Michael Wex’s “Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods” is a serious but funny, scholarly but accessible, elegantly written study of Yiddish expressions and their religious and cultural background — now out in paperback.
It is a study of a language that flourished for a thousand years, and that had, he writes, a relationship to the Bible and the Talmud roughly the same as that between the plantations and the blues.
Here is the opening story:
A man boards a Chicago-bound train in Grand Central Station and sits down across from an old man reading a Yiddish newspaper. Half an hour after the train has left the station, the old man puts down his paper and starts to whine . . . “Oy, am I thirsty . . . Oy, am I thirsty. . . Oy, am I thirsty . . .”
The other man is at the end of his rope inside of five minutes. He makes his way to the water cooler . . . fills a cup with water . . . stops in front of the man . . . hands him the cup . . . [and] then sits back down . . .
As he sits back, the old man . . . tilts his forehead toward the ceiling, and [starts repeating], just as loudly as before, “Oy, was I thirsty . . .”
Wex spends a page and a half analyzing this joke, concluding that it epitomizes how Yiddish-speaking Jews, living in difficult times in a world not hospitable to Jews, “figured out how to express contentment by means of complaint:”
[K]vetching becomes a way of exercising some small measure of control over an otherwise hostile environment. If the Stones’s “(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).”
There is a lot of Jewish learning and lore in this book, captured in a word or turn of phrase, on page after page.
But for perhaps the most incisive analysis ever of the serious underpinnings of Jewish humor, see Ruth Wisse’s masterful analysis in her 2003 talk at Melbourne University, which began with this joke:
Four Europeans go hiking together, and get frightfully lost. First they run out of food, then they run out of water.
“I’m so thirsty,” says the Englishman. “I must have tea.”
“I’m so thirsty, says the Frenchman. “I must have wine.”
“I’m so thirsty,” says the German. “I must have beer.”
“I’m so thirsty,” says the Jew. “I must have diabetes.”
Shabbat Shalom.