Oyneg Shabes Kveln

This is a story which spans two New York summers. If you’ve ever spent a summer in New York, you know that the humidity is inescapable and tends to color your perceptions. 

 

In the summer of 2019 I was at the YIVO summer program where I took a literature class with Miriam Trinh. There we read a poem by Celia Dropkin which had the title Du kvelst, ikh kvel or You Swell, I Swell. In it, a woman addresses her lover. Nail my hands and feet to a cross, she says, consume the whole of me. 

 

The poem is full of startlingly erotic imagery and it got me thinking about the Yiddish verb kveln and its American afterlife. 

 

Kvelling has become the quintessential Yinglish verb, signifying everything cozy and right within the American Jewish habitus. 

 

But when I looked up kveln in the dictionary, I found that the verb contains two distinctly antithetical connotations. The first relates to swelling or gushing, either literally or figuratively. The second means to torture or suffer. Kveln (to kvell) is in fact a contronym, a word which comprises two opposite meanings (other examples in English being cleave and sanction.) This is because Middle High German, the precursor language to Yiddish, contained two distinct, differently spelled words, one relating to water and swelling, the other related to torture and pain. By a linguistic quirk, these two different words ultimately merged into the Yiddish homonym, kveln. 

 

In Yiddish, both meanings of kveln are utterly commonplace, and can be found everywhere. But in English, the second, more uncomfortable kvel is entirely absent. The fact that there’s a popular Jewish parenting site called Kveller (with no asterisk to disambiguate this kvell from its evil twin) speaks for itself.

 

In February 2020, Kveller dedicated a whole article to the art of kvelling. 

“Kvelling is not boasting or bragging; it’s quieter. It’s the pride you feel when you witness your older child patiently helping the younger one finish a puzzle. It’s also the satisfaction you feel because it means they might have been listening to you after all.” But kvelling isn’t limited to your own kids. Kvelling can be communal: seeing a bat mitzvah girl at the bima or a Jewish celebrity being excellent in the public eye. A good kvell is low key because it avoids attracting the attention of the evil eye (ayin-hore.)”

 

Now, let’s go back to Celia Dropkin’s Du kvelst, ikh kvel

 

Du kvelst, ikh kvel.
Es kvelt in undz der got,
Vos makht fun alts a tel,
Vos veyst nisht fun farbot.

(You swell, I swell
Within us swells a god
Which makes of everything a ruin
And knows nothing of forbidden.)

 

The narrator of the poem asks her lover to nail her to a cross, to consume her, to suck every drop from her and walk away. 

I wrote about this dimension of adult kveling in my Valentine’s Day Golden City column this year

In American-Jewish English, kvell has been shrunken down in connotation, reduced to taking pride in one’s children or its association with motherhood more generally. But as we see, Dropkin infuses kvel with a much more primal vulnerability, one in which kvel can mean an uncontrollable gushing, of desire, of emotion, of the stickiness of human procreation. Kveln also carries this paradoxical second meaning, to torment or torture, introducing a masochistic question to the verse.

  

How then to translate Dropkin’s ‘kvel’? For my own translation, I liked the mamoshesdik (substantial) quality of ‘swell.’ But even ‘swell’ loses the erotic dampness of kveln’s connotations of ‘gushiness.’ I was sad but not surprised when I saw one male translator had gone with ‘overjoyed’ for Dropkin’s ‘kvel’. With all due respect, not every Yiddish poem must be rendered safe for the front of the family fridge.

 

Which brings me to the Summer of 2020. Whether you were listening to the radio, or right wing talk shows, everyone was suddenly talking about gushiness. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion had dropped their single called WAP. The “radio-friendly” edit  of the song changed the words to “Wet and Gushy,” perhaps the only cleaned up single version to end up that much filthier than the original.

 

The nation’s (mostly male) pearl-clutchers were predictably alarmed at two women insisting on their own pleasure, and profiting from it, to boot. 

 

Dropkin, too, had her share of pearl-clutchers. Reviewing Dropkin’s sole published collection of poetry in 1935, the most important literary critic of the day, the writer now known as Samuel Charney dismissed Dropkin’s work as insufficiently political: “it irks me that [Dropkin] included in her books things that were important only for her, and not for the reader.” Even Charney, a sensitive reader who himself pioneered a Yiddish literary theory which centered female readers, even he could not imagine the female readers who would find female pleasure “important.” 

 

Dropkin’s vision of the feminine kvel was, to say the least, ahead of its time, unlimited as it was by male, or American, ideas of propriety, literary or otherwise. Her poetry imagined a female subject whose kvel was not passive, not centered on the achievements of her family, or her community. Dropkin’s kvel was a messy flood of feeling which could not be contained by either pleasure or pain, one which, you might say, demanded a bucket and a mop. If, as Kveller tells us, anyone can (and should) master the art of kvelling, Celia Dropkin challenges us to expand the boundaries of the word itself. I would suggest that this must include taking Yiddish seriously as a Jewish language, making sure students in Jewish schools have the resources to study it if they want to, and ultimately, to reclaim the mess and contradictions of Jewish-American life which defy translation.