Born to Kvetch
Chapter 4: Pigs, Poultry, and Pampers
THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF YIDDISH

Born to Kvetch extract:

The shikse is freedom from the yoke of the mitsves expressed in terms of nocturnal emission. Since a shikse has no mitsves, a shikse has no morals. She is the Other in a garter belt, Ellie-Mae Clampett after the censors go home. But Ellie-Mae soon turns into Granny; a woman passes from shikse to goye once she loses the ability to tempt a Jewish male. A yunge shikse--my mother recited it, my mother's friends and my friends' mothers, they all recited it, it was a secular hymn to endogamy--a yunge shikse vert an alte goye, a young shikse turns into an old goye. This is the Yiddish gloss on the Wife of Bath's, "Age, allas, that al wole envenyme," and the Wife of Bath is a perfect illustration of the shikse at sunset: "I have had my world as in my tyme." I had my fun? No good Jew could ever say such a thing.

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