How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

How to Be a Mentsh(and Not a Shmuck)

Michael Wex

In memory of my mother

Contents

A Note on Spelling and Terminology, with a Prologue to Any Further Kvetching

Introduction: Don’t Be a Shmuck

  One What’s a Shmuck?

  Two What’s a Mentsh?

Three Extending the Shmuck

  Four What a Mentsh Does

  Five How to Do It Like a Mentsh

Notes

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Michael Wex

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Note on Spelling and Terminology, with a Prologue to Any Further Kvetching

I

MANY PEOPLE READING this sentence have already looked at the cover of this book and snorted derisively. “Ach, du lieber! I knew it all along. The kvetch-guy, the big expert, the Grand Poobah of Yiddish, should give Dan Quayle a call and ask for lessons in spelling. Mentsh, my eye. Everyone knows that the word is spelled mensch.”

And if we were all speaking German today, it would be. A bagel and schmeer would be spelled Begel und Schmier, lox would be Lachs, and we’d think of all three as wholesome Teutonic delicacies straight from the Vaterland—because a Mensch, one of a certain age, at least, would be a solid citizen whose service in the Wehrmacht or on the home front had helped Germany conquer the world. The kind of mentsh described in this book would probably be a thing of the past; and I, were I lucky enough to be alive, might have written a book—as underground as any bestseller can be—about a language that was born to quetsch.

Let’s not belabor the obvious, then: Yiddish and German are two separate and very different languages that use different alphabets and reflect wholly different ways of thinking. If you’re worried about what mentsh is really supposed to look like, imagine a cover that reads:

How to Be aand Not a

The authentic Yiddish mentsh has no truck with any ABCs. The best we can try to do is come up with a substitute as close to the original in sound and meaning as possible. Unlike the German Mensch, the Yiddish mentsh has a definite t-sound between the n and the sh; unlike the German, it isn’t German, though it could certainly be described as Germanic. The Yiddish mentsh sounds no more like Mensch than the German ist sounds like the English is. Where is and ist mean the same thing, though, we’ll see over the course of this book that the Yiddish mentsh differs from Mensch even more in meaning than in spelling or pronunciation.

The Latin-alphabet mentsh is also an internationalism, the transliteration sanctioned by YIVO, the Académie Française of the Yiddish-speaking world, for use in all languages that employ the Latin alphabet. To use Mensch in its stead is to deny Yiddish-speakers the right to ensure that their language is represented with a maximum of accuracy in other languages. Mentsh was even used instead of Mensch in Yiddish transliterated in Germany before World War II, and people who can get their heads around the idea that Beijing renders the name of the Chinese capital more accurately than Peking shouldn’t have any problem with mentsh.

The second Yiddish word in the title presents no such trouble; it isn’t really German at all and has nothing to with the German Schmuck, which means “jewelry.” While Yiddishists might have preferred to see shmuk instead of shmuck, I felt in this instance that the latter spelling came closer to satisfying everybody—my favorite way of satisfying nobody (see Chapter 2)—especially because shmuck is used a bit differently in this book from the way it is used in Yiddish. Although mentsh can be used of both men and women in Yiddish, the Yiddish shmuck applies only to males. On the basis of the same principle that allows etiquette, the French for “label” or “price tag,” to mean nothing but “good manners” in English, I have extended the reach of shmuck in English to cover people of either sex who don’t know how to behave. One need only compare the French con—a “c-word” that also means jerk of either sex—to see the same principle at work on the other side of the anatomical divide.

In the same spirit, shmek, the correct Yiddish plural of shmuck, is used interchangeably with shmucks, a highly anglicized version of the same idea.

II

SOME TERMS THAT come up fairly often in the book might not be immediately familiar to people who have not attended a Jewish day school. The Talmud, for instance, consists of two sections. The earlier one, completed around 200 C.E., is called the Mishna. The Mishna was compiled in Hebrew and consists, for the most part, of attempts to organize and interpret the practical applications of the Bible’s commandments. The part known as either the Gemara or the Talmud (the latter name has come to be used for the whole collection) was finished about three hundred years after the Mishna. It is mostly in Aramaic and consists, loosely speaking, of commentary on the Mishna. There are two different Talmuds, compiled in two different places and containing much divergent material. These are commonly known as the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Historically, the Babylonian has been the more important. In the few citations to the Jerusalem Talmud in this text, the word Yerushalmi precedes the name of the tractate from which the quotation has been drawn.

The Talmud became essential to Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. The destruction of the Temple and the accompanying loss of Jewish political autonomy mark the beginning of Judaism as we know it, a religion characterized by exile and dislocation. Until the year 70, Jewish practice revolved