Given its physical heft, it’s no surprise that the new Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary published last month by Indiana University Press is the work of generations.
Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, its editor, worked on the 856-page, 4 1/2-pound volume for some 20 years in her Teaneck basement. At its core are words collected a generation earlier by her father Mordkhe Schaechter in the family’s house in the Bronx. For many of those years, when Gitl was a teenager, she helped her father as he cataloged Yiddish words at the dining room table.
But before that, the family legend goes, there was her grandfather, Khayem-Benyomen Shekhter, and his enthusiasm for the Yiddish language. The memory of his enthusiasm is tied to a date more than a century ago: 1908, the year he made sure to attend the great Yiddish language conference in his hometown of Czernowitz, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In Czernowitz, Mordkhe Schaechter, with his arms crossed, stands in front of his parents.
In Czernowitz, Mordkhe Schaechter, with his arms crossed, stands in front of his parents.
Of course, all languages are the work of generations. It took time for Yiddish to evolve from the medieval German that was picked up by Jews living in the Rhineland, mixed with their inherently Jewish Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, and then given Slavic vocabulary (e.g. bubbe and zeide) and even touches of syntax. (That’s the most accepted, broad-brush origin story for Yiddish, notwithstanding recent clickbait headlines arguing for more exotic origins.)
And it took time for Yiddish to be seen as a language worthy in its own right, something worth cataloging and defining and even writing in. Where people speak two languages, those languages seldom are on equal footing; people always are inclined to value one more than the other. Jews may have loved the dialect they spoke among themselves more than the language of the neighbors, which they generally mastered as well, but in Jewish culture pride of place went to Hebrew, the language of the Torah and the rabbis. Popular demand led to the publication of the first Yiddish books in the 16th century, even though the rabbis objected to it. (The first Yiddish bestseller was “Bovo Bukh,” a rhymed retelling of an Italian poem about Bevis of Hampton; this knightly romance is the origin of the term bubbe meise; rather than the popular, and wrong, etymology linking it to bubbe, or grandmother.) And in the 19th century, with the spread of printing and newspapers, came the great Yiddish writers: Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Mendele Mocher Sforim.
Which brings us to the 1908 Czernowitz conference. The 20th century was young. Change was in the air. And Nathan Birnbaum, the 44-year-old Austrian Jew who had coined the word “Zionism” and advocated for Jews in Eastern Europe, championed Yiddish as the Jewish national language. Peoples throughout Europe were coming to understand themselves as separate nations, wearying of being under the rule of the grand European empires, and Mr. Birnbaum’s Yiddishism offered an equivalent national identity to Jews — without demanding that they leave for Palestine. (He later would abandon Jewish nationalism altogether and help found the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement.) He sent out a call for everyone interested in Yiddish to come to the Yiddish language conference.