Born to Kvetch
Chapter 7: If It Wasn't for Bad Luck
MAZL, MISERY, AND MONEY

Born to Kvetch extract:

As a language of goles, of the exile that has defined every aspect of Jewish life since the destruction of the Second Temple, Yiddish has developed an unusually extensive vocabulary of poverty, want and stymied desire--the indispensable prerequisites for a really good kvetch. The whole point of being in exile is that you aren't where you want to be--at home; you don't have the one thing you want the most--a home; you shlep yourself from one day to the next, lurching from crisis to crisis, painfully aware that any episodes of prosperity are likely to be all too brief. Yidishe ashires iz vi shney in marts, Jewish wealth is like snow in March: you get it once in a while, and it vanishes overnight. Up until the Nazis, poverty, not anti-Semitism, was considered the most serious problem facing the Jews, and much, if not most, modern Yiddish culture developed in an environment of almost incomprehensible deprivation.

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