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Nov. 11, 2005
Kvetching his way forward
Wex brings his Yiddishkeit to the JCC Jewish Book Fest.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
It's an age-old stereotype that's more than familiar to fans of
Woody Allen movies: the neurotic, woeful Jew. But as Michael Wex
explains in his new book Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Culture in All
of Its Moods, it's a stereotype with an honest history.
Wex, who reads from the book at the Cherie Smith Jewish Book Festival
Nov. 27, has been widely acclaimed as, "a Yiddish national
treasure." He makes the bulk of his living by promoting and
sustaining the Yiddish language: as a teacher, translator and stand-up
comic.
Wex grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family and went to Hebrew school.
But in a recent interview with the Independent, he said that
what finally set him on the path towards becoming "the world's
most perfectly developed Yiddishist" was taking Old English
at university.
"I suddenly realized, 'Hey, I know all of this. This is very
similar to Yiddish,'" he mused. "It kind of dawned on
me one day that the linguistic rules I was learning applied equally
well to Yiddish, which I already could speak and I thought, 'Aha,
here is a bit of an opening to do something that I like to do.'
There was the horrible guilty thought of, 'If I don't do it, who's
going to do it?'"
Born to Kvetch follows on the heels of two decades of Yiddish
revivalism, spurred initially by a renewed interest in klezmer music
and continuing to the point where Yiddish classes are now offered
at many universities. It's also thriving among ultra-Orthodox communities,
said Wex, "particularly the Chassidic community, where birth
rates have skyrocketed in the past decade or two. It's not unusual
now for families to have eight, 10, 12 children. Of course, it tends
to be a community that doesn't really deal with people so much from
outside. It's fairly self-contained. But in terms of absolute numbers,
I think there's probably a lot more people speaking Yiddish now
than there would have been, say, 10 years ago."
And yet, Wex believes that another factor of Yiddish revivalism
stems from a need to identify what makes us Jewish, especially for
nonobservant, so-called "cultural" Jews.
"It gets harder and harder," he said, "to pinpoint,
well, what is it that makes me as a Jew different from the Presbyterian
neighbor on one side of me and the Catholic neighbor on the other
and the Hindu or Muslim neighbor across the road? Everybody somehow
feels that being Jewish makes you different, and Yiddish definitely
embodies this idea of being different."
The legendary complaining, or kvetching, he said, stems from thousands
of years of tortuous history.
"The whole reason there's Yiddish, or any other non-Hebrew
Jewish language, is because the Jews were expelled from their country
and the Temple was destroyed – for thousands of years, the
main thrust of Jewish life everywhere was hoping and praying and
waiting for Mashiach [Messiah] to come and take everybody
back to the land of Israel and rebuild the Temple. Well, when that's
what you need to feel normal, you know, everything else is kind
of small potatoes."
Wex uses a number of imaginary dialogues in Born to Kvetch
to illustrate his point. For example:
"YOU: Good news! Your son has been nominated for the Nobel
Prize!
THEM: And who do you think bought him the ticket?"
He also cites a wide range of ingenious Yiddish curses, from wishing
upon the recipient a burst gallbladder or varicose veins to declaring,
"May an accident befall your face."
Then there are the concomitant superstitions, from spitting three
times to ward off bad luck to believing in the power of the evil
eye to the ominous presence of a whole cabal of troubling demons.
"Yiddish is a lot of things," Wex writes early in the
book, "but innocent isn't one of them."
That's because, he said, "Yiddish doesn't take anything at
face value. It has a very high degree of built-in BS detector. There's
a well-known Yiddish phrase, nekhtiker tog, which means literally
a yesterday's day, and it means, 'don't tell me this ridiculous,
unbelievable story.' [It's] your response to the excuse, 'You know,
I was on my way to school with the homework and Martians came and
took it away from me.' The teacher would say, 'Ah, nekhtiker tog.'
Very few people realize this is a translation of a line from the
Psalms, and what's going on here is, you're not profaning the Psalms,
so much as you're exalting the notion of BS. There's a lot of this
in Yiddish. It's not always conscious or intentional, but it's always
happening."
In fact, although it has been used regularly by an older generation
that wasn't necessarily observant, there are many biblical underpinnings
to Yiddish, said Wex.
"We're at a point now, and have been for a couple of hundred
years, where religious observance is a matter of choice. At one
point it was simply taken for granted," he said, "so a
lot of that stuff remains inside the language, even if you're not
consciously aware of it. It's there just below the surface. There
are these really common day-to-day Yiddish expressions that even
people who speak Yiddish as a first language don't necessarily realize
have come out of the Bible or the siddur, that have ultimately these
pretty deep religious resonances."
Wex is among those who hope to keep the flame of Yiddish alive.
Part of the challenge, he said, is that the younger generations
"started going to schools that taught Israeli Hebrew, rather
than the old kind of cheder that you had over here, which tended
to be run by people from Europe, who said Shabbas, not Shabbat,
and that was what the kids absorbed. Kids growing up after the war,
for the most part, went to places that used Israeli pronunciations,
since the state was already there. That's what they absorbed and
it comes naturally to them."
Despite the growing presence of such cultural events as Klezkamp
- an annual conference devoted to all things Yiddish - Wex said
it's members of the Jewish community who question his professional
devotion.
Non-Jews, he observed, just accept it as, " 'OK, it's some
weird cultural thing that they do,' and leave it at that. It's the
Jews who can't believe [he makes a living in Yiddish]."
He does it partly, he says, "Just out of obstinacy, just to
spite all the people who think it's not going to keep going. Somebody
once said that Yiddish has been pronounced dead more often than
any language. It's still there."
Words around world
Michael Wex's reading will be bookended by a number of other Jewish
literary luminaries. The opening night of the Jewish Book Festival
on Nov. 26 features American photographer Joan Roth, author of Jewish
Women: A World of Tradition and Change and the recently released
The Jews of Ethiopia.
Roth has spent three decades travelling the world, documenting the
lives of Jewish women. The Jews of Ethiopia features photographs
taken in the Jewish villages of that country's Gondar province in
the mid-1980s, before large numbers were airlifted to Israel.
"Wandering through the pages of this book," wrote Micha
Feldman, former Israeli consul and head of the Jewish Agency in
Ethiopia, "the reader goes back in time and space into the
vanishing world of Ethiopian Jewry. One lives with them in their
simple huts, works with them in their fields, witnesses the love
flowing from parents to children and sees the beauty of the people
and the country."
The closing night reading on Dec. 1 is a panel discussion with authors
Michael Kaufman and David Homel, moderated by Georgia Straight
books editor John Burns. The panel is set to focus on issues of
social justice from a global perspective. Homel's most recent novel,
The Speaking Cure, is set among the turmoil of the former
Yugoslavia. Kaufman has garnered international recognition for his
work promoting gender equality and ending violence towards women.
For his part, Homel, a novelist and journalist currently working
on a documentary film about Bosnia, believes that, "Writing
and reading save lives.
"I realized in early adolescence," he told the Independent,
"that my violence could be channelled into something better
– into art – and that I didn't have to accept my society's
assumptions that I would slowly become more self-destructive."
Kaufman, author of the novel The Possibility of Dreaming on a
Night Without Stars, added that, "Fiction provides a wonderful
way to get under the skin and into the head of someone who has had
a vastly different experience. It is a means of promoting connection,
identification and empathy between people."
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