“If we were having this lunchtime conversation in Yiddish, I wouldn't use the word.”
Michael Wex cringes slightly at the admission.
The word shmuck?
He nods.
Still, there it is, in the title of his new book: How to be a Mentsh (& Not a Shmuck).
“Oh, it's really rude,” the 55-year-old Toronto author says behind his napkin as he dabs his lip. He draws out the middle vowel of the word “rude” like a kid secretly delighted at the thought of its impropriety.
How rude?
He utters a popular English expletive in a calm voice.
“There are plenty of ways of saying in Yiddish that someone is a jerk or you don't like them,” explains Mr. Wex, who grew up in Lethbridge, Alta., one of two children in an Orthodox family who spoke Yiddish in the home. “That one is extreme.” He shrugs, and continues to eat his omelette.
Language is a living thing, of course, that mutates over the years, adding words and subtracting them from common usage; losing and gaining meanings in translation; nuance and definition as they cross from one culture – and often one era – to the next. In the English language, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the word ‘nice' used to mean ‘stupid' or ‘empty-headed,' Mr. Wex explains at one point in the conversation. “And Thomas Jefferson was mocked for using the word ‘belittled' which was considered slang, and now it's sort of a fancy word,” he says, his eyebrows rising.
An author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller Born to Kvetch , Mr. Wex has made a career out of his esoteric interest in the tonic intricacies and meanings of Yiddish, even though his expertise in language began with Medieval English and grew to include Old Norse. He also speaks French, German, Hebrew and some Italian.
“Expert in language? Pshtt ,” he says at the suggestion in the singsongy inflection common in Yiddish. He shrugs. “ I do all right.”
He has taught Yiddish at the University of Toronto and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But they were only temporary gigs, he explains. “For years I had trouble cobbling together a living,” he says, adding that he drove taxis, wrote plays, gave lectures and did stand-up comedy, among other things. The opportunity to write books came when he was invited to speak at Jewish community events. People wanted to access information about the language in one place. Most other books about it were highly academic.
“It's definitely a niche,” Mr. Wex says of his non-fiction books. (He also writes novels.) “It's what I'm fighting against. I don't want a niche! I want an empire!” he exclaims, arms gesturing wildly.
A genial, quiet-spoken man, he breaks out his humour as he does his erudition. How to Be a Mentsh (& Not a Shmuck) draws on religious texts to explain the characters of the two personality types. “I wanted to look at these notions, how they influenced Jewish culture, and how they might be of general use to everybody. I was playing off the idea that we already know these words in English and what went into making these words and what they mean.”
From contemporary culture he draws two examples. Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York who resigned last year over his involvement in a prostitution ring, is a shmuck. “What struck me is that when police arrested him, he gave his best friend's name. What kind of person would do this?” Mr. Wex asks, saying that the event inspired the book. And a good example of a mentsh would be Alice Munro, who recently withdrew her book from contention for the lucrative Giller Prize. “It's thinking of someone else. For her to win it, someone else would have to lose it. To be able to see that is a great thing.”
