Yiddish Wisdom: Just a Forshpayz

As you may have noticed, many authors place a special quotation on the page before the first chapter of their novel. For example, Harper Lee opened To Kill a Mockingbird with the following quote from Charles Lamb: “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.” Ernest Hemingway opened The Sun Also Rises with this quote from Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.”

I, too, am one of those open-with-a-quote authors. Sometimes the one I pick is a witty take on the theme of the novel, such as this one from Dorothy Parker at the beginning of Bad Trust:

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

Other times, the quote can be more serious, such as this one from Ecclesiastes at the beginning of The Flinch Factor:

“Vanity of Vanities,” says the Preacher. “All is Vanity.”

Well, as I was trying to figure out the appropriate opening quote for my newest novel, The Gourmet Club, I came across a book of Yiddish adages and proverbs, the wisest and most profound of which is also the title of that book–and the perfect opening quote for my novel.

Indeed, my publisher even included that quote in the first paragraph of the dust jacket syllabus, which reads:

Four young lawyers meet in the fall of 1981 as new associates at Chicago’s prestigious Abbott & Windsor. They are ambitious twenty-somethings, each having graduated with honors from a top law school, each with big plans for the future, and each unaware that—to quote a Yiddish proverb—“Man plans, and God laughs.”

I found two more Yiddish proverbs in the Man Plans, God Laughs collection that perfectly captured the theme of a particular section of my novel:

• “If it doesn’t get better, depend on it, it will get worse.”
• “Hoping and waiting makes fools out of clever people.”

As I paged through that collection, chuckling at some of those proverbs and nodding at the wisdom of others, I started hearing another voice in my head–the voice of Tevye. For many of us, we first heard that voice in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevye is the pious Jewish dairyman living in a small village in Russia and the patriarch of a family including several troublesome daughters

What I didn’t know back when I first saw that musical is that Tevye and his family are the creations of that esteemed Yiddish author Sholem Alecheim, whose Tevye the Dairyman stories were originally published in Yiddish toward the end of the 19th century. Much like Sancho Panza, the fictional sidekick of Don Quixote, whose witty and astute observations–such as “There’s a remedy for everything except death” and “They’ll come for wool and go back shorn”–remain alive more than four centuries after the novel was published, Tevye’s pearls of wisdom, uttered at key moments in the stories, charm and delight the reader. Here are just a few:

• “There’s an old saying, you know, that if you scratch a secret, you’ll find a thief.”
• “I only wanted to be good—the trouble is that being good gets you nowhere.”
• “Well, a matchmaker, as you know, can talk a wall into marrying a hole in the ground.”
• “Do you know what my grandmother used to say? What a shame it is we have mouths, because if we didn’t we’d never go hungry.”

But going back to the book that gave me the opening quote for The Gourmet Club, I can assure you that there are plenty of Yiddish proverbs in that collection that will delight you. Some are witty, others are profound. As the title of this piece states, I’m giving you “just a forshpayz.” That word is Yiddish for “appetizer.” And the usage example given by the Jewish English Lexicon website is the perfect fit here: “I don’t want to want to tell the whole story, but I’ll give you a little forshpayz, as my husband used to say.”