{"id":89642,"date":"2025-09-18T03:52:49","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T08:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=89642"},"modified":"2025-09-18T03:52:49","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T08:52:49","slug":"at-yivo-an-unfinished-yiddish-dictionary-gets-the-last-word-as-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/at-yivo-an-unfinished-yiddish-dictionary-gets-the-last-word-as-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"At YIVO, an unfinished Yiddish dictionary gets the last word \u2014 as opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL<\/p>\n

(New York Jewish Week<\/em> via JTA) \u2014 In the hallways of New York\u2019s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the story was told as a punchline: the great Yiddish dictionary project that took 25 years and never got beyond the first letter of the alphabet, aleph. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Composer Alex Weiser and librettist Ben Kaplan, both longtime YIVO staffers, heard the tale so often that it seemed like lore. Then they dug deeper \u2014 and found an epic.<\/p>\n

The result is \u201cThe Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,\u201d an original chamber opera premiering this week as part of YIVO\u2019s centennial celebration. Featuring music by Weiser, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist for an album of Yiddish and English song, and a libretto by Kaplan, YIVO\u2019s director of education, the work dramatizes the extraordinary, and unfinished, post-Holocaust effort to create the definitive Yiddish dictionary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d heard the joke version \u2014 two Jews, three opinions, they couldn\u2019t even make a dictionary,\u201d Kaplan recalled. \u201cBut the real story is so much more powerful. These were Holocaust survivors and \u00e9migr\u00e9 scholars in New York, racing against time to salvage a civilization through its words.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the opera\u2019s heart is Yudel Mark (1897-1975), the dictionary\u2019s indefatigable editor, who in the piece is cast as a visionary. His foil is Max Weinreich (1894-1969), YIVO\u2019s legendary director, a gatekeeper who demanded adherence to YIVO\u2019s standardized spelling rules and kept one eye on budgets and deadlines. <\/p>\n

\u201cMark is the prophet, Weinreich is the priest,\u201d said Weiser, citing a classic essay by the Zionist thinker Ahad Ha\u2019am that contrasts the uncompromising idealist with the enforcer of tradition.<\/p>\n

Mark worked in the 1950s out of a small office at YIVO\u2019s mid-century headquarters on Fifth Avenue and later in Jerusalem. The four \u201caleph\u201d volumes of the \u201cGroyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh\u201d (\u201cThe Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language\u201d) appeared between 1961 and 1980. (The language has a plethora of words that start with aleph, as both a vowel sound and a silent letter.) After that \u2014 gornisht, as they say in Yiddish.<\/p>\n

The volumes were published with a disclaimer from YIVO, which did not allow the use of the institute\u2019s logo because of the orthography issue and other objections. <\/p>\n

\u201cAfter Mark\u2019s death, mismanagement and continuing scholarly disputes paralyzed the dictionary project,\u201d Gennady Estraikh, a professor of Yiddish studies at NYU, writes in \u201cThe YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.\u201d The story of the dictionary is fleshed out in a doctoral dissertation that Weiser and Kaplan drew on, written by Leyzer Burko, a Yiddishist with a doctorate in modern Jewish studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary.<\/p>\n

The opera dramatizes the Mark-Weinreich clash as more than academic squabbling. It is staged as a battle over memory itself. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ben Kaplan, left, and Alex Weiser, seen in Weiser’s office at YIVO, are the co-creators of “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” a new chamber opera about the monumental effort after the Holocaust to preserve the language and culture of Eastern European Jewry. (New York Jewish Week)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

YIVO was founded in 1925 in Vilna, Lithuania as a hub for the academic study of East European Jewish life, language and culture. During World War II, much of its library was plundered by the Nazis, though portions were secretly hidden by the \u201cPaper Brigade\u201d of Jewish ghetto inmates. After the war, YIVO was reestablished in New York. At its current location at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street, it continues to preserve and study the legacy of Yiddish-speaking Jews while memorializing the lost.<\/p>\n

As the opera opens, Mark is visited by three angels, performed by a trio of mezzo-sopranos, who embody three different forms of the letter aleph. They share a vision Weiser compares to the prophet Ezekiel\u2019s valley of the dry bones. Instead of skeletons resurrected, it is a prophecy of words crumbling to dust \u2014 and revived through his dictionary. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exactly what he thought he was doing: resurrecting the Jewish people through language,\u201d Weiser said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark saw words as sparks,\u201d added Kaplan. \u201cLose a word and you lose a piece of the Jewish soul. That symbolism cried out for opera, not just history.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At a rehearsal for “The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,” tenor Jason Weisinger, right, portrays Yudel Mark and mezzo-sopranos Kristin Gornstein, Kate Maroney and Kelly Guerra portray angels with a heavenly vision for preserving Yiddish. (New York Jewish Week photo)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The score avoids klezmer clich\u00e9s. \u201cThis is an argument happening in an academy, not at a wedding,\u201d said Weiser. Instead, he draws on post-minimalism, biblical chant, incantatory motifs and, to this ear anyway, Stephen Sondheim at his most operatic. In the opening, the three Alephs sing in shifting heterophony, evoking divine prophecy. \u201cI wanted people to feel the storminess of letters swirling into life,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The libretto is largely in English, but the Alephs sing in Yiddish \u2014 a subversive twist that the creators refined in conversation with one of their mentors, Israeli novelist Ruby Namdar. In Jewish tradition, Hebrew is lashon hakodesh, the holy tongue, as opposed to mere \u201cvernaculars\u201d like Yiddish. \u201cUsually Yiddish is the language of the jokers and schleppers,\u201d Kaplan said. \u201cBut for Mark, it was sacred. We made it the language of the heavenly realm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Workshops of the opera have already earned blessings from Yiddish scholars and even from Mark\u2019s daughter and granddaughter. At one showing, cultural historian and Yiddishist David Roskies \u2014 who had known the two protagonists personally \u2014 declared, \u201cI wasn\u2019t just watching them. I was watching Hillel and Shammai,\u201d referring to the rabbinic sages whose arguments are preserved in the Talmud.<\/p>\n

For Weiser and Kaplan, both 36, the opera is also a personal act of homage. \u201cIn a way, it\u2019s a love letter to YIVO,\u201d said Kaplan. \u201cWe\u2019re standing on the shoulders of giants, people who smuggled books past the Nazis, who saved treasures for us to work with today. You can\u2019t repay that debt. You can only try to honor it and carry it forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

The premier performances of \u201cThe Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language,\u201d on Sept. 18  and Sept. 21 at 1:00 p.m. ET are sold out. Tickets are still available for a third performance on Sept. 21 at 4:00 p.m. The opera is presented by and at YIVO in collaboration with American Opera Projects, the League for Yiddish, the American Society for Jewish Music, and the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York, and co-sponsored by Nusakh Vilne.<\/p>\n

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