JustASC

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of Michael Wex’s book Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won’t Do). Better yet, get the audiobook: not only do you benefit from Wex’s pronunciation of the Yiddish phrases he explicates, but his delivery is eccentric and hilarious.

And smart. When Wex defines a Yiddish term, he also manages to define a civilization. It’s somewhere between archeaology and psychoanalysis, uncovering layers of meaning and nuance to explain Jews to themselves. Here he is on me ken laibm, ober meh lozt nisht– you could live if they let you:

Most Jews are not Buddhists, let alone students of Zen. While virtually any Yiddish-speaker would subscribe to the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – the idea that to live is to suffer — they would differ with him on the final cause of that suffering.

ME’ KEN LAIBM,

as we’ll see later in this book; life in the fullest sense of the word is indeed possible in this sublunary, material world:

ME KEN LAIBM, Ober MEH LOZT NISHT

You could live if they let you

It isn’t life that’s to blame, it’s the living. Just about all of them. There are a lot of them, they’re all out to get you — and worse, as far as they’re concerned, it’s your fault..

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:17 am and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.