Born To Kvetch audiobook

The Yiddish language is alive and well in Kiryas Joel, New York, materially the poorest but presumably spiritually the richest town in the United States, where the Satmar Hasidic residents' pious lifestyle is subsidized by the impure Gentile United States via food stamps and Medicaid. It survives in a few more similar places: from Williamsburg in Brooklyn to Stamford Hill in London to Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. Millions of descendants of Ashkenazi Jews in the United States have switched to American English a few generations ago (a statistician former coworker of mine once told me that her mother-in-law's parents spoke Yiddish to her as a child, but she replied in English); those in Israel have switched to Modern Israeli Hebrew and those in the Soviet Union have switched to Russian. I suspect that had the Second World War and the Holocaust not taken place, there would be another few million assimilated Jewish speakers of Russian and Polish. Other than the Hasidic Jews, and old Jews born in interwar Eastern Europe, of whom there are fewer each year, the language has a few hundred enthusiasts around the world, not all of them Jewish. The author is such a person; he admits that most Yiddish speakers under 40 who are not Hasidic Jews have learned the language at a university, in the form of an artificial dialect that corresponds to no authentic one, sometimes from teachers who themselves have learned it at a university; unlike them, he actually learned it from his family, which is the last surviving branch of a rabbinic dynasty. Possessing such unique knowledge, Wex decided to spread it.This is a book on the world of Yiddish as revealed through its idioms, proverbs and folklore. Wex does not want to have anything to do with the secular Yiddish culture of the late XIX and the early XX century, such as the writings of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Leib Peretz (Isaac Bashevis Singer was writing in a language that he knew was moribund). Nor does he care about the Yiddish into which Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book was translated in 1913, and Lev Kassil's The Black Book and Schwambrania was in 1937. Instead, his Yiddish lives in a timeless imaginary Eastern European stetl. The physical and mental separation between the Jew and the non-Jew in the world of this book is absolute; one of the idioms Wex cites is "yevonishe toyre": Greek, i.e. non-Jewish, or Ivan's Torah - i.e. the Russian filthy language. I know for a fact that such separation existed but it was not absolute: there were many Ukrainian-Yiddish bilinguals, for one. One of the chapters protests against the popular notion that Yiddish cares little about nature. Of course a tavernkeeper or a shoemaker cares less about nature than a peasant or a husbandryman (yes, there were Jewish peasants and husbandrymen, but proportionately fewer of them than among their Slavic neighbors). However, as befits the language of a minority specializing in services, unlike its agriculturalist neighbors, Yiddish cares a lot about the human mind. One lovely idiom in the book is "khokhem be-layle": "a sage at night", when no one is looking, which is to say an idiot during the day.The book cites what is probably hundreds of sayings and idioms about birth, childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and death, food, poverty, and luck. A great one is "Zolst vaksn vi a tsibele, mitn kop in dr’erd": "You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground." To a much greater extent than modern Israeli secular culture, this was a Jewish culture, rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. "Sheyne moyshe ve-arendlekh" means "nice breasts": Song of Songs 4:5 talks about a woman's two breasts, and a Midrashic interpretation says that this verse refers to Moses and Aaron. In Numbers 33:26 the Children of Israel pitch their tents at Tahath, a Hebrew word that means "under", which is pronounced "tukhes" in Yiddish and means "buttocks"; "kush mir vu di yidn hobn gerut", "kiss me where the Jews rested" means "kiss my ass."The book was on The New York Times bestseller list, presumably selling well among American Jews who want to discover their roots in an imaginary stetl. The cover depicts a scowling boy with long sidelocks in a black jacket and a black hat. It is possible that the boy speaks the language the book is about very well, and the language of the book itself less well; however, the boy probably won't read the book in his lifetime. This vexing contradiction is at the center of the book.

Oy, did I love this book! Serious exploration of how Jewish culture, particularly Ashkenzic Jewish culture, is reflected in the Yiddish language. The scholarly stuff is good. But what makes this book for me Wex's writing. His presentation of the material is funny, and wry and fabulous. Here are a few examples :On Yiddish reflecting the Jewish condition of exile: "Judaism is defined by exile, and exile without complaint is tourism, not deportation."On a phrase that translates as "lying in the ground baking bagels": "The phrase is both kvetch and mission statement, a perfect prologue to any other complaint. . . . [It's] as if being dead isn't bad enough, you've got to spend all of eternity in hellishly hot bakery conditions, baking bagels that, being dead, you have no need to eat; that, being dead, you've got no one to whom you can sell them; that being dead, you don't even know anyone except other dead people, who also don't need to eat and who also don't have any money and who are all busy baking their own lousy bagels that they can't get rid f either."On non-Kosher (treyf) food: " [T]reyf originally referred to animals that would otherwise have been kosher, and was the biblical equivalent of 'roadkill." ... "[S]o for as Jewish culture is concerned, the pig exists only to provide gentiles with food and Jews with idioms."Also, there is a selection of post script essays, one of which is entitled "Enough Already: Five Yiddish Words Frequently Misused in English." I'll share one: "Knish. I've heard this pronounced with a silent 'k' on more than one occasion. Please remember that nothing can be silent in Yiddish." Yep.

