by Catherine Madsen - Yiddish Book Center

y Catherine Madsen
photographs by Ben Barnhart
Based on an interview of Solon Beinfeld
by Max Ticktin, Washington, DC, on
June 8, 2007, and a conversation with
Solon Beinfeld, Barry Goldstein, and
Harry Bochner at the National Yiddish
Book Center on December 14, 2007.
BEST WORDS,
BEST ORDER

In 1908, a group of eminent Yiddishists assembled in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in
Ukraine) to argue about the spelling, grammar, vocabulary, status, and future of the Yiddish language. Among the items on their
agenda was the production of a dictionary.
A hundred years later, we are about to have the first comprehensive dictionary of modern Yiddish. Thanks to a handful of intrepid
scholars and programmers, the Yidish-English verterbukh/Yiddish-English Dictionary is taking shape.
Actually, the book will be a reworking of a Yiddish-French dictionary. In 2002, the Bibliothèque Medem in Paris published Yitskhok
Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot’s Yidish-Frantseyzish verterbukh/Dictionnaire Yiddish-Français, an exemplary work that was immediately
adopted by English-speaking Yiddishists as well. It listed so many words not represented in previous dictionaries that the extra step of
translating from French to English was worth the trouble. Solon Beinfeld, director of the new dictionary project, aims to make that extra
step unnecessary. The process of compiling the dictionary will be relatively quick: starting from Niborski’s abundant (and electronically
stored!) lexical base, the time involved in producing an English version will be substantially less than starting from scratch.
The story of Yiddish lexicography is complex, contentious, occasionally comic, and sometimes tragic. The first glossaries of
Yiddish appeared in the 17th century, for the use of German merchants – and policemen: Yiddish words had entered the argot of the
criminal underworld. Lexicography was just beginning to evolve in those days (Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary was not published
till 1755), and there were wide variations among dictionaries in length, format, and purpose. Not until the end of the 19th
century – by which time the first fascicles of the Oxford English Dictionary were being published – did the first major Yiddish-English
dictionaries appear. They were written in New York by the great Alexander Harkavy, an immigrant from a learned Lithuanian family
who also wrote a number of home-study manuals for Yiddish speakers learning English.
Harkavy not only documented but championed the Yiddish language, at a time when most educated Jews were focused on the
revival of Hebrew. His dictionaries were invaluable to their intended audience of immigrants and remain so for contemporary students
in search of a broader Yiddish vocabulary. His entries are very brief, providing simply the Yiddish, the English, the part of speech, and
sometimes an idiomatic usage. (Hakn, for example, is defined as “to cut, chop; to knock; to talk (fig.),” and hakn a morde is “to knock
a person on the jaw.”) Harkavy did not supply grammatical particulars like the genders of nouns, nor the pronunciations
of Hebrew and Aramaic imports, features that would be useful nowadays. But he had an eclectic sense of the
Yitskhok Niborski Yiddish vocabulary, and his dictionaries are the best existing guide to actual usage in prewar Yiddish literature and
and Bernard
culture. His last dictionary, the trilingual 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew, has been reprinted twice by the YIVO Institute
Vaisbrot’s 2002 and is still one of the primary Yiddish reference works.
Yiddish-French
But the rapid evolution of Yiddish did not stop in1928. Poets, writers, and ordinary speakers continued to push the
dictionary. Right, boundaries of the language: adopting words from other languages, bending the meanings of existing words for new purposes,
inventing new slang and bilingual puns. Snippets of non-Jewish dialect continued to attach themselves to adjacent
Uriel Weinreich’s
1968 Yiddish- Yiddish dialects; modern translators regularly consult Polish, Ukrainian or Russian dictionaries when translating as
English dictionary. simple a thing as a letter. Decades of intense social and literary activity – to say nothing of the upheavals and terrible
losses of a world war – worked major changes in Yiddish vocabulary and usage.
Uriel Weinreich, who next took up the challenge, was more concerned to limit than to expand lexical Yiddish.
His father, the linguist Max Weinreich, had founded the YIVO Institute in Vilna (now in New York) for the study and
preservation of Yiddish cultural materials. Uriel Weinreich worked at Columbia University just as the field of Yiddish
studies was taking shape, and aimed to define the boundaries of the language. His 1968 Modern English-Yiddish,
Yiddish-English Dictionary was a milestone in the establishment of correct usage. Whereas Harkavy was inclusive
to the point of whimsy (among many other anglicisms, his 1928 dictionary includes sanovegon, “son of a gun”),
Weinreich was austerely prescriptive, excising common German, Slavic and English imports as insufficiently authentic.
