Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods

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Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods

3.52 of 5 stars 3.52 · rating details · 577 ratings · 91 reviews

A delightful excursion through the Yiddish language, the culture it defines and serves, and the fine art of complaint

Throughout history, Jews around the world have had plenty of reasons to lament. And for a thousand years, they've had the perfect language for it. Rich in color, expressiveness, and complexity, Yiddish has proven incredibly useful and durable. Its wonderful...more

Paperback, 336 pages

Published August 15th 2006 by Harper Perennial (first published January 1st 2005)

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Nov 11, 2008 Petra X rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy-religion

I really wanted to like this book and like the curate's egg, it was good in parts. Wex tells us early on that Yiddish is the language of complaint and sets out to prove that statement the entire rest of the book. The book is very scholarly and much of it is of interest but still, towards the end I was so depressed it was a struggle to finish it. Yiddish may be the language of complaint but its complaints turned humorous in possibly the most onomatopoeic language in the world. (Does schmuck sound...more

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Mar 19, 2008 Carrie O'Dell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: the-food-writing-course, jewish-culture

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 patienc...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Ilya rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: linguistics

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 Americ...more 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.(less)

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Sep 01, 2008 Paige rated it 3 of 5 stars

I didn't really "like" this book so much, but I am glad for the new information it gave me, and I'd probably actually give it 3.5 stars, but I really didn't enjoy reading it all that much, so three stars it gets.

As someone with hardly any knowledge of Yiddish, parts of it were pretty boring and useless. Although all of the cultural aspects were fun to read about, sometimes it seems like pages and pages of a phrase in Yiddish followed by its English translation. All of that went "into my left ear...more

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Jul 10, 2008 Jake rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: anthropology, history, judaism

Born to Kvetch is about Yiddish. Specifically, it’s a combination history and cultural study, filtered through the study of a language. Wex does a very nice job of explicating not only how Yiddish evolved, but how the very character of the language is uniquely Jewish, and indeed, uniquely Diaspora Jewish. Along the way, he also traces the development of the language, including how it split into various sub-types, where certain words and phrase came from, and how the language and culture deal wit...more Born to Kvetch is about Yiddish. Specifically, it’s a combination history and cultural study, filtered through the study of a language. Wex does a very nice job of explicating not only how Yiddish evolved, but how the very character of the language is uniquely Jewish, and indeed, uniquely Diaspora Jewish. Along the way, he also traces the development of the language, including how it split into various sub-types, where certain words and phrase came from, and how the language and culture deal with topics like birth, sex, and death.

There’s some very interesting stuff in here, most of it having to do with Jewish culture in general. Little things, like the fact that Orthodox Jews love…Paul, I think…one of the saints, for making sure that there was a very clear delineation between Judaism and Christianity. Or how the very nature of Yiddish is intricately tied to Jewish ghetto culture, and trying to separate the two is like trying to separate…I don’t know. Two things very hard to separate. You get my point.

Unfortunately, there’s some stuff in here that I found deliriously boring, most of it consisting of sections that are just little descriptions of a Yiddish phrase, followed by it’s meaning, and then it’s real meaning. One chapter, devoted entirely to explaining the differences between two diverse branches of Yiddish, is particularly hard to follow, especially if you don’t speak any version of Yiddish at all.

Which really is the problem with this book; Wex is clearly a native Yiddish speaker, and there’s a fair amount of material in here that will only make sense, or be interesting, if you have some familiarity with Yiddish. The less you know, the harder it is to follow. Since my Yiddish is limited to Oy, Kanahore (which I now know the meaning of, thanks to this book), Schmuk, and a few other curses, it was fairly tough.

The book is well-written, and interesting, but linguistic evolution isn’t my big thing. If this sort of thing interests you, it’s worth the read. If you’re looking for just a random, fun, non-fiction book to read, I’d look elsewhere.(less)

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Dec 15, 2007 Lucy rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people interested in Yiddish

Shelves: jewish

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...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Erica Verrillo rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 socioli...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Hester rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, judaism-and-jewish-issues

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 prou...more

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Aug 08, 2010 Karyl rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I really, really wanted to like this book. I've always been fascinated by language, and I wanted to learn more about the Yiddish I have heard bits and pieces of throughout my childhood. What I have learned from this book is that I don't know ANY Yiddish.

