June 04, 2008
Welcome to the seventeenth 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 e-book is only available to Vekslblat subscribers so the link has been disabled. Don't forget to check out the back-issues of Vekslblat.
This edition of Vekslblat includes news, articles from the Jewish Week, Wex's Kvetch of the Month and much more. Enjoy!
Apologies for the late appearance of this addition of Vekslblat - it's been a little hectic in the Wex household. Wex himself has been busy with a couple of new book projects that we can't tell you about just yet - but watch this space - Vekslblat readers will be the first to know the exciting details! Mrs. Wex has had family in town from the UK - this gave Mr. And Mrs. Wex a chance to return to the scene of their honeymoon - Niagara Falls. It's going to be a busy summer of writing for Wex, so all three of us took a well-deserved break together.
News
Born to Kvetch is on A Way With Words!
Public radio's A Way With Words will be featuring the fabulous idiom hakn a tshaynik in an upcoming episode. Wherever you are in the world you will be able to listen to the podcast version of this great show all about language via their website, here. The podcast will link back to The Yiddish World of Michael Wex website with an extract from Born to Kvetch explaining how knocking a tea-kettle turns into one of Yiddish's most colourful expressions. Check the Way With Words website next week!
Where's Wex?
Articles
Passover is all about the breaking of unwanted bonds: three different people have e-mailed me this week about an idiom that likens the dissolution of a business relationship to the breakdown of a marriage.
If things go wrong between partners or associates, you can say that they are oys mekhutonim, “no more relatives-by-law.” The image derives from divorce—technically, it describes the divorced couple’s parents after the final decree has been issued—but usually means the dissolution of a business partnership, another contractual relationship from which both parties emerge aggrieved.
Oys mekhutonim can be compared with the delightful oys kapelyush-makher, “no more fancy-hat maker,” i.e., no more Mr. Big Shot. Kapelyush can mean either “derby” or “fancy woman’s hat”; someone who’s oys kapelyush-makher has “slipped,” as they used to say in English. The phrase has a jocular sense, a hint of resignation, and can be used just as easily in the first person as in the third: “So there I am, two days before my IPO when--bang! the market crashes and I’m oys kapelyush-makher, applying for food stamps.”
The mortgage crisis is making former derby-makers out of thousands of home-owners.
The ex-business partners will probably refer to each other the way our ancestors might have bid good riddance to Egypt: “A sheyne, reyne kapore, a beautiful, pure kapore” — to be waved around your head three times, then slaughtered like a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur as penance for all your sins: "Benedict Arnold's dead? A sheyne, reyne kapore."
The idea crops up periodically, generally on Passover, when the khomets-starved brains of certain West Coast executives––addled, some say, by a surfeit of matzoh-brei––go into overdrive and begin to smell money where the rest of us see nothing but Nyafat: “Why don’t we do a Jewish version of The Godfather?”
I can think of a thousand reasons why not, none of which stopped a reasonably well-known producer from calling me up last week and asking, “When Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes, how would you do this in Jewish?”
Got, as they say in Yiddish, shikt di refue far der make, God sends the remedy in advance of the plague; there’s a reason that this guy called me on Pesach.
“Matzoh,” I told him, “A gross of matzohs with a note in Hebrew.”
“In Hebrew?” he asked. “Not Yiddish?”
“In Hebrew. And it says, “Eyn maftirin akhar ha-peysakh afikoyman.”
“You mean the injunction to the wise son concerning the laws of the afikoyman contained in the Passover Hagaddah? What’s that got to do with Luca Brasi?” “Look,” I explained, “When you say that someone is ibergegesn mit afikoymens, ‘has eaten too many afikoymens,’ you’re saying that they died of old age. It’s like a coroner describing the cause of death as ‘one too many Christmases.’ All those matzohs show that you’ve provided Luca Brasi with enough afikoymens to produce a state of ibergegesen, and that now he sleeps with gefilte.”
“A-ha,” said the producer. “What about a Yiddish Dreamgirls?”
The yeytser horeh, the evil inclination, is still alive and well among our children. My thirteen year-old daughter just informed me that a friend of hers has been grounded after coming home from what was supposed to have been a Yom Ha’Atzma’ut party with “a hickey the size of a matzoh ball.”
It’s probably a good thing. According to the medresh, "Were it not for the yeytser horeh, no one would build a house, get married, have children, or do any business;" it drives people to satisfy their urges and gratify their egos. Someone who has been seized by the yeytser has fallen into a passionate desire––for an ice cream, a new house, or finding a cure for cancer––anything that can be desired or even lusted after. It's Inclination with a capital I, immune to cold showers or thoughts of Santa.
There's only one way to resist, especially when the yeytser starts to talk about sex: “Shlep it into the bes-medresh [study house]. If it’s made of rock, it’ll be crushed; of iron, it’ll be smashed to pieces (Sukko, 52b).”
Rock, iron--the only thing that's supposed to be hard in a bes-medresh is the book you're trying to read: yeytser-horeh-bleterl, “a small blotch of the evil inclination,” is what Yiddish calls a hickey. “She got such a yetster-hore-bleterl at the Teaneck drive-in that she wore turtlenecks for the next three weeks.”
May she wear them in good health––as long as she isn’t my daughter.
And Finally....Wex’s Kvetch of the Month:
Bar mitzvah blues
I've just returned from yet another bar mitzvah that featured a disc jockey, assorted disc jockey tummlers and a chocolate fountain––the sort of celebration that thirteen-year olds seem to enjoy. My own bar mitzvah was a matter of a few bottles of Crown Royal, a roomful of adults, none of whom made me want to nod vigorously while whistling "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman"--1967's counterpart to "Soldier Boy"––and heated discussion of the recent Israeli victory. It was what a bar mitzvah used to be: acknowledgment of the fact that I was finally old enough, mature enough, grown-up enough for my parents to be able to forget about me for a night. I could sneak outside for a cigarette without anybody noticing. I might have been as lonesome as Humphrey Bogart, but I knew I was a man.
Happy Father's Day! Look out for your next edition of Vekslblat soon.