With two new books in print to follow his 2005 bestseller Born to Kvetch, and enjoying a new popularity with Jewish audiences who delight in his erudite knowledge of Yiddish, Toronto writer Michael Wex can no longer be said to be languishing in obscurity.
In the round fullness of middle age, the Lethbridge-born Yiddishist put himself on the map – and on the New York Times bestsellers list for about ten weeks – with the publication of Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods. The book soon became a bona fide publishing sensation, a fact that becomes doubly astonishing when one considers the witty tome focuses on the intricacies and psychology of a language commonly presumed to be dying. But Yiddish, Wex proclaimed in a recent interview, “is like Paul McCartney or Mark Twain. It might not be quite as dead as people thought it was.”
He had been writing the book for more than a decade without realizing it – collecting tidbits of information about Yiddish the way some people compulsively gather bits of string, not knowing how they may eventually be used. The previous author of Shlepping the Exile, a book that may have sold in the low hundreds, Wex was propelled into the media spotlight as Born to Kvetch sold about 90,000 copies in hardcover, then another 100,000 or so in paperback.
He appeared on NBC’s Today Show just before the Christmas and Chanukah shopping season; the publicity generated sales of 16,000 books in one week. “I made more in that week than I made in a year teaching at Ryerson on contract,” he said.
The book’s popularity apparently took its publisher, St. Martin’s Press, by surprise. Bookstores ran out of the title and eager would-be readers flocked to order it on-line at Amazon.com. For a while, Born to Kvetch was the internet bookseller’s second most requested title. (“What does that mean? You never do find out,” the happy scribe observed. “But it does wonders for your self-esteem and it doesn’t hurt your bank balance, either.”)
Last year, Born to Kvetch earned a Canadian Jewish Book Award as well as an honourable mention from the American Library Association.
Wex recently followed up one publishing triumph with what he hopes will be another: Just Say Nu, Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won’t Do), published by St. Martin’s Press.
Quattro Books of Thornhill has also recently published his novella The Adventures of Micah Mushmelon, Boy Talmudist, in which the protagonist is a brilliant Hassidic yeshiva bocher modeled after Sherlock Holmes.
Even more than the literary detective upon which his character is based, Micah Mushmelon has many rare qualities. For one thing, he graduated from high school at the age of just nine months.
“There’s a Jewish folk legend that every Jewish soul who is about to be born spends his pre-birth time learning Torah from Moshe in heaven,” Wex explained. “Then, just before you’re born, an angel taps you on the mouth and you forget everything. Micah was supposed to have avoided getting hit, so he’s born with all of this knowledge.”
As for Wex, he was born into an observant, Yiddish-speaking home, never dreaming while he was growing up in Lethbridge and later Calgary that he would put the mamaloshen to such good use. He attended high school in Toronto and studied English and medieval studies at the University of Toronto. He’s worked as a writer, translator, medical researcher and Yiddish instructor.
While Born to Kvetch isn’t shy about raising touchy Jewish-Christian interfaith issues and pulls no punches when humourously discussing Gentile persecution of the Jews in centuries past, Wex, an innate satirist, makes no apologies for that. “I’ve had people say, ‘That was very cute, but you shouldn’t say that in front of them,’ he said. “But you’d think that after the Crusades and the Holocaust, they could take a little ribbing now and then.
“These attitudes are so deeply ingrained in the development of the language, you can’t not talk about them,” he continued. “It’s like if you were to write a book about the development of black English, you couldn’t ignore slavery and segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Wex, who lives in mid-town Toronto with his wife and daughter, is currently finishing a young adult novel about the exodus from Egypt for an American publishing house. When writing such a tale, “the Bible determines your plot lines,” he said, but that still leaves plenty of room for creativity because “the Bible goes from A to C, but you’ve got to get through B,” he observed.
Hoping to make himself even more of a household name, he’s also planning a non-fiction volume called Wexology, to include an assortment of essays, stories and other pieces. Meanwhile, he’s still receiving plenty of speaking invitations, which will necessitate numerous trips throughout Canada and the United States this year.
“They still want you for a dollar and a quarter,” he observed wryly. “Before, it was, ‘We don’t have to pay you, you’re a nobody.’ Now, it’s ‘You’re so famous, what do you need the money for?’ “
For more information on The Adventures of Micah Mushmelon, Boy Talmudist, please visit the website www.quattrobooks.ca ♦
© 2008