The book starts out well, explaining the mindset that gave rise to a language like Yiddish that has no homeland. However, Wex quickly turned the rest of the book into a litany of definitions. Without knowing any Yiddish at all, or even how it's c...more

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Mar 11, 2011 Joseph Young rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: People interested in Yiddish

A quite interesting touch upon Yiddish and its many facets. The author's voice was hard to deal with, especially since the first disc dealt mainly with complaining. Made me want to drive to the author's house and kick him in the nose, even at the risk of being labeled anti-semitic. Thankfully, the author lays off the excessive intonation and you get used to the voice, allowing you to even enjoy much of the deadpan humour.

Honestly, being of an optimistic nature, I get annoyed at people who compl...more

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Dec 21, 2009 Darshan Elena rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 nee...more

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Jan 13, 2009 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: language

"Together with what we've come to see as typical Yiddish earthiness and typical Yiddish humor, there is a good deal here that is neither pretty nor politically correct--and there's almost nothing that could be described as naive. Like the Talmud, which lies at the root of so many Yiddish attitudes, Yiddish is a lot of things, but innocent isn't one of them."

Incorporating a bit of history, a bit of etymology, and a lot of cultural analysis, "Born to Kvetch" is both an entertaining survey of Yiddi...more

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Mar 02, 2011 Amy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I really wanted this book to be so great. I bought it as soon as it was released in paperback. But it just ... wasn't. The second chapter was really illuminating for me personally. I was hoping for more of an analysis and exploration of Yiddish *culture* but this is very heavy on the grammatical construction of the language. I'm somewhat of a polyglot myself but this was just to heavy into linguistics for me so after a while it goit boring and slow and uninteresting to read. I finished it out of...more

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Jan 25, 2011 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating book. Wex uses every inch of his background from Jewish childhood to stand-up comedian to Yiddish scholar to expound and sometimes skewer the language he loves. It's an easy love to see.

Overall, Born to Kvetch is a nice balance of humour and erudition. It clips along nicely, loosely stringing sections together and giving a breath of a laugh between heavy translation. Some of the text is a little dense, but Wex skilfully lightens it just when your head is starting to spin. R

...more

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May 01, 2009 Christina rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 r...more 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.:]
(less)

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Jan 15, 2010 Osho rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

I read this by alternating between the book and the audiobook so that In could see orthography and hear pronunciation. Ideally I'd have done these simultaneously, but in fact I alternated media.

I enjoyed about the first 6 chapters, which included topics such as the titular kvetching. Though they included a heavy dose of diachronic linguistics, the balance of language, anecdote, and culture worked well. The latter half of the book took some slogging, perhaps because it became a vocabulary lesson...more

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Feb 08, 2013 Dave Maddock rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: language

Pretty cool book, but it got a little formulaic in the middle. Thankfully, the ending was rescued by the awesome chapter on swears with sexual connotations.

Being a language dilettante with a soft spot for dead or rare literary languages, I was pretty fascinated with Yiddish going in. Learning about Yiddish culture has cooled that somewhat since it seems so heavily permeated with religion.

Since Yiddish heavily borrows from German and Hebrew, perhaps I'll take a stab at learning it when I already...more

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Jun 25, 2011 Angela rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 300s-american-studies, 400s-language, 900s-history, 940s-970s-countries-history-cultu

An etymology of the Yiddish language, the author/reader of this cd is a scholar og great depth in linguistics, ancient Hebrew and the more recent Yiddish culture, as well as in popular American and European culture. The biggest surprise for me was the leaders of the newly formed state of Israel outlawed Yiddish, saying because there was now a place for the Jews, they didn't need the culture or language of Yiddish. This is an effort to preserve and explain the idioms,before they become extinct.

