Sometime in the early 1970s, I found myself in the unenviable position of being in New York City with no place to live. For a time, I lived, or, better said, crashed, with a number of people in a variety of scenarios, living out of a suitcase.

One brief stay was as the guest of four women, at least one of whom was clearly not a New Yorker. One evening, this girl was busy finishing her shower in the bathroom and overheard the Yiddish expression, Oy Vey iz mir, I’m chalishing (oh my, I’m fainting). Unfamiliar to her, we attempted to teach her how to say it. Her interpretation went something like: Ova schmear, allava hallashing. I wondered whether an ova schmear was some medical procedure unfamiliar to me. From the living room, we urged her to repeat it over and over. On each telling, she popped her head out of the bathroom and proudly volunteered, “Ova schmear, allava hallashing.”

As she retreated, we laughed hysterically and secretly, never revealing how severely crippled her mispronunciation was, perhaps the worst bastardization of Yiddish I have ever heard. The scene was hilarious and reminiscent of a sophomoric prank in Wayne’s World where Mike Myers and Dana Carvey trick their mother to repeatedly announce a phone call from a mythical “Mr. Sphincter.”

Some Yiddish is a rite of passage in New York City. Certainly a working knowledge of basic words and phrases is a necessity. The lack of familiarity is a dead giveaway that an individual is an out-of-towner. If you doubt how much Yiddish is part of the fabric of the city, note the sign on the Williamsburg Bridge which proclaims, Leaving Brooklyn, Oy Vey!, below which one finds the names of the Borough President, Marty Markowitz, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, both Jewish. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has the world’s largest enclave of Satmar Hasidic Jews, estimated at 60,000 of the world’s 150,000.
The sign leaves no doubt of where you are. You should know that iz mir bears no connection to a schmear, which is a thin coating of cream cheese on a bagel, and that ova are eggs. And if you don’t, we New Yorkers can only say in despair, Oy Vey!

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