I love this book, but I also have an unnatural facination with all things Yiddish, considering I'm a lapsed Prebyterian of Irish extraction who grew up in Tennessee. Wex takes his own sweet time explaining a variety of Yiddish expressions and obscure idioms as well as Yiddish the goys use daily (hint- schmuck is a much nastier name for someone in Yiddish proper). He digs into the cultural roots of a variety of idioms while explaining the development of the language. Reading may take some patience, but you'll come out with a whole list of new curses, insults, and names for your gentalia.

I can't kvetch about this book because it was great. (In spite of all the dated pop culture references.) Michael Wex does an excellent job of describing Yiddish and conveying the underpinnings of the culture that gave it birth. He does so with profound insight, with an impressive breadth of scholarship, and with an occasional one-liner that will have you laughing out loud. (My favorite was "The kvetch is a living nightmare; the curse, a dream deferred.")Wex does not spare his readers the sociolinguistic and etymological details, which means non-linguists may find parts of this book hard going. My advice is to ramble on through those sections that discuss the more esoteric aspects of Yiddish, until you get to something you can really sink your teeth into. (Patience!Those delights will come!) Even if you are not up to tackling vowel shifts in the different dialects, there will be curses! food! sex! beatings! and death-defying irony!Although my primary interest in reading this book was linguistic, what I learned was much more than the ins and outs of Yiddish. I learned a bit about my own history. On every page I heard the voice of my grandmother, and...I think...I finally understand what she was saying. (Apparently, "a khalerya af dir" does not mean "come to dinner".) Even if you don't speak Yiddish, that most expressive of languages, you will come away from this book enlightened.

I read this with my book club at Temple. It is one of the few books that everyone didn't kvetch about a lot. Usually we pick a book and then spend about 1/4 of the time complaining about why we don't like it. But this one seemed to be pretty well liked. It wasn't as funny as I expected from the online summaries and reviews I had read. But it was very interesting. A lot of Jewish culture comes along with Yiddish and we had some good discussions about that. I was frustrated with not being able to remember all of the phrases I liked (especially the curses). I know a few more now than the ones I grew up hearing but not as much as I would like to know.

This is a demanding but very funny read that is unlike any other book I have ever read. It gives an over view of Yiddish (mainly its idioms), structured by the phases of Jewish life (in the shtetl). I cannot conceive of a similar book covering Russian, Spanish, or French. I can imagine such a book for Mayan; maybe books like this are only possible for rare languages associated with a lost world.The world Wex describes is alien to me. After reading this, I understood why my ancestors were so proud to be reform, German-speaking Jews. I am not excusing their snobbery, but my great grandmother was one of Europe's first female doctors and there was no room for dybbuks in her world view. I think this book would be very confusing to non-Jews. At least I am familiar with the concept of sheytls, even if I am find them crazy. I don't know if gentiles would find this book bewildering, or if they would enjoy unencumbered by emotional baggage.

I loved this book. I thought it was funny, interesting, informative, useful, and pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be. In fact, I would give it five stars if it had a comprehensive glossary, but the glossary is selective. There are a lot of words and phrases discussed and defined throughout the text which don't appear in it.

The author explores the story of Yiddish, not as history, but as a living language and a symbol of Judaism. Indeed, in Wex's conception, Yiddish is a tool wielded by Jews to represent and shape Jewish culture, religion, and custom. Extremely witty, ribald, and self-effacing (as much of Jewish comedy is), Wex is a delightful and erudite writer. From chapters called "Kvetch-que-C’est" to absolutely fascinating exegesis on expressions, slang, and smut, this book is no dry text. It’s a rollicking religious psychoanalysis, a poke at Jewish stereotypes, and pride in Yiddish’s varied idioms that reinforce those stereotypes. In the Yiddish conception, to speak directly, as Wex notes, is to "speak Goyish;" Yiddish makes its point via synecdoche, curses, puns, ironic reversals, and food. Is someone beautiful? Say your enemies should be as ugly! Has your grown child taken up with a sexual partner? They're carrying on like God in France; refer to them as the old "don’t-ask!" Want to talk about the number of Jewish families in the neighborhood? Mentioning the family outright seems like tempting God; just call them the "prayer shawls." In short, Wex argues that to understand the story of Yiddish, you must understand the Jewish mentality, shaped by historical experience with oppression and exile. There’s no good in bringing attention to yourself, whether to authorities or God himself. Underneath the etymology and the comedy, Wex does have a serious message. Wex revels in all the foibles of demotic, natural, spoken Yiddish, and compares it unfavorably to "klal shprakh," standard Yiddish, that is meant for classroom instruction. All in all, this book is a funny, informative tour of Yiddish, led by an enthusiastic teacher that will have readers ready to start studying at the local shul.

