(Not quite a) Spoiler warning: This article includes a quote from the film "Life of Chuck." Although there are no plot details or significant revelations here, this caution is for those who wish to enter the movie without any prior information (a legitimate and even recommended approach by the writer).
The film "Life of Chuck," directed by Mike Flanagan, recently premiered in Israel, and since then, it has stirred a range of emotions in those who watched it, just as it has worldwide.
Based on Stephen King's 2020 short novella, the film didn’t become a box office hit, but it seems that everyone who watched it couldn't stop thinking about it days later. Many critics in the United States have praised the film for its sensitivity, originality, and unconventional optimism. In Israel, however, the film might become a topic of discussion for an entirely different reason.
In one of the film's more touching scenes, there is a surprising dialogue between a grandmother and her 10-year-old grandson (Benjamin Pejcek). When Pejcek's character asks his grandmother how she was in high school, she responds, "I was a 'Kusit'."
This is especially surprising because she uses the explicit word in Hebrew, and then immediately demands that he not tell his Zayde (grandfather), because "he’s old school about these things."
To understand the absurdity of the situation, one must delve a bit into the beauty of linguistic analysis.
The word used – "Kusit" – is clearly understood by any Israeli viewer, but to an American audience, it would sound like another Yiddish slang word used throughout the film, like "Vaitzik," "Baba," or "Zayde."
But any Israeli knows exactly what it means: it’s a half-vulgar Hebrew word that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and became, by the 1990s, a somewhat flattering yet degrading term used to refer to a particularly attractive woman.
How far is this word from Yiddish? Originally, it’s derived from a more vulgar word referring to the female genitalia, a word that actually comes from Arabic.
If someone were to say this word to their grandmother in Israel, they’d probably get slapped. In fact, it’s an ugly, objectifying, and crude word that I would never choose to use in a journalistic article. But in this film, which is so rare in its sensitivity, the American-Jewish grandmother, in a tender and innocent dialogue with her grandson, chooses to use it as an intimate joke.
It’s important to note that the grandmother's use of this term to describe her high school years, likely in the 1950s, is anachronistic and culturally mismatched. The term didn’t exist during her youth, and, more importantly, it wasn’t adopted in Jewish-American slang, which historically relied more on Yiddish expressions.
In fact, the fact that the grandmother in the story is referred to as "Baba" (the Yiddish word for grandmother) further emphasizes the linguistic mismatch between Yiddish and modern Israeli Hebrew slang in this context.
So, how did she come up with it?
The answer can be found with the source, the great American author Stephen King, who published the original story as part of a novella collection titled "If It Bleeds" in 2020.
Many details changed from the book to the film, and a significant monologue by the grandfather (Mark Hamill, in probably his biggest role since Luke Skywalker) was added – but in this case, the dialogue in King’s book is exactly the same as in the film. There, too, the grandmother Sarah describes herself as "Kusit." In reading, by the way, it’s even stranger than when watching.
The truth must be told: King has never been obsessed with cultural accuracy. In fact, over the years, he has received quite a bit of criticism for simplistic depictions of minorities.
Even when it comes to language, he tends to choose words based on sound and feeling, not socio-linguistic correctness. He writes intuitively, connected to contemporary slang, gets excited about neologisms and words that just sound good to him.
So, perhaps he heard this word from an Israeli. Maybe he thought it was an exotic Yiddish word. Or maybe he felt it worked as a sweet absurdity for a cheeky grandmother, without realizing the cultural baggage the word carries in a small country in the Middle East.
It’s likely that he simply encountered the word, liked the meaning ("attractive woman"), and put it into the character, without checking too much when or where it actually existed, or whether it had ever crossed the ocean.
Long-time Stephen King readers know that King often leaves it up to the audience to figure out when or where the story takes place. In this case, he left quite a few "breadcrumbs."
If you connect the dots, you understand that the story’s hero was born around 1980, and the conversation took place around 1990. No grandmother in Israel would have said "Kusit" in those years, let alone grandmothers in the suburbs of New England, as cool as they may be.
In any case, Flanagan’s decision to keep this word in the script and even pronounce it exactly as it’s written is one of the most remarkable examples of how language, identity, and culture can slip into a Hollywood film in a careless way without anyone noticing. No one, except for Israelis sitting in the theater, will smile to themselves at that moment.