Yiddish and English: The Story of Yiddish in America by Sol Steinmetz (paperback)

Yiddish arrived in America as the mother tongue of millions of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Not only did this language without a homeland survive in the great American melting pot, it infiltrated the majority language, English, with a wide variety of new words and expressions and helped to establish a new ethnic language called "Jewish English." New Yorkers, in particular, have adopted a long list of Yiddish words, including the well-known "kosher," "chutzpah," "klutz," "yenta," "nosh," "mavin," "schlep," and "schmo."

With a collection of quotations from literature and the press, Steinmetz documents the unusually high lexical, semantic, and intonational exchanges between Yiddish and English in America. He offers more than 1,200 Yiddish words, expressions, idioms, and phrases that have melted into the English vernacular.  Yiddish and English is important for Judaica collections with its two appendixes - one on the romanization of Yiddish and another of Yiddish-origin words - a Jewish-English glossary, a selected bibliography, and an index. But this slim volume is so entertaining and informative for the general reader that it is recommended for anyone who delights in word derivations and language.