Having been raised as a culturally Catholic atheist, I'm going to aggressively refrain from performative moral superiority and simply say that a large percentage of this book discusses orthodox practices that are, to put it kindly, old-fashioned. Of course, Wex discusses plenty of culturally taboo subjects openly, giving the reader a window into some of the more obscure customs.My knowledge of Jewish culture and Yiddish were severely limited, so this was an entirely educational read for me. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author, and since I'm unfamiliar with the accent of people from Alberta, I can only describe his cadence as reminiscent of a Valley girl, ending sentences in a higher pitch than you'd expect. It was initially off-putting but well worth getting used to.This book is occasionally funny, more or less often depending on your sense of humour. I'm a big fan of puns, so those were a big hit, but some of the more colourful comments didn't land for me.

A great exploration of the Yiddish language and the whole Ashkenazi experience, with the Yiddish language as a lens. The first half is amazing. Wex discusses the history of European Jewry and makes a claim for the religious and philosphical basis of the kvetch. The latter half of the book comes off a little like a listicle, with Wex tossing phrase after phrase in Yiddish, explaining what it meant and then sometime trying to connect it to the wider Jewish world. In the last couple of chapters, the ones on love and sex, this worked because those topics are so interesting and so closely connected with the lived experience of any group. In other chapters, the listy-nature goes on a bit, but still, the first half is impressive enough to make up for this. Note: I read the audio edition, which is read by Michael Wex himself. He is a native Yiddish speaker and his accent adds a lot to the book. If you do both audibooks and book books, I would highly recommend reading the audiobook edition for this one.

Born to Kvetch is a study of Yiddish idioms, and a delightful exploration of Ashkenazi culture. The word kvetch literally means "to press or squeeze", like you'd do to get juice out of oranges, and its use in culture where there is so much to complain about has risen to an art form. The kvetch is a way of making sense of a world where the blessing of the Torah is met with the pain of exile where the demands of a righteous life involve deliberate low level antagonism of the goyish world in which Jews are embedded, lest the two become intermingled.Yiddish is spoken these days mostly by Hasidic communities and a handful of Jewish language nerds. Even if my community, American Reform Judaism, is several generations away from Yiddish, this idioms get at my modes of thought, what it really means to be Jewish, in a way that few other books have. Bravo!

This book isn't for putzes or wusses; it delves into the roots and routes of the pithy phrases for which Yiddish is famous. Fans of lexicographers will adore it; and I, I am such a fan! What I most loved about this book was the knowledge I amassed of Yiddish - that is Jewish - traditions related to sex, food, death, and gender. I love finishing a book and feeling richer for its reading! To gain the fullest benefits from Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods, I will need to read and re-read this text. What a Jewish approach to reading have I!

Highly entertaining as well as educational. Key phrases, etymology, situational use, personal stories, and humor throughout. Definite winner for anyone with an interest in Yiddish language or culture.

A delightful scan through aspects of the Yiddish language and the peoples that created it and, in particular, brought it to the United States, subdivided by which aspects of life are being discussed. Warm, self-effacing, witty, fascinating.

I thought that this was a really well-crafted piece of informative nonfiction. It was funny and clever, and I enjoyed learning about orthodox Jewish culture. Yiddish is a beautiful, complex, and fascinating language that I knew almost nothing about before I picked up this book. It's rife with irony, puns, and countless charming idioms. But what I think is unique about it is that it grew organically from separation, secrecy, sorrow, poverty, and general otherness. I've never been more aware (or really aware at all) of my own identity as a Goye, but here is this entire language that developed as a means for describing a way of life that my ancestors were TOTALLY removed from. Yiddish was a specific way to converse about Christians and Christianity, Jews, and Judaism, all in a way that non-Jews couldn't understand, and it grew from there into a fully-fledged language. That whole idea is so fascinating to me that I can't believe I didn't know about it before. A big part of why I enjoyed reading this was because I felt like I was doing something subversive, learning about a language and religion that I'm not really supposed to understand. I felt like I was reading a manual for a secret club that I wasn't invited to join. (And I really wanted to be invited.)The only part that dragged, for me, was the pages-long description of various forms of corporal punishment used in schools. There were also lots of pop-culture references that went over my head, though I didn't resent them too much because the ones that I did get were so funny.Here's an excerpt:Kalb [calf:] gives us the adjective kelbern, which in turn gives us the lovely phrase kelberne hispayles, "calflike enthusiasm," a foolish enthusiasm or infatuation, the mental state responsible for carnival barkers and infomercials. Spray hair on, vacuum it off, slice, dice, and get six-pack abs- it's kelberne hispayles that gets you to reach for your wallet or pick up the phone.[I should, perhaps, warn that Mr. Wex isn't prudish in the least in describing Yiddish swears and slang, and there are plenty of disdainful idioms involving Jesus Christ. So definitely DON'T read this if you are Christian and easily offended.:]