Customer Reviews

Shlepping The Exile

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Author Wex has written a laugh-out-loud funny tale of coming of age with payus in Canada. It's a landmark novel...imagine a Catcher in the Rye for the Yiddish set. Awesome.

Wex's book is daring, funny, outrageous, & irreverent - a sardonic kabbalistic wit, earthy and soaring. THIS BOOK IS FUNNY. Wex is a lamed-vovnik of humor- a hidden saint of Jewish comedy.

This book is a must read for anyone trying to understand jewish identity and self perception in the western world. Its funny, irreverent, poignant, and above all, true.

If you want to know American Jewish angst, read this. And if you just want to laugh a little, it's also not so bad. After all, you work hard all day, it's good for you to relax a little. Stay a while, have something to eat, ... oh, never mind.

Michael, please, please, give us more.

Michael Wex is a gift to a world that takes itself far too seriously. I first read this book many years ago when it was privately offered by the author under the original title, "Shlepping the golus". I was afraid I might injure myself I laughed so hard.

As I wrote in another review ( Born to kvetch, CD version) the man is one of the creative geniuses of our time. I really don't care what he writes or records; I'll buy and enjoy it.

What most people don't know is that behind all of the self deprecating, Rabelaisian wit and hysterical humor is a true scholar. The man is multi-talented and an absolute one of a kind. He has multiple graduate degrees, is a doctor of everything many times over, an expert in philology, medieval literature, popular culture and music, a rock musician, a stand up comedian and a real sweetheart.

This is an autobiography unlike any that I have ever read. My only regret is that I didn't write it.

I read "Born to Kvetch" by the same author right before reading this book, and I think it helped. I'm not Jewish by heritage or upbringing, so a lot of the writing in "Shlepping the Exile" seemed like inside jokes that I didn't "get". However, there were a few passages sprinkled throughout the book that would be funny to most anyone.

Overall, I recommend "Shlepping the Exile" to people who are interested in Jewish culture, grew up around Orthodox/Hassidic Jewish people, or are speakers/students of the Yiddish language.

Shlepping the Exile is a most unusual coming of age novels, and here Wex shows the same virtuosity at weaving incongruous elements into one fabric as he did in Born To Kvetch. Shlepping is written with near manic intensity, but the foundation of Wex's ideas are solid, and the even when he goes off the rails, almost writing in an argot of Yiddish and English, the effect is enchanting and unreal. Most of all, Wex documents an obscure corner of the Diaspora, long gone, Western Canada, where the impossible seems almost possible: Yiddish rubbing elbows against a "frontier" western town.

have to admit that my review might not mean much, but I have very little almost no knowledge of the Yiddish language. So I didn't understand some of the things they were talking about. But I still found my self laughing out loud on some of the parts. It was a good time

Read this book! It is an absolute page-turner, hysterical, but still poignant. You don't need to be Jewish to "get" it, but it does help.

This book has a lot of funny anecdotes, but the inclusion of 4-letter words, i.e. profanity, detracts from it. I would not recommend it to anyone.

This is the type of book that once you pick it you can't put it down. And on top of that, you keep finding yourself reading it over and over again.