Customer Reviews

If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Say It In Yiddish

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is arguably the most sloppily produced book I ever read:
The number of misspelled Yiddish words is enormous; the most frequenly recurring one is zid in place of zikh, or stub for shtub, cheyli for kheylik (or cheylik), toches-lecher for toches-lecker, etc. The gender of words is often wrong (di for der or vice versa).
The etymology of words is often inaccurate. The most blatant example:
Bobe-mayse is not derived from a story your grandmother told you, and you are free to use the word in her presence. It comes from a 16-th century translation into Yiddish by Elja Levita of the Italian romance "Bovo d'Antona" published under the name of "Bobe-bukh".
I am tempted to send the book back to Amazon for a $ 10 refund, even if I have to pay for return shipmen!

I should have considered that the cover indicates "curses". There are plenty of mean-spirited curses, which frankly scared me; these are clearly idiomatic within Yiddish language, but were not what I expected. I should have purchased a Yiddish dictionary or thesaurus for my interest level. The book contains much more, and the curse section (i.e., a hex or spell vs. calling people nasty names when they take your parking spot) is not primary, and there are plenty of OTHER areas of the book which are FUN and INTERESTING. It's a personal choice, obviously, so a potential reader shouldn't disregard the book based on MY superstitious nature alone! I guess I just wanted to understand the terms I've heard TO SWEAR for my own venting agenda.

Very funny, especially if you have a non-Yiddish speaker read it out loud.
I bought two copies as gifts. If you grew up hearing Yiddish, now you have the translations of what the Bubbe's were saying.