{"product_id":"born-to-kvetch","title":"Born to Kvetch","description":"For Jews, kvetching is a way of   understanding the world. It is rooted, like so much of Jewish culture, in the   Bible where the Israelites grumble endlessly. They complain about their problems,   and complain as much about the solutions. They kvetch in Egypt and they   kvetch in the desert; no matter what God does, it's wrong. In Yiddish Jews   found the perfect language for their complaints. In kvetching they made   complaining into an art form.Yiddish was the main spoken language for Jews   for over a thousand years and its phrases, idioms and expressions paint a   comprehensive picture of the psychology that helped the Jews of Europe to   survive unrelenting persecution. In Born to Kvetch Michael Wex looks into the   origins of this surplus of disenchantment, and examines how it helped to   create the abundance of striking idioms and curses in Yiddish. Michael Wex   takes a serious but funny look at the language that has shaped and was shaped   by those who spoke it. Featuring chapters on the Yiddish relationship to   food, nature, God, death and even sex, he allows his scholarship and wit to   roam freely from Sholem Aleichem to Chaucer and Elvis Presley. A treasure   trove of linguistics, sociology, history and folklore -- an inspiring   portrait of a people, and a language, in exile.","brand":"Profile Books Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54224349397336,"sku":"9780285638891","price":21.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780285638891.jpg?v=1764774033","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/born-to-kvetch","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}