Yiddish Saves the Day, by Debbie Levy

Yiddish Saves the Day book cover

Ashkenazi or Sephardic? Who cares about your DNA results when you can share funny rhymes like these with your child: “Oy, did I have a shlep! I fell on my shnoz when my foot missed a step! I tripped like a klutz and lost my left shoe! And, oy vey, my tuchis! I fell on that, too!” Each page contains adorable illustrations of exactly what kind of mishegoss is going on, along with a vocabulary box at the bottom with proper English translations and a pronunciation key. Follow along as our hapless shlemiel gets fartootst because he loses his notebook, but his menschy little brother and his food-obsessive mishpachah help him just in time for him to contribute enough outsized Yiddish words to bring to school the following day. Now he’s a maven, and his vocabulary-crazed teacher is duly impressed. 

“Yiddish words,” says the author in an endnote, “are so powerful, and so often comical, they’re like the superheroes of language.” This hilarious book proves it. -- Lisa Silverman, Director, Burton Sperber Jewish Community Library, retrieved from https://jewishjournal.com/culture/books/308705/hanukkah-books-are-scarce-yiddish-is-trending/