by Catherine Madsen - Yiddish Book Center

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