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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/18979/full/18979/leo-rosten-s-yiddish-makes-german-debut/ <br /><br /> <b>Leo Rosten’s ‘Yiddish’ makes German debut</b> <br /> Friday, December 13, 2002 | by <p>TOBY AXELROD </p> <br /><br /><p>BERLIN—Germans who want to learn Yiddish now have an additional resource.<br /><br /> Leo Rosten's "The Joys of Yiddish" is hitting bookstands in Germany, 35 years after it first appeared in English and five years after the author's death.<br /><br /> And though the book's title in German—"Yiddish. A Small Encyclopedia"—does not include the word "joy," its recent launch here included both humor and sadness—emotions that many agreed are essential to the appreciation of the mamaloshen, or mother tongue.<br /><br /> "There is no richer language in all the world," said Alexander Brenner, head of the Jewish community of Berlin and a native speaker of Yiddish. He related several flavorful Yiddish curses during the launch last month at the Jewish bookstore Literaturhandlung.<br /><br /> "You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground, and you should be like a light, hanging during the day and burning at night," were among the pronouncements that drew appreciative laughter from the small crowd.<br /><br /> The closest linguistic kin to Yiddish is Middle High German, said Lutz Wolff, who worked for 18 months on the translation of Rosten's book.<br /><br /> Wolff said his favorite word in the 638-page book is nebisch. And he said the most moving word was the verb teitschen, which means "to explain."<br /><br /> Linguistically, "teitschen means to make something German," Wolff said. "So my work as a translator of Yiddish was to 'teitschen.'"<br /><br /> Quite a bit of teitschen took place at the book launch in the cozy bookstore, opened 10 years ago.<br /><br /> Berliner Sara Bialas, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland, said she has made sure her sons, now 56 and 54, can speak the language.<br /><br /> "I will die with the feeling that I have done something," Bialas said. "But when I see the Yiddish books in the library of the Jewish community, I don't want to die. There is so much to read.''</p> <p> </p>

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