Benjamin Blech, Apha Boooks, 2000
A really fun book by the well-known modern-Orthodox author and part of a large, excellent series which really aren’t for idiots at all. There are several Jewish books in this series, including one on Hebrew, the Middle-East and the Talmud. They are all good additions to a library. The book is very attractively presented, yet packed with good material, just like the others in the series. The main text only occupies about half of the page: the rest is taken up with boxes with titles like ‘a gut vort’, ‘oy vey’ and ‘khap a nash’, giving interesting snippets of information. The objective of the book is to give the reader some sense of the context of Yiddish, some basic vocabulary, as well as a great deal of humour, including full Yiddish translations of sections of Hamlet and the Gettysburg Address. Chapters deal with pop culture, life at home, odd-sounding words and even a few exercises to help the reader remember some of them. Great fun.