He did coin words, notably for technological innovations, though not all of these have taken root in the language.
His impeccable scholarship nevertheless produced a masterful dictionary, thorough
and helpful in including many idioms that would otherwise confound the beginner.
Tragically, Weinreich died at the age of 40, while his dictionary was still in proof.
His family and friends saw it through publication under YIVO’s auspices. The book
remains in print and is still indispensable for Yiddish readers at all levels, but it has
never been revised. One can only wonder how Weinreich’s thinking and methods might
have changed over the course of 30 or 40 more years.

Nahum Stutchkoff’s 900-page thesaurus,
Der oytser fun der Yidisher
shprakh (The Treasury of the Yiddish
Language, 1950), provides a rich supplement
to the standard dictionaries.
Stutchkoff was a Yiddish actor, playwright,
and radio announcer noted
for his eloquence who also compiled
the only Yiddish rhyming dictionary.
However, as generations of Englishspeaking
students have found with
Roget ’s, it is dangerous to try and
extrapolate definition and usage from
a thesaurus; the unwary writer can
make really embarrassing mistakes. As
Nokhem Stutchkoff’s a source of vocabulary the Oytser is
Der oytser fun der splendid, but the nuances of meaning
Yidisher shprakh. must be filled in from other sources.
Yudl Mark, a major figure in Yiddish linguistics and education
and author of the invaluable 1978 textbook Gramatik fun
der Yidisher klal-shprakh (Grammar of Standard Yiddish),
worked for many years on the Yiddish-Yiddish Groyser verterbukh
fun der Yidisher shprakh (Great Dictionary of the Yiddish
Language). Four volumes, covering only the letter alef, were
published between 1961 and 1980. This is a much larger
achievement than English speakers might guess, since a
number of common Yiddish prefixes (and the vast majority of
words beginning with vowel sounds) have an initial alef :by
stripping away the prefixes one can identify verb roots for the
whole alphabet. Fifteen or so prefixes – among them oys, oyf,
on, op, arum, avek, aroyf, aroys, arayn, arop, ariber – can attach
themselves to the verb geyn,“to go”; the prefixes yield various
subtleties of expression, but the underlying root geyn is easy to
spot. When this factor is taken into account, the four alef volumes
cover about one-third of the Yiddish lexicon.
Yudl Mark died in 1975. A group of his colleagues
attempted to continue his work, with ambitious plans –
beyond the capacity of the software then available – but did
not manage to complete any subsequent volumes. The project
eventually lost its funding and was never revived, again
an immense loss to the Yiddish world. Rumors (and recriminations)
still circulate about the failure of the project and the
location and extent of the remaining materials.
For many years, Mordkhe Schaechter was the man to contact
for the meanings of obscure Yiddish words and for new
coinages. Born in Czernowitz in 1927, he came to New York
in 1951, had a long association with YIVO, and taught in the
YIVO/Columbia Weinreich summer program in Yiddish
from its inception in 1968 until 2004. After Schaechter’s
death in 2007, an obituary in the Forward described him as a
“one-man Academy of the Yiddish Language.”
Schaechter was fascinated by minutiae, and published a
substantial list of Yiddish botanical terminology as well as a
book of terms relating to pregnancy, birth, and early childhood.
Among the work he left behind is an enormous card
file of the sexual terminology in use among yeshiva students
(needed for – among other purposes, one supposes –
Talmudic debate). Schaechter was associate editor of the
Groyser verterbukh in the 1980s, and not surprisingly was at
work on his own dictionary. His descendants are organizing
his materials into an English-Yiddish dictionary that will
undoubtedly be a magnificent counterpart to Beinfeld’s
Yiddish-English.
Yitskhok Niborski, compiler of the Yiddish-French dictionary
from which Beinfeld’s group is working, was born in
1947 in Argentina – the Library of Congress lists him as
Isidoro – and attended the excellent Yiddish day schools of
Buenos Aires, whose students spoke Yiddish even on the
playground. As an adult he taught in those same schools, and
co-authored a Yiddish-Spanish, Spanish-Yiddish dictionary.
Gradually it became clear that the schools were being compelled
to shift from Yiddish to Hebrew education. Niborski
moved to Paris to work at the Bibliothèque Medem, a vibrant
center of Yiddish activity and the largest Yiddish library in
Europe. His 1997 Verterbukh fun loshn-koydesh-shtamike
verter in yidish (Dictionary of Words of Hebrew and Aramaic
Origin in Yiddish) is an invaluable tool for decoding the often
difficult Hebrew spellings and sometimes surprising Yiddish
usages of Hebraic elements. Niborski’s Yiddish-French dictionary
contains roughly 37,000 words to Weinreich’s 20,000,
restoring the German and Slavic imports and introducing
many dialectal forms.