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Jul 11, 2009 Kerry rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you're interested in the intersection of Jewish culture and Yiddish this is the book for you! Fascinating look at how culture is embedded into language. And you get sentences like "the Yiddish idea of toilet paper contradicts the basic principles of dialectical materialism."! Even better on tape - read by the author in an unusual cadence in which every sentence drops an octave at the end. Wex is also a master at translating Yiddish expressions into their popular American equivalents.

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Oct 19, 2009 Phil rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-history, non-fiction

If you're not a linguist (which I'm not) or Jewish (which I am), you probably won't find much in this book. Even if you are Jewish, if you didn't spend some part of your life at least hearing Yiddish spoken regularly (my grandparents) you won't get it. The soul of Yiddish is in the inflections, not in the written word. I almost wish I'd listened to the "book on tape."

At any rate, the linguistic explanations did bring warm back memories of many of my grandfather's favorite expressions: "A nekhtik...more

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May 31, 2012 C. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: jew-ish

You should own a thousand homes
with a thousand rooms in each house
and a thousand beds in every room
And you should sleep sleep each night in a different bed
in a different room
in a different house
and get up everything 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

- Yiddish curse

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May 05, 2012 Renee rated it 5 of 5 stars

OMG! LOL! To use some popular online expressions. This book made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh. The author is a brilliant wordsmith and has such a wry sense of humor--loved it. And since it was about some of my favorite things, language, words, Yiddish, culture, history, family ...I highly recommend this book to any one who also enjoys works by Bill Bryson. Michael Wex will become a new favorite.

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Jan 21, 2010 Roxy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fun-read

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this book.

This is a genuinely funny book. The author has a great sense of history and humor. I like reading books by authors with a strong voice and Michael Wex most definitely transports you. I learned a lot about Jewish culture by reading this book but I also learned a lot about the nature of complaining (kvetching).

In reading this book, you learn a ton about Yiddish. I don't think I realized how much Yiddish has pervaded colloquial American English until

...more

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Jul 26, 2007 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: judaism

This book examines Yiddish and all it's details and eccentricities. It was kind of hard to get going but there were funny anecdotes and explanations that kept me going. I don't see how a lot of people would read this book willingly other than Jewish folks or the Jew-curious.

I had the book out on my coffee table the other day and I asked people to tell me what they thought the book was about. None of them guessed right because they had never heard the word kvetch! So much for a good education!

As...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Milliontruths rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book was really interesting, and you learn a lot about yiddish and Jewish culture through the learning about the language. However, it was not a page-turner. It took me a very long time to read this book, even though it is fairly short, and I am very interested in the subject matter. An informative, but not gripping, book.

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Nov 26, 2009 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very smart, insightful, and at times very funny, too. But so, well. . . kvetchy. I find a good bit of the Yiddish culture described her fascinating but some of it is not so appealing to my more American, optimistic Jewish sensibility.

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Aug 08, 2010 Emily added it · review of another edition

I think I may have liked this audiobook if I could stand to listen to his narration! Maybe one day I'll give it another change--in print form. As it is, I wasn't even able to make it through the introduction!!!!

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Nov 22, 2012 Arthur Gershman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting essay on the Yiddish language. For the moderately knowledgeable to very knowledgeable in Yiddish. Contains a Yiddish-English glossary. If you are new to Yiddish this book won't be of much help.

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Sep 16, 2012 Jill Edmondson rated it 3 of 5 stars

I agreed with his thesis from the outset, so reading a book that tried to prove what I already thought was a tad dull. Lots of interesting bits in it though, and a few laughs.

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Feb 18, 2011 RUSA CODES rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sophie-brody-medal

This was an Honorable Mention for the Sophie Brody Award for 2006. For the complete list, go to http://ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/aw...

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About Michael Wex

Michael Wex is a novelist, professor, translator (including the only Yiddish translation of The Threepenny Opera ), and performer (of stand-up and one person shows). He has been hailed as a Yiddish national treasure and is one of the leading lights in the current revival of Yiddish, lecturing widely on Yiddish and Jewish culture. He lives in Toronto.

More about Michael Wex...

Books by Michael Wex

Just Say Nu: Fluent Yiddish in One Little Word

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