Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken - Daniel Pinkwater

Illustrated by Jill Pinkwater
Feiwel and Friends (McMillan), 2010
32 pages
$16.99
Rating: 4.5
Endpapers: azure

Mr. Flegelman is taking his organic chickens to the city (which happens to be Brooklyn) to be sold. "The truck pulls up in front of Phil's Poultry World, and with a tear in his eye, Mr. Flegelman begins to unload the crates."

And now, the fun starts. When Mr. F. speaks, his words, "Good-bye, my dear chickens," appears in a talking cloud above his head. Then we see the line written in Hebrew and then the phonetic pronounciations of the Hebrew words. COOL!

Well, Yetta the chicken breaks free and takes off into the streets of Brooklyn. Freedom! Each time she speaks to herself, we can see the translations and pronounciation. Of course the pigeons she meet can only speak English...and they're mean. But when Yetta saves a bright green parrot from a cat, she is adopted by a flock of Brooklyn's wild parrots - and they speak Spanish! So everything they say is translated from Spanish, including the pronounciations!

Happy, happy ending to a very clever story. And there's an explanation of the Hebrew alphabet at the end of the book.