The Weekend Not in Scotland, Part III

I've already posted two installments of the not-in-Scotland October weekend without describing the trip's core mission:  attending the "Community Open House" of the National Yiddish Book Center, following a postcard invitation and the cancellation of our Scotland plans.   Aplologies.  Over six or seven weeks, this task has languished, stopping up the flow of at least four potential posts. 

The main room of extra copies of rescued
Yiddish books at the Center -- waiting for homes

Anyway, the Yiddish Book Center's mission -- propelling Yiddish into present and future generations -- is clear as a bell and visibly passionate, even before you cross its threshold in that apple orchard up in Amherst.  Before going through the front door, you cross a little bridge. The bridge is labelled "Brik."  Instantly I'm reminded of the song I learned so many years ago, "Dortn dortn," whose first line has the words, "ibern vasserl, ibern brik"; over the stream, over the bridge.  Here's a word to keep, before you even get inside.

I love this place for bringing all this Yiddish back to me from long-term storage.  The old books on the rows of shelves, extra copies waiting to be bought and read, are a perfect physical analog to the dormant vocabulary in my head waking up and getting exercised. And all brought back from a time I looked like the young romantics here, except perhaps for the purple hair.

Can you make out the "shrekliche" disaster 
reported on here? No peeking on the bottom!

While I've earned my special affinity by virtue of courses taken decades ago,  the Center also tries very hard to draw in those who don't speak the language a bit.  There are exhibits tucked in among the books; an exhibit of great Jewish moments in popular films and TV shows; front pages of the Yiddish press on historical news days, with translated headlines; old Yiddish linotype machines and their histories; stories behind the translations of great works; pictures and old home movies of an ethnomusicologist's travels through Eastern Europe.    There's also the huge original crate, pried opened with (replaced) books spilling out in a prominent place on the floor, which was sent from the evaporating Jewish community of Zimbabwe.

Who knew? 

There's a sandbox of sorts for playing with Yiddish; a table set with labeled objects and a Yiddish menu.  A phone with recorded phrases to converse with. There's also shelves of good Jewish picture books for children, in English, and comfortable space to read them in.

Exhibits educate the Yiddish deprived.

I love this place for transplanting Yiddish into progressive New England, a place whose trees and fields might resemble the Galicia of my grandparents, but whose sensibility is so modern and world-embracing.   As Yiddish was once, too. A language too rich to starve in ossified Hasidic enclaves, the only place it's natively spoken now.

Once inside, a Yiddish, entre-nous (tsvishn unz)  sense of humor permeates the place along with its eagerness to teach; one of the rest rooms is labeled Vu Der Kaiser Gait Alayn.*

Yiddishist-in-training giving a tour beside
the crate of books from Zimbabwe.

I spend time reading the spines and sometimes even the contents of the shelves, and read the posters and understand a good deal of the song sheets and film clips, even without the subtitles.

I love this place for  memorializing its poets and playwrights on slate squares, in Yiddish and English, over engravings of leaves, among the outside plantings.

The Writer's Garden

English-to-Yiddish is in the works

Beyond the main room of books, there's an auditorium where Dr. Harry Bochner and Professor  Solon Beinfeld, sixty- or seventy-something editors of the new Comprehensive Yiddish-to-English Dictionary, are being interviewed on stage by young Josh Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting English Professor at nearby U  Mass.  The dictionary, the first since Uriel Weinreich compiled his back in 1968, has just been published.  These philologists are describing how it differs from its predecessor.  For starters, it has 50 percent more words.  The editors got a great leg up on their project through the efforts of a new Yiddish-French dictionary, whose authors Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot  created the large corpus of Yiddish words. They say it's also easier to use, without all the cryptic abbreviations.

This volume also includes words Weinreich simply didn't like; his dictionary is famous, for example, for leaving out the dirty words and even "tuchis," one of the best-remembered Yiddish words that ever lived.  It also includes words with the German-type spellings that were favored by socialists.  Adamant secularists, they didn't want speakers to have to refer back to their religious educations to know the original vowel-free spellings of Hebrew words, which keep their original forms when passing into Yiddish.

Linotype machine

The Forward newspaper put up some of the funding for the verterbuch, with the understanding that this lexicon would be used to help readers understand their Yiddish online edition. Some also came from the University of Indiana, whose press is the official publisher. 

The day proceeds with campus tours, including descent into the climate-controlled archive in the basement.  Oddly, they tell us that everything to be digitized is schlepped to Israel for this process and then schlepped back.  And Hebrew-character OCR and indexing, performed pro bono by Assaf Urieli, a computational linguist in the French Pyrenees, will ultimately render the Center's whole collection of books searchable online.

The day ends with a Q and A with Aaron Lansky in the bigger auditorium, followed by a great performance by klezmer duo Debbie Strauss on violin and accordion and Jeff Warschauer on guitar and mandolin. They don't do the Yiddish standards, but gems I've never heard before.

Aaron Lansky

On the way out I buy, for eight dollars apiece, part II of Sholem Aleichem's wonderful Motel, Peysi the Cantor's Son in the original, a Workmen's Circle Yiddish children's textbook from the sixties, and a book of poems in Yiddish and Hebrew. I also buy a copy of the dictionary, just to show support.  Did they know my Rutgers teacher, writer Wolf Younin?, I ask, while they sign the book. Dr. Bochner says he had heard of him.  Later that evening, in downtown Amherst, we bump into him with friends at Moti's, the local middle eastern restaurant. We try to cozy up, even peripherally, with the few families who constitute the Yiddish pillars of Boston. 

*    "Where the Kaiser goes alone."