Born to Kvetch Chapter Extracts

Read extracts from every chapter of Born to Kvetch below.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 1: Kvetch Que C'Est? ORIGINS OF YIDDISH

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.Born to Kvetch Chapter 2: Six Feet Under, Baking Bagels - YIDDISH IN ACTIONThere's a way of thinking that owes something to Talmudic logic and can be applied to absolutely anything, as in the idiom hakn a tshaynik, to knock a tea kettle. More often than not, this phrase is used in the negative: Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik, don't knock me a tea kettle—that is, you don't have to shut up completely, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop rattling on about the same damned thing all the time… Knocking or hitting or chopping a teapot is the kind of image that causes kids from Yiddish-speaking families to wonder about their parents’ thought processes, and generations have been disappointed to realize how pedestrian the image really is. Think of a kettle with a cover or lid on the top. You pour the water into the kettle, put the lid back on top, turn the burner on, go off to make a phone call and forget all about it. The more water boils away, the more the cover rattles. The fewer the contents, the less it has to offer, the louder and more annoying the noise. The lid is moving up and down, banging against the kettle like a jaw in full flap, clanging and banging and signifying nothing. Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik--don't bang away at me like the lid on an empty kettle.

The image is so striking that hakn a tshaynik has become one of the most popular idioms in the language, making its way into millions of Jewish and non-Jewish homes through the medium of Three Stooges shorts: Moe is on his way to a hock-shop; when Larry hears where he's going, he says, "While you're there, hock me a tshaynik." During a manhunt for the Stooges, who are suspected of having kidnapped a baby, Larry disguises himself as a Chinese laundryman; confronted by a cop who asks, "What kinda Chinaman are you?" Larry bursts into rapid-fire Yiddish, beginning with "Ikh bin [I am] a Chinaboy fun di Lower East Side," and concluding with, "Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik and I don't mean efsher [maybe]."

While the Stooges were banned in many homes because of their eye-gouging, nose-pulling, face-slapping and occasional propensity to violence, these activities were called discipline in my own household. What bothered my parents was their Yiddish, which can get pretty salty, especially when Moe dresses up as Hitler. Along with Lenny Bruce and early Mad magazines, the Stooges are responsible for exposing millions of children born after World War II to Yiddish and its ethos; "Don't hit me a kettle" could have come right out of Mad.

Tshaynik hakking was not confined to the commercial media, either. A Yiddish copy of the New Testament left in my family's milk box by some of our thoughtful neighbors in southern Alberta--they must have dropped it off in the middle of the night, just to give us a taste of what we were missing--rendered the sounding brass of St. Paul's well-known statement in 1 Corinthians 13 ("Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or as a tinkling cymbal") as .”..hak ikh nor a tshaynik." I definitely got Paul's point, but who needs a Bible that sounds like someone’s bobe? His message went in der linker peye, into my left sidelock, but didn’t make it as far as my ear.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 3: Something Else to Kvetch About - YIDDISH DIALECTS

Imagine a situation in which one half of the U.S.A. pronounced "poodle" to rhyme with "toodle,” the other half pronounced it "piddle,” and each resented the other for doing so. If you change the Americans to Jews and forget about English, you’ll have a fairly accurate portrait of conversational Yiddish—a language in which you can’t open your mouth without finding out that, no matter what you’re saying, you’re saying it wrong.

Born to KvetchChapter 4: Pigs, Poultry, and Pampers - THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF YIDDISH

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.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 5: Discouraging Words - YIDDISH AND THE FORCES OF DARKNESS

Yiddish isn't social work; it would rather vent its feelings than share them. But don't go blaming the Jews; they are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. As if endless exile and ravening goyim were not enough, let us not forget that klal yisroel, the Jewish people as a whole, is besieged twenty-four hours a day by sheydim, rukhes, klipes, leytsim, mazikim and dibukim--demons, spirits, gremlins, sprites, goblins and devils, whose only reason for living is to wreck your hopes and rain on your parade. They hate human happiness and can't stand prosperity. And there's no getting out from under them.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 6: You Should Grow Like an Onion - THE YIDDISH CURSE

"You should own a thousand houses... with a thousand rooms in each house... and a thousand beds in every room. And you should sleep each night in a different bed... in a different room... in a different house... and get up every morning... and go down a different staircase... and get into a different car... driven by a different chauffeur... who should drive you to a different doctor -- and he shouldn't know what's wrong with you, either."

