Description
Leo Rosten left a great legacy of Jewish culture with his classic informal lexicon of Yiddish. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that most North American Jewish homes possessed a copy, or that most Jewish boys/girls of Bar/Bat Mitzvah age received it as a gift. More than that, it became an indispensable tool for writers, journalists, politicians, and the like. In it, Rosten, wedding scholarship and humor, defined (by synonym, anecdote, and joke) the words that have made it into common parlance (like chutzpah, schlep, and schmooze) as well as a choice collection of less integrated but equally rich vocabulary such as schmatte, chozzerai, and hundreds more. He redefined the term “dictionary” to reflect the heart and soul of a people through their language, illuminating each entry with marvelous stories and epigrams from folklore and the Talmud, from Bible to beatnik and beyond. With his help, anyone can pronounce, and master the nuances of, words that convey everything from compassion to skepticism.
With the help of Yiddish scholar Larry Bush, Leo Rosten’s daughters, Maddy and Peggy, have resurrected their father’s classic. Mr. Bush has re-edited the original, updated it for new generations, added literally hundreds of new entries, and a cross-referenced English-to-Yiddish index, which the original was sorely lacking, and in so doing made the old version new again.
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