The culture of kvetching

Carlin Romano reviews Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods by Michael Wex.

Wex's overarching frame is that "the Bible and the Talmud are to Yiddish what plantations are to the blues." Eschewing century-by-century plodding, he zooms in on the logic of Yiddish, centering on its perfection as a tool of kvetching, or complaint. A typical Wex riff: "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).'"

Consider it parenthetical wit.

"Like so much of Jewish culture," Wex argues, droll and probing at the same time, "kvetching has its roots in the Bible, which devotes a great deal of time to the nonstop grumbling of the Israelites, who find fault with everything under the sun." If Yiddish is, in Wex's phrase, "the national language of nowhere," one explanation is that "Judaism is defined by exile, and exile without complaint is tourism, not deportation." The will to kvetch similarly derives from the peculiar Jewish obligation to perform the 613 mitzvahs, or commandments, which Wex breaks down into 248 "thou shalts" and 365 "thou shalt nots."

It's the latter that truly annoy the so-called chosen people. "The Jews," Wex quips, "have been chosen not to: not to have that BLT; not to sit on Santa's knee; not to catch the Saturday matinee or blend in with the people around them."