Think of it as a kvetch with a mission, a bellyache that knows where it’s going; it’s a classic example of the klole, the Yiddish curse. It might be formulaic--you have to wonder if it’s subtlety or an oversight that every room in every house seems to be a bedroom--but it shows how much you care. This kind of elaborate curse--delivered in a Talmudic sing-song--isn't an imprecation, it’s a pastime, a form of recreation that lets standard Yiddish thought and speech run wild.

To learn more about Yiddish curses go to our Yiddish curses page.

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

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.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 8: Bupkes Means a Lot of Nothing - YIDDISH AND NATURE

When it came to day-to-day life the Jews knew no less than gentiles. Jews were cattle-dealers, horse-traders, stewards on noble estates. They had vast vocabularies relating to animal-parts and agriculture--Yiddish vocabularies that sometimes diverged considerably from the local non-Jewish language. Tailors, shoemakers and rabbis were treated by folk-healers who commonly prescribed herbal specifics—sgules, in Yiddish--that the patients (or their wives) were often expected to compound for themselves. This might not be the stuff of belles lettres, but that doesn’t make it any the less natural.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 9: Making A Tsimmes - FOOD-KOSHER AND TREYF

As the voice of a system of thought designed to keep Us Jews from turning into Them Goyim, Yiddish has developed an unusually comprehensive vocabulary of exclusion. Differences between yidish and goyish, sacred and profane, proper and improper, are built into the structure of the language, nowhere more deeply than when Yiddish deals with food. When you're constantly on guard lest a drop of gravy wind up on a plate used for dairy; when Passover, a major holiday, is based on forbidding more foods than usual, and Yom Kippur, the major holiday, forbids any food at all; when food, in other words, becomes a locus of transgression, eating is never too far from your mind. Laconic as Yiddish might sometimes be about nature in the raw, it devotes considerable attention to nature on the plate.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 10: A Slap in the Tukhes and Hello - YIDDISH LIFE FROM BIRTH TO BAR MITZVAH

I don't mean any disrespect to Jesus--if I did, I'd be writing in Yiddish--but Hebrew school is not for the meek. Airless and overcrowded, full of pre-adolescents forced to trudge through steaming jungles of syllogisms, bubbe mayses [cock and bull stories], and kid-eating prohibitions--you can't touch your hair while praying; you can’t pet a dog on shabbes or go swimming during the hottest three weeks of the year--the kheyder [traditional elementary school] had to be run by a combination prison guard, exegete and child psychologist. But we’re in goles [exile]; we got the melamed instead.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 11: More Difficult than Splitting the Red Sea - COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE

Mitsves might begin at thirteen, but maturity is a matter of marriage. A bar mitzvah ceremony acknowledges developments that it does nothing to bring about; a wedding canopy turns boys and girls into men and women. “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife,” says the Bible—a man, not a boy: a kid stays a kid until marriage, and the unmarried never really mature. Bokher, the Yiddish for bachelor, can also describe a junior high school student; its basic meaning is “male youth, adolescent,” someone steaming along to manhood in an engine stoked with hormones. The alter bokher’s train, the train of the “old adolescent, the confirmed bachelor,” never quite arrives, and it’s nobody’s fault but his. In light of the surprising fact that the Torah’s first commandment, “increase and multiply,” is incumbent on men but not women, bachelorhood is seen as a deliberate flight from authenticity, a refusal to face up to the fundamental imperative of masculine life. An alter bokher of eighty is only a minor on the verge of senility.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 12: Too Good for the Goyim - SEX IN YIDDISH

The Beatles' contribution to certain areas of modern Yiddish has never been properly acknowledged or appreciated. Among people who speak English with a Yiddish accent, Beatle and the Yiddish word bitl are virtually indistinguishable. Bitl means “contempt, scorn”; kukn mit bitl is “to look down on, dismiss.” In some combinations, bitl also means “waste, squandering.” So, bitl zman is “a waste of time,” bitl toyre, “a waste of [time better spent learning] Torah.” Er iz a bitl, “he's a bitl/Beatle,” could mean so many different things, none of them very nice.

Born to Kvetch Chapter 13: It Should Happen to You - DEATH IN YIDDISH

Trust classical Judaism to link sex and death in an entirely novel way two millennia before the development of psychoanalysis. The Talmudic description of the malekh ha-moves — the Angel of Death — occurs in the middle of a set of instructions on how to avoid getting an erection in public.

For a guide to the pronunciation and transliteration used in Born to Kvetch, go to our transliteration page.

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