Birthday of August Bebel, Political Leader

Ferdinand August Bebel, known to all by his middle name, was born on February 22, 1840, in Deutz, Germany. As a young man, Bebel apprenticed as a carpenter and joiner and spent several years traveling around Europe looking for work. In 1860, he settled in Leipzig where he made horn buttons and participated in various labor organizations. Bebel began reading the pamphlets of Ferdinand Lassalle, which popularized the ideas of Karl Marx. In 1865, under the mentorship of Wilhelm Liebknecht, Bebel decided to commit himself completely to the socialist cause.

Together with Liebknecht, he founded the Sächsische Volkspartei (“Saxon People’s Party”) and in 1867 Bebel entered the Reichstag of the North German Confederation representing the party.  In 1869 he helped found the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP), which later became the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1870 Bebel and Liebknecht were the only members of the North German parliament to vote against the continuance of the war with France. In 1871, Bebel was the only socialist who was elected to the Reichstag, and used this position to defend the Paris Commune in the parliament. He was jailed for “high treason” and “insulting the Emperor.”

Women Under Socialism

After his release from prison, he helped to organize the united party of Social Democrats, which had been formed during his imprisonment. In 1879 Bebel published (illegally) the first edition of his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (translated as Women under Socialism). In the book, Bebel argued that it was the goal of socialists:

…not only to achieve equality of men and women under the present social order… but to go far beyond this and to remove all barriers that make one human being dependent upon another, which includes the dependence of one sex upon another.

Bebel was the first person to speak in parliament against Germany’s anti-gay “Paragraph 175,”  legislation which was not repealed until 1969. He argued in favor of a petition that was being circulated by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the world’s first activist homosexual rights organization, founded in 1897 by the prominent Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld. Bebel was also the first person to publicly to reveal the existence of “pink lists”, on which the police recorded the names of homosexuals regardless of whether they had been convicted of sexual activities or not.

Here is a clip from the German silent movie “Different From The Others”. It was made as a form of protest against Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code which made homosexuality between men against the law.

From a 1916 Yiddish Volume of Bebel's Work

Bebel is also famous for his outrage at the news of a German conducted policy of extermination towards the Herero people in German South-West Africa, considered the first genocide of the 20th century, in which up to 100,000 indigenous opponents to German rule were driven into the desert and starved to death. He later followed this up with strongly worded warnings against the rising tide of theories of racial hierarchy and racial purity. In the most explicit terms, Bebel condemned anti-semitism with his well-known saying “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.” Bebel’s writing was widely translated, including into Yiddish, and esteemed by Jewish readers around the world.

August Bebel died August 13, 1913 of a heart attack during a visit to a sanatorium in Passugg, Switzerland.  Bebel was among the socialist icons included in bas relief portraits on the facade of the The Forward building, erected in 1912 as the headquarters of the New York Yiddish-language socialist newspaper.

Birthday of Maurycy Gottlieb, Polish Jewish artist

Maurycy Gottlieb was born on February 21, 1856 in Drohobycz, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (today: Дрогобич, Ukraine). Gottlieb’s artistic talent was strongly encouraged by his family. Of the 11 siblings, three other brothers became artists as well.  Gottlieb studied at Vienna Fine Arts Academy, and later under Jan Matejko in Kraków. He spent several yeas in Norway before returning to Vienna to search for his Jewish roots and pursue his career as an artist. He was perhaps the first Polish Jewish artist to distinguish himself as both a “Polish” and a “Jewish” artist.

Inspired by Matejko’s national historical paintings, he began painting scenes of Polish history. He also painted a number of works with overtly Jewish subject matter, including a Jewish wedding, the Jewish philosopher Uriel da Costa, illustrations for Gotthold Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), and portraits of several contemporary and literary Jewish figures. He also produced a number of fascinating and revealing self-portraits, one as a Polish nobleman, another in Arab dress, another as King Ahasueras of the Purimshpil, and yet another in the clothing of the central European bourgeoisie. His most famous painting is “Jews Praying in the Synagogue on the Day of Atonement” from 1878 (below).

For many Jews, Gottlieb represented living proof that Jews could become prominent in the visual arts, just as they had in literature and music. He received praise from the general Polish public in part because his art displayed ardent patriotism at a crucial time to assert Polish national identity. Gottlieb’s art reflected his support for the ideals of Jewish integration into Polish culture. Among his most interesting paintings are two large works on the subject of the life of Jesus, “Christ Preaching at Capernaum” (1878–1879) and “Christ before His Judges” (1877–1879), which depict Jesus as both a Jew and a universalist figure preaching brotherly love and toleration.

