Leo Rosten died (in 1997)

[Mark A Mandel]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

#  HUH??  From the archives at nytimes.com:
#
#
#Magazine Desk | January 4, 1998, Sunday
#The Lives They Lived: Leo Rosten; Talking Tachlis
#
#By Wendy Wasserstein (NYT) 574 words
        [...]
#our social selves. In our house, Yiddish was the language of the old country,
#specifically Poland, and therefore the one that the ''kinder'' didn't
#understand. My brother Bruce and I sought to decode secret transmissions by
#signing him up for high-school German.

My grandparents used it the same way.

I read it as meaning that her brother signed up to study German in h.s.
as a way for to understand their parents' Yiddish, and tell his sister
too. Presumably (almost certainly) their h.s. didn't offer Yiddish.

Just because that's what they were trying to do doesn't mean they
succeeded at it.

-- Mark M.