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Cover: Jakob Hessing , The Yiddish Joke

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The Yiddish Joke

Jakob Hessing

"A secret, melancholy and outrageous pleasure... What a wondrous, wonderful book!" Ulrich Raulff. The Yiddish joke is more than the sum of the jokes with which Eastern Jews laughed at themselves. It is spirit, "esprit", even black humor in the face of an absurd existence. Jakob Hessing reveals the ironic potential of the Yiddish language entertainingly and explains why Yiddish wit and Yiddish literature flourished when Eastern Jewry was heading for its annihilation. Thus his book is an entertaining story just before the abyss - much like the Yiddish joke itself.

Jokes and anecdotes in Yiddish give us an insight into the old, sunken world of the shtetl, which is also told by the three great classics of Yiddish literature - Mendele Moícher Sfórim, Scholem Alejchem and Jizchok Leib Perez. They have transformed the wit of Yiddish into art. Jakob Hessing shows why Yiddish jokes lose their subtlety when translated into German and how they differ from the defamatory joke about Jews. His masterfully written book makes us laugh, smile, marvel and at the end regret that the amusing story does not continue.

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