BERLIN — Germans who want to learn Yiddish now have an additional resource.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
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.”
Linguistically, “teitschen means to make something German,” Wolff said. “So my work as a translator of Yiddish was to ‘teitschen.'”
Quite a bit of teitschen took place at the book launch in the cozy bookstore, opened 10 years ago.
Berliner Sara Bialas, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland, said she has made sure her sons, now 56 and 54, can speak the language.
“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.”