Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods

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Title: Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods
Author: Michael Wex
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Year: 2005
319 pages

Audiobook: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Kvetch-CD-Yid

dish-Language/dp/0061131229 . Be aware that the audiobook reader sounded like a cross between Jerry Lewis and Stephen Hawking--very strange intonation.

I read this by alternating between the book and the audiobook so that In could see orthography and hear pronunciation. Ideally I'd have done these simultaneously, but in fact I alternated media.

I enjoyed about the first 6 chapters, which included topics such as the titular kvetching. Though they included a heavy dose of diachronic linguistics, the balance of language, anecdote, and culture worked well. The latter half of the book took some slogging, perhaps because it became a vocabulary lesson (which, don't get me wrong, I enjoy) without sufficient leavening humor. I could appreciate the scholarship, but it was no longer very fun. Oddly, the sections on relationships and sexual terminology were relentlessly heterosexual. As a child who heard neo-Yiddish terms like faygeleh, which has a fun etymology (<vogel) and is used a lot in conversation, I wondered: How does one navigate this in conversation? By same means as for schwartze? Sadly, Wex does not illuminate this fairly ubiquitous term, or any others related to homosexuality. .וואָס אַ שאָד