(JEWISH GROUP) Can you decipher Yiddish slang?: Er ganevt aroys s'shvarts apel fun oyg

A man visited the home of a friend who had just got married. When he saw his new wife, he whispered to him: “I have to tell you, as a friend, I really don’t like the looks of your wife. If you didn’t marry her for the money, I’m not sure what you see in her. She’s got a hunchback and a bad eye.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the newlywed replied, “you can speak normally – she’s deaf, too”.

And that, dear readers, is an example of one of the hundreds of Yiddish jokes, salty and no respecter of persons, to be found in the archives of YIVO, the unique institution dedicated to the lives and culture of East European Jews, which is celebrating its centenary this year.

On 25 March 1925, a group of around 30 Jewish scholars — mostly in their mid-20s or early 30s — gathered in a public building in Vilnius, a city then in Poland, home to a huge Jewish community. The building, YIVO specialists believe, may have been one of the Yiddish-language schools then flourishing in the city.

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