Gottlieb proposed to the daughter of a prosperous Viennese merchant family but was rejected. When he learned that she had married a banker in Berlin, he willingly exposed himself to the elements and became extremely ill, leading to his untimely death in 1879. Gottlieb’s contribution to Polish Jewish art was celebrated among Jewish assimilationists, Polish advocates of Jewish acculturation, and representatives of Jewish diaspora nationalism. His reputation was kept alive in Poland by several important exhibitions in the interwar period.

Gottlieb has come to be regarded not only as a father of Jewish national art, but also as an important witness to the rich Jewish spiritual heritage of Eastern Europe. Despite his early death, more than three hundred of his works survive, though not all are finished.

Here’s an interesting video of the contemporary artist Toby Cohen recreating Gottlieb’s famous Yom Kippur painting:

Birthday of Meir Balaban, Jewish Historian

Meir Balaban (Majer Bałaban in Polish spelling) was born on February 20, 1877 in Lemberg, (later Lvov, Lwów, and today Львів, Ukraine). In 1900, Balaban began his studies in history at the city’s university. He studied under Ludwik Finkel, author of a classic bibliographic work on Polish history and editor of the leading journal Kwartalnik Historyczny (History Quarterly). It was in that journal that in 1903, Balaban published the first annotated bibliography of historical literature on Jews in Poland. Balaban taught in secondary schools until the outbreak of World War I, when he served as a military chaplain in the Austrian army. While stationed in Lublin, he prepared a short monograph on the history of Jews in that community.

His bibliographical research continued throughout his career, culminating in a comprehensive list of works related to Polish Jewish history and the history of Jews in neighboring lands. The first part was completed and published in 1939, but the second section remained in manuscript and was lost during World War II.

From 1920 to 1930, Balaban directed secular studies at the newly founded Tachkemoni Rabbinical school in Warsaw. He began lecturing on Jewish history at the University of Warsaw in 1928 and became an associate professor in 1935. He was the only person to hold a university post in Jewish history in Poland between the wars. Many of Balaban’s students at the university also attended his lectures at the Institute for Jewish Studies that he had founded with Mojżesz Schorr and Markus Braude in 1928. Classes were conducted in Hebrew by all instructors except Balaban and Schiper, who lectured in Polish.

Balaban published hundreds of works in Polish, German, Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. His popular essays were featured regularly in the Jewish press. Among his many outstanding works is his two-volume history of Jews in Kraków, which remains the most detailed study of a leading Jewish community, and his Hebrew-language history of the Frankist movement.

A video from 1939 from the Jewish film archive documenting Jewish life in Krakow:

Meir Balaban was active in General Zionist circles, and ran unsuccessfully for parliament in 1919 and 1922. After the German occupation in September 1939, he became the director of the Judenrat archive in Warsaw and continued his research there. In total, Balaban published about 70 historical studies and about 200 short papers and reviews in various periodicals. He was considered the founder of the historiography of Polish Jewry, especially of its communal life. He died of a heart attack in the ghetto in 1942.

Birthday of Ossip Dymov (Yosef Perelman), Yiddish Writer 

Yosef Perelman was born on February 17, 1878 in Białystok. In 1902, Perelman graduated from the Forestry Institute in Saint Petersburg where he earned a degree in land surveying. He took an interest in literature and began writing under the pseudonym Ossip Dymov, named after a character in Anton Chekhov’s classic short story “Grasshopper.” His literary career began as a columnist for a Saint Petersburg weekly called Театр и искусство (Theater and Art). Dymov’s first play, голос крови (The Voice of Blood), was staged in 1903 at the Maly Theater in Saint Petersburg. After the October Manifesto enacted on October 17, 1905 proclaimed freedom of press in Russia, a countless number of satirical magazines emerged. Dymov became active with a magazine called Signals and it was there that he became famous for his sense of humor.

