of domestic clumsiness and ill luck.
It wasn’t that the departing balebosteh couldn’t be bothered, she just couldn’t get it together to look after things the way she would have liked to. This aspect of helplessness helps to distinguish the shlimazlnitseh from the dreaded shlumperkeh, also known as the shtinkerkeh, who is as close as Yiddish comes to an idea of Jewish trailer-park trash, although it often means little more than a neighbor whom your mother dislikes.
Dishes piled high in the sink, mould sprouting from the unwashed floor, the shlumperkeh is a working-class Emma Bovary, in love with her own leavings. Everything is too much for her, housework is beneath her; the shlumperkeh hot ken mol nisht ken koyekh, she never has the strength or the energy to do what she's supposed to--despite the fact that not having anything else to do is an essential pre-condition of true shlumperkism: "I have to take the kids to soccer, don't expect me to clean the house!" The shlimazlnitseh is incompetent; the shlumperke just doesn’t care.
Meanwhile, I’m scrubbing like it’s Pesach in January.
“Ven freyt zikh an oremen?” asks the Yiddish proverb. “What makes a pauper rejoice? Az er farlirt un gefint, When he finds something that he’s lost”––because a pauper can’t afford a replacement. This is especially true when what’s been lost is one’s youth.
I was interviewed last week by a journalist whom I’ve known since we were in high school. Though never close, he and I have always been cordial; we were both good friends of a third schoolmate and saw a fair bit of each other at one time.
At the end of the interview, he said, “I’ve got something for you. It’s a little embarrassing, but, well, we’ll see what you think.”
The term “embarrassing” covers most of my waking moments since I escaped from the teeming ghetto of Lethbridge, Alberta, and I had no idea what he could be talking about. Bill, the journalist, reached into his briefcase and laid a book on the table. It was a paperback copy of The Liveliest Art by Arthur Knight, the first book on film-as-art that I ever read. “When I told Mike,” our mutual friend, “that I’d be interviewing you, he couriered this book to me. He said that he borrowed it from you in the ninth grade and wanted to give it back. Apparently, it’s been bugging him.”
I’ve been mourning this volume since 1968. Hashoves aveydeh, the return of missing articles, is a wonderful mitzvah. What you’re returning could be someone else’s innocence.
I was recently asked how Yiddish refers to people who live together without what used to be called “benefit of clergy.” The short answer is, as infrequently as possible. Indeed, as soon as the news gets out, the woman’s older relatives will all nod sagely and whisper that they’d always suspected that the girl shpint nisht ken tsitsis dortn, “isn't spinning [i.e., knitting, weaving] any tsitsis there”; she's leading a less than virtuous life. As recently as a few years ago, this expression was a favorite of adult relatives of girls who'd “gone bohemian” in college and were alleged to be living vi got in frankraykh, “like God in France,” or, as my mother used to say, vi um shabbes in holevud, “like it was shabbes in Hollywood.”
The best way I've heard of referring to a “significant other” with whom you might be cohabiting but to whom you are certainly not married is as a freg-nisht or freg-nisht-tse. The former is a male, the latter female; the phrase is used by the mekhutonim manqués to describe the one who isn't their kid. Freg nisht means “don’t ask”; turned into a noun, it takes on the sense of “the-name-and-character-of-the-person-in-question-so-disgust-me-that-I-can't-bring-myself-to-mention-him-or-her-by-name”: “So tell me, Miss Educated-Home-From-College-Who-Has-No-Further-Use-For-Morals, vus makht der freg-nisht, how's the Don't-Ask?” It means “lover,” and were there a choice between two Yiddish translations of the same English novel, Froy Chatterly's Gelibter wouldn't stand a chance against Froy Chatterly's Freg-Nisht.
And Finally....Wex’s Kvetch of the Month:
Don't ask...
(Michael Wex in the early 80s as the Good Thief in a medieval passion play)
A kosheren un a freylekhn pesach! Look out for your next edition of Vekslblat in April.