Yiddish
Yiddish has a name for every fool, chiseler, and know-it-all you ever met--and some you never met! In this loving and hilarious tribute to the greatest inside language of them all, Martin Marcus defines the Yiddish words that have added a whole new dimension to modern English--words that convey a whole philosophy of life--humorous, resigned, fatalistic--in half a sentence. You'll find them here, complete with phonetic pronounciation--the words for the good guys (shay-feh-lehs) and the bad guys (shmuh-geh-gees), the major catastrophes and minor irritations of life.
As the author puts it, "This book is for Gentiles and Jews both . . . . We are all in the same lifeboat. Yiddish humor is lifeboat humor," and its carrier is the Yiddish language, invented by people in need of a verbal escape when none other was available." Now, with this small volume that answers a large need, you can help yourself to a liberal portion of this Universal Defense Mechanism of the Sinking Sixties.
Yiddish for Yankees was first published in the U.S. in 1968 by J.B. Lippincott & Company. Briefly a national best seller, the book pre-dated Rosten's Joys of Yiddish by several months. Intended as a humorous read with just enough scholarship to make it a useful reference work for both language mavins and the general public, the success of the book led to the 1971 follow-up Power of Yiddish Thinking, published by Doubleday.
With the original hardback edition long out of print, Yiddish for Yankees has nevertheless endured in library stacks and on home bookshelves around the country. Interest has been strong on the Internet in language-oriented and Jewish websites and discussion boards.