Michael Wex's Jewish Week
Kvetch Column #15

Below you will find the fifteenth edition of Michael Wex's Kvetch column for the Jewish Week.

Whenever people find out that I work in Yiddish, they almost inevitably ask me to tell them my favorite Yiddish curse. These days it’s a kazarme zol af dir aynfaln, "a barracks should collapse on you.”

Having a building of any kind collapse on top of you is never pleasant, but if that building is a barracks, then you're probably in the army--the last place any East-European Jew wanted to find himself. There's a whole history of bad luck built into the collapse of the barracks: first you get a conscription notice; then you can't buy, hide or cheat your way out of serving; you endure the million and one horrors and humiliations of army life, along with the additional horrors and humiliations reserved exclusively for minorities; and then--as if all this isn't already punishment enough--the scene of all these crimes has to fall down and crush you--all because you hadn't succeeded in evading the draft, that is, because you had failed as a criminal.

There is something quite Talmudic about all of this; it's the dialectic, the logical examination of premises, that gives the curse its kick. In a culture in which every cursee is his or her own Rashi, cursing isn't a matter of yelling out bad words; the trick is to put the good ones together in the most damaging possible way.

For a guide to the pronunciation and transliteration used on this website, click here.