In 1903, Dymov wrote a popular drama entitled Вечный странник (The Eternal Wanderer), which addressed problems of Jewish emigration. In 1906, Dymov wrote the play Слушай, Израиль!/Shema Yisroel (Hear, O Israel!), which was dedicated to the victims of the 1906 Białystok pogrom. In 1913, Dymov moved to the United States. From that point onward, he wrote exclusively in Yiddish and primarily about Jewish themes. His most popular plays included Yoshke Muzikant (also known as דער זינגער פֿון זײַן טרויער) and בראָנקס עקספּרעס Bronx Express, which was translated into English and produced on Broadway in 1922. The play is about a hard-working religious Jew who dreamed of getting rich, and, to this day, the play  is thought to be one of the best Jewish plays from the “jazz era.”

From 1927 to 1932, Dymov worked in Germany, where his plays formed part of the repertoire of the Deutsches Theater, directed by the renowned Max Reinhardt, Dymov’s long-time colleague and friend. When Dymov returned to the United States, he continued to write plays and publish in the Yiddish press. He also took up screenwriting, creating דער ווילנער שטאָט חזן (Cantor of Vilna), released with the English title Overture to Glory (1940), in which he also makes a cameo appearance.

Here is a clip from Overture to Glory starring Moyshe Oysher, here singing “Kol Nidre”:

During the Second World War, Dymov published two volumes of his memoirs entitled What I Remember. Over the course of his career, Dymov published more than 25 plays, a short-story collection, a book of selected works, two volumes of memoirs, and dozens of essays and newspaper articles published mainly in the New York Yiddish newspapers Tog and Forverts. He died in New York in 1959.

Birthday of Irena Sendler, Polish Resistance Member &  Savior of Children in Warsaw Ghetto

Irena Sendler (Sendlerowa in Polish) was born Irena Krzyżanowska to a Polish Catholic family in Warsaw on February 15, 1910. Her father, a physician, died from typhus that he contracted during an epidemic in 1917. He was the only doctor in his town of Otwock (about 15 miles southeast of Warsaw) who would treat the poor, mostly Jewish community suffering with this disease. After his death, the Jewish community offered to pay for Krzyżanowska’s education. She married Mieczysław Sendler shortly before the outbreak of war and when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she began aiding Jewish families by helping to create over 3,000 false documents.

During WWII, Sendler joined the Żegota Committee, the codename for the Rada Pomocy Żydom (Council to Aid Jews), an underground group organized by the Polish resistance movement to save the Jews of Poland. She was one of its first recruits and directed her efforts toward rescuing Jewish children. As a city social worker, Sendler was allowed to enter the ghetto with a special permit. Her charge was to check for typhus, which the Germans feared would spread beyond the ghetto. During these visits, she wore the Star of David armband, both in solidarity with the Jews and as a way to avoid attention.

Żegota Secret Headquarters in Krakow

Through her involvement with Żegota, Sendler and a group of about 30 volunteers, saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto and sheltering them in churches, as well as in individual and group children’s homes outside the ghetto. They took the children out under the pretext of conducting inspections of sanitary conditions during a typhus outbreak. They were transported in ambulances, body bags, potato sacks, and by any means available. She and her co-workers buried lists of the hidden children in jars in order to keep track of their original and new identities.

In 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured, and marked for execution. Żegota members saved her by bribing German guards who were leading her to her death. She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war she lived in hiding but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and tried to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. Most, however, had lost their families in the Nazi death camps.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first of the so-called righteous gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. In 2003, Sendler was awarded Poland’s highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle, and was announced as the 2003 winner of the Jan Karski award for Valor and Courage. She has officially been designated a national hero in Poland and schools are named in her honor. In 2007, she was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. That same year, a group of students in Kansas learned about Sendler and wrote a play about her life entitled Life in a Jar.

Here is a video from a segment on the Today Show, featuring an interview with the Life in a Jar cast. The interview also contains clips of an interview with Sendler. Irena Krzyżanowska Sendler died in Warsaw at the age of 98 on May 12, 2008.

Birthday of Zalman Shneour, Hebrew and Yiddish poet and novelist 

Zalman Shneour (right) with playwright (who eventually settled in Los Angeles) Perets Hirshbein (left) in Vilna, 1905

Zalman Shneour was born on February 11, 1886 to a middle-class family in Shklov, Belorussia (today Шклоў, Belarus). Shneour was, from a very early age, an avid reader of Hebrew literature. As a teenager, Shneour left his home and went to Odessa, then the capital of Zionist and Hebrew literary activity, where he was warmly received by Chaim Nachman Bialik, who became a kind of father figure for Shneour.

