Born to Kvetch
eBook - ePub

Born to Kvetch

Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods

  1. 123 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Born to Kvetch

Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods

About this book

For Jews, kvetching is a way of understanding the world. It is rooted, like so much of Jewish culture, in the Bible where the Israelites grumble endlessly. They complain about their problems, and complain as much about the solutions. They kvetch in Egypt and they kvetch in the desert; no matter what God does, it's wrong. In Yiddish Jews found the perfect language for their complaints. In kvetching they made complaining into an art form.Yiddish was the main spoken language for Jews for over a thousand years and its phrases, idioms and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the psychology that helped the Jews of Europe to survive unrelenting persecution. In Born to Kvetch Michael Wex looks into the origins of this surplus of disenchantment, and examines how it helped to create the abundance of striking idioms and curses in Yiddish. Michael Wex takes a serious but funny look at the language that has shaped and was shaped by those who spoke it. Featuring chapters on the Yiddish relationship to food, nature, God, death and even sex, he allows his scholarship and wit to roam freely from Sholem Aleichem to Chaucer and Elvis Presley. A treasure trove of linguistics, sociology, history and folklore -- an inspiring portrait of a people, and a language, in exile.

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Yes, you can access Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Languages. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Table of Contents
  5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  6. INTRODUCTION
  7. ONE : Kvetch Que C’est? THE ORIGINS OF YIDDISH
  8. TWO : Six Feet Under, Baking Bagels: YIDDISH IN ACTION
  9. THREE : Something Else to Kvetch About: YIDDISH DIALECTS
  10. FOUR : Pigs, Poultry, and Pampers: THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF YIDDISH
  11. FIVE : Discouraging Words: YIDDISH AND THE FORCES OF DARKNESS
  12. SIX : You Should Grow Like an Onion: THE YIDDISH CURSE
  13. SEVEN : If It Wasn’t for Bad Luck: MAZL, MISERY, AND MONEY
  14. EIGHT : “Bupkes Means a Lot of Nothing”: YIDDISH AND NATURE
  15. NINE : Making a Tsimmes: FOOD–KOSHER AND TREYF
  16. TEN : A Slap in the Tukhes and Hello: YIDDISH LIFE FROM BIRTH TO BAR MITZVAH
  17. ELEVEN : More Difficult than Splitting the Red Sea: COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE
  18. TWELVE : Too Good for the Goyim: SEX IN YIDDISH
  19. THIRTEEN : It Should Happen to You: DEATH IN YIDDISH
  20. GLOSSARY
  21. ALSO BY MICHAEL WEX
  22. Copyright