Niborski’s dictionary stands in Harkavy’s descriptive tradition
rather than Weinreich’s normative one. The expansion of
the field of Yiddish studies since Weinreich’s time made such a
dictionary imperative. Scholars from many specialties now
use Yiddish books and documents in their research. Serious
students and translators of Yiddish fiction and poetry have
been handicapped for a long time by the lack of a dictionary
that draws from the full range of post-1928 literary sources.
Political and social historians of Eastern European Jewry and
the Holocaust need much better access to the range of dialects
represented in memoirs, personal papers, and yisker-bikher
(memorial books for destroyed communities). Few of these
scholars are native Yiddish speakers, and the potential for misunderstanding
and mistranslation is enormous.
Solon Beinfeld, who is a native Yiddish speaker as well as
the son of a teacher in the Workmen’s Circle schools, is a historian
of modern Europe, specializing most recently in the
Holocaust in the Kovno and Vilna ghettos. Based in Boston, he
has made frequent research trips to the Medem, and met
Niborski there. When Niborski’s dictionary appeared, Beinfeld
24 SPRING 2008

told him how deeply appreciated it was in America. It would
make sense, he added, given the much wider reach of English
in the Jewish world, to have an English version. (“In Israel
French is not a language,” an Israeli had remarked to him.)
Such a version would have to be prepared, Beinfeld continued,
by a native speaker of both Yiddish and English who was also
fluent in French. Niborski looked at him and said, “Nu?”
Thus are vocations discovered and fates sealed. Beinfeld
knew that he would need collaborators with professional linguistic
expertise and high-level programming skills. From his
Yiddish group in the Boston area, the Khalyastre (“the Gang,”
version), more words can be added at any time, and it is theoretically
possible to produce dictionaries for other languages
from the same database as demand and expertise arise. The
English version will appear in hard copy first – a number of
university presses have expressed interest – but subsequently it
will be posted in full on the Web, where it can continue to
expand in cyberspace as new entries are approved.
The question in everyone’s mind is, When will the dictionary
appear? As always, the answer depends partly on funding.
Beinfeld and other retirees are donating their time, but
younger contributors are not in a position to do so. After initial
named for a group of avant-garde Yiddish writers in 1920s
Warsaw), he drafted linguist Harry Bochner and writer Barry
Goldstein, both of whom are professional programmers.
Other colleagues include Michael Rosenbush, another Medem
visitor who was born in Lublin and is a retired professor of
Slavic languages, and project manager Elizabeth Berman.
Harry Bochner has created a clear, comprehensible format
for entering definitions – no easy task when dealing with two
languages that read in opposite directions. The screen displays
an entry with the Yiddish word, grammatical information, the
French definition, and fields for entering the English definition
and any comments or questions for further consideration.
Once the work of the various contributors has been combined
into one file by a separate program, this program allows the
editor to compare the versions, word by word, and edit them as
necessary for the final version.
Besides the streamlining of the compilation process, the
great advantage of having the dictionary in a standard computerized
form (XML, for the technically minded), is that the
database is infinitely expandable. The original French information
is still there (though it will not appear in the English
grants from the Schaechter Foundation, Yudl Mark’s Yiddish-
London Yiddishist Hirsh Perloff, and the Yiddish Groyser
Hanadiv Foundation in Britain, the project
received a generous grant from the
verterbukh fun der
Yidisher shprakh
(Great Dictionary of
Forward Foundation, and most recently
the Yiddish Language).
the David and Barbara B. Hirschhorn
Foundation has contributed. The most critical stage will be the
process of reconciling and editing the final entries; this really
needs to be under one person’s supervision, and will need substantial
and focused blocks of time. It would be a wonderful
goal to finish the work in 2008, a hundred years after the
Czernowitz conference, but at present it looks as if there is
more than a year’s work left.
The latest news on the project can be found at www.verterbukh.org,
and donations can be made at www.afmedem.org.
The Yiddish world will be watching with all the solicitous
care, well-meaning interference, and anxious superstition
with which a family watches a long-awaited pregnancy.
Catherine Madsen is a contributing editor to Pakn Treger.
Her most recent book is In Medias Res: Liturgy for the Estranged.
25 PAKN TREGER