At one point he compares himself, unironically, to Moses; at another, he mentions "one of my few regrets." Could such a phrase even be uttered in Yiddish? Well, maybe, but with that particular inflection that makes "few" a quantity slightly larger than infinite.
Jacqueline Osherow. Saving a lost language.
Via The Language Feed.

I first wondered if "particular inflection that makes "few" a quantity slightly larger than infinite" is just a figure of speech, or there is some grammatical ground for it. Then I remembered, that you could perform the described operation in Russian. There is a suffix, which being added to a noun means that "the thing" is huge. There is the complimentary suffix [Ed: more than one, and this statistical difference asks for another post], which means the thing is small, and it also bears a notion of tenderness ("endearing intimacy" as I read somewhere) toward the thing -- this is probably why it is used more often. Strangely, you cannot attach the former ("-huge") suffix to the word "few" (nemnogo, literally "not-many", "not-much"), but you can do it with the latter. How much sense does it make to double the meaning of "littleness"? Probably no more than ascertain that this particular "few" is "huge". :) I tried to append the suffix of ''hugeness" to nemnogo, and the result, nemnogishe, is not a correct word [Ed.: "not a correct word" means "not a word", right?], but it makes sense, and I believe would be understood by any native speaker.

I am so happy that I can have an insight, if even imperfect ("nemnogishe" still doesn't feel the same as its apparently existent Yiddish counterpart, because it is grammatically abnormal, rather than normal for my language), into how it feels in another language. Sometimes I read interesting things about other languages, but if there is no analog in my native language, the pleasure of discovery is only intellectual.

October 17. Found today:

... But in both cases the deeper resonances of the topos are not obvious for a Western audience: they have to be explained—and to explain a resonance is like explaining a joke; when the explanation is over, no one laughs, except out of pained politeness, and no one is moved.
Dick Davis. On Not Translating Hafez