Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language And Culture in All Its Moods - Couverture rigide

Wex, Michael

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0312307411 ISBN 13 : 9780312307417

Editeur : St Martins Pr, 2005

Synopsis

Book by Wex Michael

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

A delightful excursion through the Yiddish language, the culture it defines and serves, and the fine art of complaint

Throughout history, Jews around the world have had plenty of reasons to lament. And for a thousand years, they've had the perfect language for it. Rich in color, expressiveness, and complexity, Yiddish has proven incredibly useful and durable. Its wonderful phrases and idioms impeccably reflect the mind-set that has enabled the Jews of Europe to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution . . . and enables them to kvetch about it!

Michael Wex—professor, scholar, translator, novelist, and performer—takes a serious yet unceasingly fun and funny look at this remarkable kvetch-full tongue that has both shaped and has been shaped by those who speak it. Featuring chapters on curse words, food, sex, and even death, he allows his lively wit and scholarship to roam freely from Sholem Aleichem to Chaucer to Elvis.

Perhaps only a khokhem be-layle (a fool, literally a "sage at night," when there's no one around to see) would care to pass up this endearing and enriching treasure trove of linguistics, sociology, history, and folklore—an intriguing appreciation of a unique and enduring language and an equally fascinating culture.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Kvetching is to the Jewish soul what breathing is to the Jewish body. For Jews, kvetching is a way of understanding the world. It is rooted, like so much of Jewish culture, in the Bible where the Israelites grumble endlessly. They complain about their problems, and complain as much about the solutions. They kvetch in Egypt and they kvetch in the desert; no matter what God does, it s wrong. In Born to Kvetch Michael Wex looks into the origins of this surplus of disenchantment, and examines how it helped to create the abundance of striking idioms and curses in Yiddish. Michael Wex takes a serious but funny look at the language that has shaped and was shaped by those who spoke it.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: St Martins Pr
• Date d'édition: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0312307411
• ISBN 13: 9780312307417
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 303