In 1902, Shneour left for Warsaw and found work in the editorial office of the Hebrew children’s weekly עולם קטן (Small World), in which his first poems for children were printed. In 1904, he moved to Vilna, where he worked for the Hebrew periodical הזמן (The Time). In 1906, he published his first collection of Hebrew poems, עם שקיעת החמה (At Sunset), which received high public praise from Bialik, thus ensuring Shneour’s status as the most prominent and promising poet among his contemporaries.

Shneour decided to leave Eastern Europe to acquire a modern literary and scientific education in Western universities. He intermittently studied literature, philosophy, and natural sciences in Switzerland and in Paris.

During the decade before World War I, Shneour wrote many works of Hebrew and Yiddish psychological and naturalistic prose fiction. He also wrote and published Yiddish poems (among them “מאַרגאַריטקעלעך (Little Daisies),” which became well-known as a popular song). He established a Hebrew publishing house which published his collected Hebrew writings from the years 1900 to 1923 in three volumes: גשרים (Bridges 1922; a new edition of his 1914 poetry collection), במצר (Under Siege; 1923; prose fiction), and חזניות (Visions; 1924).

Here’s a classic recording of  ”מאַרגאַריטקעלעך (Little Daisies)” as sung by the Yiddish soprano, Bina Landau (1925–1988):

In 1925 Shneour tried to find a place for himself and his family in Palestine but was bitterly disappointed with his reception and the offers of the local literary establishment. He returned to Paris and made France his home for 17 years. In Paris in the summer of 1927, Shneour met with Abe Cahan, the editor of the Forverts and  presented him with a series of tales and vignettes focusing on the life of a middle-class Jewish family in Shklov of the 1890s. Not only were the stories poignant, funny, and well crafted, but they also responded to a growing cultural need of the Jewish immigrants in the West to look “homeward” to their native Eastern European cities and shtetlach with bittersweet nostalgia. The success of the Shklov sequence, as it was published in weekly installments for almost a year in the Forverts, was spectacular. Shneour dedicated the three last decades of his life to writing several Shklov epics.

Shneour and his family were stuck in Nazi-occupied France, where they hid until their eventual escape to America, arriving in New York in 1941. He stayed in the United States for the next ten years. For the last 10 years of his life, Shneour lived between Israel and the U.S. A good part of Shneour’s Hebrew works were collected in a 10-volume edition, published between 1957 and 1960. His Yiddish works have not been collected. Many of them were never published in book form and are to be found only in their original publications in the newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s. He died in New York in 1959.

Birthday of Stella Adler, Actor and Acting Teacher

Stella Adler was born on February 10, 1901 in New York City’s Lower East Side. Her parents, Sara Levitsky and Jacob Adler, were among the Yiddish theater elite. The whole family acted in Jacob Adler’s company, the Independent Yiddish Artists Company, which was known for putting on Yiddish translations of classical plays, such as those by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Ibsen. Stella Adler debuted at the age of four in Broken Hearts, and throughout her childhood she played boys as well as girls. Stella attended the socialist Workers School and New York University.

Adler made her debut in London in 1919, in the role of Naomi in Elisha Ben Abuya. She returned to New York to star in a number of plays, and then spent the next ten years touring in vaudelville and Yiddish theater in the United States, Europe, and South America.

(Click to Enlarge)

In 1931, Adler met her second husband Harold Clurman, one of the co-founders of the Group Theater, a cooperative ensemble dedicated to reinvigorating the theater with plays about important contemporary topics. She joined the Group and with them did some of her best work, including her role as Bessie Berger in Awake and Sing. In 1934, Adler took a leave of absence from the Group to travel to Russia and study in The Moscow Art Theater and in private sessions with Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was “Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully.” Adler left the Group in 1937 because she felt that there was a shortage of good roles for women and that the plays were written for a male audience. She then moved to Hollywood to try her luck in the movie industry. After six years as an associate producer at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio and a number of roles in movies such as Love on Toast (1937) and The Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), she returned to Broadway to act and direct.

Check out this clip of Stella Adler talking about the Stanislavski Method and her break with Lee Strasberg over the idea of “sense memory”:

By the mid-40′s Adler was teaching at the New School for Social Research and in 1949 she founded the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City, where she taught for a decade. Adler’s belief that “the theater exists 99% in the imagination” was the cornerstone of her teaching. She stressed to her students that the actor’s main role is to search between the lines of the script for the emotional undertones and the unspoken messages. Some of her most famous students include Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, and Candice Bergen. Adler later became an adjunct professor of action at the Yale School of Drama.

