Arthur Kober belongs to that long line of American humorists with a sharp ear for distinctive speech patterns. Bella Gross, Kober's indefatigable husband hunter, domesticated the idiom spoken by first-generation Jewish immigrants in the Bronx. Arthur Kober is more often remembered today because he married Lillian Hellman rather than because his Bella did not marry anybody. Nonetheless, the Grosses of the Bronx represented an important ingredient in the mixture we now recognize as New Yorker humor. Arthur Kober himself receives only a fleeting one sentence in Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill's encyclopedic study America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (1978): "During the Depression, Arthur Kober began [in the pages of the New Yorker magazine] his Ma and Pa Gross stories, in Jewish dialect and with a Bronx setting." Here is a section of that dialect from a widely re-printed Kober story entitled "Boggains in the Bronx": "'Look who's...