Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Another Yiddish Related Post

I thought Alisa has the best post about the use of Yiddish*!

Setting: First grade. Highest level reading group, two boys and a girl, all Jewish, reading Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel. For those of you not familiar with such fine literature, Frog and Toad are good buddies who do pretty much everything together. Frog is really upbeat and fun and Toad is somewhat depressed and pessimistic. So in the response packet the kids first have to find an adjective to describe Frog, with which they have no trouble. When it comes to Toad, they have much trouble and think for a long time. Nothing they come up seems to work. Finally one of the boys says: "I think Toad is kind of Oy vey". Yes, say the other children happily, "he is definitely quite oy-veyish". And so it was.

*From now i'm going to stop writing my own posts and start to copy and paste other bloggers' posts.

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