Born to Kvetch Chapter 1: Kvetch Que C'Est? ORIGINS OF YIDDISH
Born to Kvetch extract:
Yiddish started out as German for blasphemers, as a German in which you could deny Christ without getting yourself killed any more often than necessary. From day one, once they started to speak "German" to one another, the Jews were speaking German aftselakhis, German to spite the Germans, a German that Germans wouldn’t understand--the argot of the unredeemed. Don't think of Yiddish as a union or melding of German and Semitic elements; think of it as a horror movie. Think of Hebrew as an aristocrat with a funny accent, a mysterious old language no longer used in conversation, the linguistic equivalent of the Undead. It needs body and blood to return to spoken life, the body and blood of a living language that can be taken over and put to use in the service of the Jewish brain.
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