why yiddish makes me feel better

It's been awhile. I could write all the usual crap about 'happy new year', 'happy new decade', 'happy 2010' and 'happy year of the tiger' but really ... it's been said already. So, let's just skip the formalities and assume we all wish one another a brilliant, fantastic, amazing and super duper twelve months.

With that out of the way, I can now get to the point of my post. I have been fighting a mystery ailment for almost a month now, and it has left me exhausted and, to be honest, broke. (Ah, the joys of being sick in America!) I've been poked, prodded and x-rayed to no result. I'm on a second round of antibiotics ($125 down the drain) and completely not thrilled with the prospect of swallowing yet another round of horse sized pills. And let's not mention the depression over being sick and chronically fatigued 24/7. I can't get anything accomplished these days, and anything I do manage to get done is half assed and completely not up to par.

That said, there has been an upside. I have been spending copious amounts of time reading and browsing online, and I have re-discovered the joys of Yiddish. Yes, Yiddish. It's not a language I've heard spoken very much, but I must admit -- nothing expresses pain or anguish quite the way Yiddish does. Every now and then my father pops out the random Yiddish phrase, and it always makes me laugh. Was there ever a more heartfelt and comical language?

For example, I have become fond of moaning 'Oy vey iz mir!' and somehow it makes me feel a little better than simply saying 'woe is me.' Or, at times, a simple 'oy!' will suffice. There is some sort of hidden Yiddish gene in me that makes me feel better letting loose with an emphatic 'oy vey!'. Maybe it's one of those 'You need to be (half) Semitic to understand' kinds of things, I don't know ... but seriously folks, it's better than therapy. Try hollering 'OY VEY' and you'll see what I mean. I don't even think you need the Eastern European gene to appreciate it.

This love of Yiddish has taken me to many interesting places, including this video of the Beatles sung in Yiddish:



Oh, how it makes me laugh.

Which takes me to this:




Chills. Literally.

After browsing online, I realize I use way more Yiddish words in my daily life than I initially realized. Chutzpah, glitch, klutz, nosh, mishugena, plotz, schlep, putz (don't repeat that one) ... and the list goes on. Even my boyfriend has picked up my habit of stuttering out the occassional Yinglish word. I think both of our vocabularies are all the more enriched because of this. I must admit it makes me laugh when my Catholic boyfriend mutters "oy vey" instead of "oh crap".

With that said, I'll end this post with one of my favorite Yiddish phrases of all time:

Heng dikh oyf a tsikershtrikl vestu hobn a zisn toyt.

I'll let you google what it means. It's brilliant and I promise you will find a use for it in your daily life.

And now I'm going to go back to moaning "Oy vey!" and telling myself that old saying, "This too shall pass ..." I can only hope that this illness will go away sooner rather than later. However, I hope my newfound love of Yiddish stays with me for a long time.