There Are so Many Yiddish Expressions for Going Bankrupt

I was talking the other day with a friend of mine who grew up in London. Discussing a hi-tech company he has invested in, he said: “If it doesn’t go m’khúleh before it’s bought in an acquisition, I’ll be rich.”

The Hebrew-Yiddish word m’khuleh—in proper Hebrew it’s accented on the last syllable, in Yiddish on the next-to-last—literally means “finished” or “used up.” But it can also mean “bankrupt,” as it did in my friend’s sentence. “Is that a word British Jews use?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t American Jews?” As far as I knew, I told him, they didn’t.

When it comes to Yiddish expressions for defaulting on one’s debts, being m’khuleh is just one of many. Some of the most colorful—and seemingly arcane—are concentrated in a few lines of a single literary work: Sholem Aleichem’s play Yoknehaz, a four-act comedy set in the author’s favorite city of Yehupetz (a fictional version of Kiev) with a cast of Jewish nouveaux riches and stock-market speculators.