A fine whine (How sheep shit got cute)

D'ont let the studly pin-up fool you-Michael Wex wasn't born to be bad. He was born to kvetch.

Having heard Wex lecture, I didn't need an entire book to know that the title was true. He is a shrewd linguist, sociologist, historian, playwright and skilled native Yiddish speaker-and a heck of a whiner.

Wex is a beloved fixture at KlezKanada, a summer program devoted to Yiddish music, theater, and language. And there, in the backwoods outside of Montreal, I have heard Wex complain about everything from the quality of the cholent (a long-simmering beef and bean stew), to the cruel distance of his trailer from the bathroom (not unrelated grievances).

Even those with no prior exposure to Yiddish can follow Wex's clean and clear prose as it weaves through explanations of the roots of particular words and of whole expressions. Wex greatly appreciates just how layered-how masterfully evolved-many Yiddish expressions are.

A favorite example of mine is the phrase "nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn," it didn't climb up and it didn't fly. As Wex explains, the origin of this phrase-whose import is "yeah, right"-is a reference to the Christian notion of Jesus climbing onto the cross and later winging his resurrected way into heaven. The author explains:

"Each individual word of nisht geshtoygn un nisht gefloygn would be comprehensible to a German-speaker, but it's unlikely that the German would ever guess what it really refers to, even if he or she caught the meaning of 'bullshit.' And that's the point: Yiddish started out as German for blasphemers, as a German in which you could deny Christ without getting yourself killed any more often than necessary."

Such complexities to Yiddish turns-of-phrase and wordings, though not always related to religion, are the substance of this book: are part of what Wex means by kvetching. He writes: "If the Stones' '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' had been written in Yiddish, it would have been called '(I Love to Keep Telling You That I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Because Telling You That I'm Not Satisfied Is All That Can Satisfy Me).'"

To illustrate what he's driving at, he gives the example of a joke involving a man complaining just to be a nuisance, and explains:

"He knows?that in a world where indifference is the best that can be expected, the principle of aftselakhis (very literally, 'in order to provoke anger'), the impulse to do things only because someone else doesn't want you to, is sometimes essential to the world's moral balance. And the old man understands how aftselakhis works: alone in the history of the world, Yiddish-speaking Jews long ago broke the satisfaction barrier and figured out how to express contentment by means of complaint: kvetching becomes a way of exercising some small measure of control over an otherwise hostile environment."

This placement of Complaint at the center of the whole language is something that many, if not most, Yiddishists and Yiddish-speakers would disagree with. But for Wex, it is the ideal springboard for a scholarly discussion of the language, and also for his own idiosyncratic sense of humor, which successfully walks the precarious line between witty and grating.

Lots of New Yorkers sprinkle their schmoozing with some Yiddish words; but, if they knew what they were actually saying, perhaps they might think twice. Many of the words that are used casually in English, in the original Yiddish would have been unsuitable in respectable conversation. In his chapter "'Bubkes Means a Lot of Nothing:' Yiddish and Nature," Wex explains how bubkes, a word meaning, literally, "sheep shit" became an acceptable alternate in English for "nothin'." He discusses why it's true that "Like so much of the Yiddish that has found its way into English, bubkes has been downgraded from vulgar to cute; but unless you were discussing barnyard waste, you'd try to avoid the word in polite Yiddish conversation."

All in all, it's a great read for those who know and love Yiddish, and those who just drop the occasional "schmuck" into conversation. Whine on, Wex, whine on you irresistible hunk.