To Farblondje Is Human
I have been taken to task, and rightly so, by a number of Russophones (speakers of Russian, that is) for having suggested that the Yiddish mutcheh, “to bother,” may be derived from the German mühe, which can mean “to make trouble.”
How silly of me! As the writers—among them Robert A. Rothstein, professor of Slavic and Judaic studies and of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (and he should know)—all pointed out, a much more likely candidate is the Russian мучение, pronounced muchinyeh and meaning “torment.”