Leo C. Rosten

Leo Calvin Rosten (1908–1997) was an American humorist, novelist, and screenwriter best known for celebrating Jewish-American speech and culture. Born in Łódź, then in the Russian Empire, he immigrated to the United States as a child and later studied at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. Rosten gained wide popularity with the Hyman Kaplan stories, comic sketches about an earnest immigrant student learning English, first published in *The New Yorker* and later collected in book form. His best-known nonfiction work, *The Joys of Yiddish* (1968), became a classic guide to Yiddish words and expressions in English.