Shlepping the Exile

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

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.

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.

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.

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.