Leo Rosten Quotes

Yiddish is the Robin Hood of languages. It steals from the linguistically rich to give to the fledgling poor. It shows not the slightest hesitation in taking in house-guests — to whom it gives free room and board regardless of genealogy, faith, or exoticism. A memorable remark by a journalist, Charles Rappaport, runs: “I speak ten languages — all of them in Yiddish.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

A Yiddish expression, “Er ligt in der erd un bakt bagel,” is readily translated as “He lies in the ground and bakes bagels.” But what does that mean? “He’s not doing so well, poor chap.

SCENE: Classroom, Lower East Side, 1926. Teacher: “Who can tell us where the Romanian border is?” Student: “In the park with my aunt, and my mother doesn’t trust him!

"I came to believe it not true that "the
coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man
only one." I think it is the other way around:
It is the brave who die a thousand deaths.
For it is imagination, and not just conscience,
which doth make cowards of us all. Those
who do not know fear are not truly brave.
"

Writing after the Holocaust had destroyed a third of the world’s Jews, Yiddish poet Kadia Molodowsky (1894–1975) addressed the “Chosen People” doctrine most poignantly: “O God of Mercy,” she wrote, “For the time being / Choose another people.

A Bulgarian proverb goes: “When you baptize a Jew, hold him underwater for five minutes.

Medieval rabbis dubbed Germany Ashkenaz, after a passage in Jeremiah (51:27), and decided that after the Flood, one of Noah’s great-grandsons, named Ashkenaz, had settled in Germany. I have no idea what inspired the rabbis.