Contributed Photo

Michael Wex.

Michael Wex, How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck)
7 p.m. Nov. 10. Jewish Community Center, 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge. Free. 203-387-2522, jccnh.org.

Avoiding a klutzy academic spiel or schmaltzy little pearls of wisdom that make you want to punch him in the schnozz, Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods and, most recently, How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck): Secrets of the Good Life from the Most Unpopular People on Earth, conveys a mother-lode of fascinating Yiddish facts and Jewish cultural wisdom to his readers. We schmoozed with Wex over the phone before his reading at the Jewish Community Center on Tuesday.

Advocate: What do I have to do to be a mentsh and not a shmuck?
Michael Wex: It’s pretty much a matter of considering other people. The classic formulation is one found in the Talmud, from a rabbi named Hillel: “If there’s something you hate when somebody else does it to you, don’t do it to other people.” Why did Hillel express this negatively? Why didn’t he just say, “Treat others the way you want them to treat you,” like Jesus did? The Jewish tradition has a relentlessly realistic view of human character. There’s no idealizing of it, no, “If we all try really hard, we’re all going to turn into Eagle Scouts.” That all ties in with this idea of being a mentsh. Working with what you hate allows you to respect the other person’s preferences.
 
A: I’ve never heard “mentsh” or “shmuck” applied to women.
MW: You can call a woman a “mentsh” in Yiddish, that’s not a problem. “Shmuck,” no, because of the literal meaning of the word; it’s a vulgar term for “penis” — the same way you can’t call a woman a “prick” in English. In Yiddish, in general, “mentsh” is used the way “man” used to be used in English to mean “human.”

A: Is a “mentsh” a pacifist?
MW: Pacifism is not a big Jewish virtue. Suffering is fine, but pacifism is like, you know, “This is too much.”

A: So if he got beat up on the street, a mentsh would probably fight back?
MW: A mentsh would know when to fight back. The basic thing about a mentsh is that he knows the right thing to do at the right time, and does it. The right thing to do in one circumstance may not be the right thing to do in another.

A: In a recent interview, you said there were two kinds of shmucks — a Bernie Madoff, who tried to separate people from their money dishonestly, and the people who believed they could get something for nothing. So “shmuck” can mean both “jerk” and “fool”?
MW: A shmuck is, say, a con man, but a shmuck is also the con man’s victim. Madoff is a thief, he’s totally crooked - so he's a shmuck. But [so are] the people who just thought, “Wow, this is great, I’m going to get 10 percent a month for the rest of my life for doing nothing” when anybody could have told you that this can’t be kosher. Once you allow your greed to blind you to this kind of thing, you too become a shmuck.

There’s also the idea of a sap, a dupe, a stupid person. You can also say, “I’m standing there like a shmuck in my tuxedo and the bride doesn’t show up.” It’s the same way you can use a word like “jerk,” I guess, to mean yourself or others. But the idea is that it’s a continuum. Nobody is 100 percent mentsh, nor can anybody be 100 percent shmuck. If there were so many shmucks and so many mentshen, there wouldn’t be much point to writing a book — if you’re already a mentsh, you don’t need the book, and if you’re a shmuck, you’re not going to read it.

A: You’ve called Yiddish “the language that turned complaining into an art form.” Can you explain?
MW: “Turning complaining into an art form” is a bit of a joke. But one of the things about traditional Jewish life, particularly in Yiddish-speaking areas, is that people were very superstitious. Good news could be messed up. Say you’re out on a picnic and you say, “Oh, the sky is blue, it’s not raining,” and everybody goes, “Shut up!” That happens whether you’re Jewish or not.
 
A: Right. “Don’t jinx it!”
MW: Yiddish has a very high jinx-consciousness. You show approbation in a much subtler way, which is often by not saying anything. If you’re not complaining, you must be happy. People from outside that culture don’t realize that. So you know, “I went and he complained and complained and complained, and I did what he wanted, and what he said was — nothing.” Nothing is good.

A: How important is Yiddish to being Jewish?
MW: There have always been large parts of the Jewish community that don’t speak Yiddish, because they just don’t come from the areas where Yiddish is spoken. But I think for the way that we — that is, people in the West — think of Judaism, we basically think of Ashkenazic culture. And Yiddish is at the root of a great deal of that. You can see ways of thinking built into the language, and I worry that by losing the language, the way of thinking will persist for one or two more generations, but eventually it’s going to be gone. A lot of these sort of popular clichés about Jewish people — they’re quick, they’re clever, if there are two sides to a coin they can see the third side — a lot of that comes from Yiddish.

A: What was the impetus for writing your books? Who do you see as their main audience?
MW: The books are written for everybody; I think it has a great deal to offer everybody. Canada is a bilingual country, and minority languages have become more of an important issue. Maybe because I’m a Canadian, I can see more easily why somebody would be more interested in a language that’s not necessarily theirs.

A: Do you hear Yiddish words wrongly used?
MW: In Yiddish, “shmooze” is a good thing. It means an informal conversation. So: “I was schmoozing with Barack Obama” — we were speaking to each other as equals. In English, it has only the sense of sucking up to somebody in order to get something, whereas the Yiddish meaning is absolutely the opposite.

A: So “schmoozing” is just having an informal chat, not just with a famous person, with anybody.
MW: Yes, with anybody! My wife has just reminded me that “chutzpah” is entirely negative in Yiddish. In English, it’s this idea of admirable nerve in the face of opposition. In Yiddish, it just means really, really bad behavior. “Chutzpah” in Yiddish is: a man dies, and you start coming on to his widow at the funeral. It’s so bad, it makes you mad.

A: Would you say someone terrible like Hitler or Stalin was a “shmuck,” or is that too soft?
MW: No, that goes well beyond being a shmuck. A shmuck’s not necessarily evil — they’re thoughtless and inconsiderate and stupid, and this can lead to evil. But it’s not about good versus evil in that sense. You’d usually say something like, “Hitler yamakh shemo,” meaning, “May his name be blotted out,” which is about the worst thing you can say about anybody in Yiddish.

A: Would you say, modesty aside, that you’re a mentsh?
MW: It’s one of those no-win questions. If I say I’m a shmuck, I’m a shmuck; if I say I’m a mentsh I’m also a shmuck, because what kind of person goes around saying, ‘Oh, I’m a warm, wonderful, fantastic person’? But you know. I do my best. One of the reasons I wrote the book was you can always find a justification for your own behavior, no matter how bad it is. Being a mentsh means you cut people the same slack you cut for yourself. “I cut that guy off in traffic, because I’m a surgeon and I was on my way to the hospital to perform an operation.” The guy who got cut off doesn’t have any idea of that; you’re just some shmuck who cut him off. The ideas of being a mentsh is the next time some shmuck cuts you off, before you start screaming or honking, think, “Maybe he has just as good an excuse for doing this as I would if I did it.” And that might save people a great deal of aggravation.

A: Do you plan to continue writing along these lines, or have you thought about writing on a different topic?
MW: I’m working on a novel right now, which is due in to the publisher next month. The main characters are Jewish, but otherwise it’s not really about any of this stuff. I guess some of them are mentshen and some of them are shmucks.