The Joys of Yiddish

by Leo Rosten, McGraw-Hill, $10.00. The jokes, wisecracks, folklore, and historical oddments tucked in among the definitions would justify a stranger project than this Yiddish-English dictionary, which the world may not need quite as desperately as Mr. Rosten thinks. There is, incidentally, no provision for looking up the Yiddish equivalent of an English word, which suggests that linguistic instruction is not really what the author has in mind.