Jewish Word | Tsuris
Nobody Knows the Tsuris I’ve Seen…
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” laments an African-American spiritual. In Yiddish, this feeling is encapsulated by the word tsuris—variously defined as troubles, worries, aggravation, woes, suffering, grief or heartache. In other words, “tsuris is what nudniks have and are only too willing to share with others,” according to the Everyday Yiddish-English Dictionary. The online Urban Dictionary calls it “a Yiddish phrase for worries, stress or hassle,” giving this example: “Oy, Zelda, I don’t want to be a kvetch, but I’ve got tsuris up to here.”
Tsuris is a Yiddish word, but its root is the Hebrew tzarah, meaning trouble; its relative, litzrot, means to become narrow or to be in a tight place, says Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York, a longtime student of Yiddish...