430-499: Most. Unmotivating. Dewey. Section. Ever. Just 70 digits of language dictionaries, 60 of them allocated to various European languages. So imagine my pleasant surprise at finding that my old friend Leo Rosten wound up amongst the Germans! I knew Rosten from his wonderful character, H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N, a fictional adult ESL student whose personality was as colorful as his signature. But Rosten was fluent in Yiddish as well as English and wrote a wonderfully schlocky (see what I did there?) guide to Yiddish as spoken in America by Jews and goyim alike, and that is how he ended up in 430-439.
Some people object to the jokes that were old before Rosten was even born. Others might object to outdated social attitudes. Myself, I just found out that even Leo Rosten cannot persuade me to read an entire dictionary front to back in a period of three to six weeks. But, as dictionaries go, this is a good one! And his kids have updated it, so, there's that. If you want to learn some Yiddish, this is the way to do it!
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