Stella Adler died of heart failure in her Los Angeles home on December 21, 1992 at the age of 91. She is remembered by her students as an inspiring, yet very tough, critic and to this day is viewed as one of the foremost influences of contemporary acting.

Yortsayt of Paul Levi, Political Leader 

Paul Levi was born March 11, 1883 in Hechingen, Germany to a Jewish middle-class family. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1906 and served as Rosa Luxemburg‘s lawyer when she was tried for inciting soldiers to disobedience in 1914. In 1916, Levi settled in Switzerland where he became active with the Zimmerwald Left and the Spartacus League, which became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

After the failure of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, and the killing of the KPD’s main leaders Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Leo Jogiches, Levi took over as the central leader of the Communist Party. Levi headed the German delegation to the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1920. Due to his opposition to the revolutionary tactics of the party majority, Levi resigned from the chairmanship of the Communist Party in early 1921. Following the failure of the March uprisings in 1921, Levi was expelled from the Communist Party for publicly criticizing party policies.

In 1922 he rejoined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and in 1924 was reelected to the Reichstag and was the intellectual leader of the party’s left wing. He edited the journal Sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft (Socialist Politics and Economics), which eventually merged with the Social Democratic organ Klassenkampf (Class Struggle). Levi’s greatest professional victory came in April 1929 when, as a defense lawyer, he achieved the acquittal of the journalist Josef Bornstein, who was accused of defaming public prosecutor Jorns.

Less than a year later, on February 9, 1930, Levi (while suffering from a feverish lung infection) fell to his death from his window in Berlin. After his death the Reichstag held a minute of commemoration during which the representatives of the Communist Party and the Nazi Party ostentatiously left the assembly hall.

Here’s the anthemic “Einheitsfrontlied (Song of the United Front)” with words by Bertold Brecht and music by Hanns Eisler, urging for a united front of German communists and Social Democrats to defeat the Nazis:

The pacifist and 1935 Nobel Prize Laureate Carl von Ossietsky wrote in appreciation of Levi:

He will remain in the memory amongst the few incurable outsiders who are inseparable from the idea that revolutionary politics also involve strong independent individuals, and that, with a man like Paul Levi, one will fare much better than with the polite office-managers of radicalism.

Birthday of Chaver Paver (Gershon Einbinder), Yiddish Writer 

Chaver Paver is the pen-name of the esteemed Yiddish writer Gershon Einbinder. Einbinder was born on February 8, 1901 in Bershad (today Бершадь, Ukraine). At the age of 19, he moved to Romania and eventually settled in the United States in 1924. He lived in New York and Los Angeles, where he died in 1964.

Chaver Paver made his debut in Yiddish literature in the 1920s as a children’s writer. He wrote five volumes of children’s stories and several plays. However, the majority of his literary works were stories and novels for adults. American Yiddish literature always maintained a close connection to its readers, and Chaver Paver did not break from that tradition. He wrote of the movement from the shtetlach to the United States and the tone of his writing always expressed the compassion he felt for his reading public.

When asked in an interview, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, about the basic motives of his writing, Chaver Paver replied:

“I feel like telling myself and the people around me a story which will remove us from the sadness and drabness, I try to infuse such colors from which there should emanate, despite the sadness, the festivity and the joy of living.”

Vovik: Tales of a Brownsville Puppy (1947)

Labzik: Tales of a Wise Pooch (1935)

Chaver Paver’s style is unique in Yiddish prose. There is no sense of distance between the writer and the reader and his writings have the sing-song quality of a storyteller, giving the impression of improvisation. The stories move fast, often featuring children, as well as real and imaginary animals that possess human characteristics. Chaver Paver’s best-known children’s book, Labzik (1935) is about a self-conscious dog who considers running away to Philadelphia. His 1937 story “Clinton Street” tells the tale of Jewish gangsterism in American life, and the tension building between these youngsters and the pushcart peddlers they looked down upon.

Generations of Jewish children in the United States and Europe grew up listening to Chaver Paver’s stories that fuse fantasy and reality, taking problems from real life and twisting the logic to create an alternative reality that children love to believe in.

Here’s a clip from The Light Ahead, an adaptation of Mendele’s Fishke the Lame, for which Chaver Paver wrote the screenplay.

Strange: Just as one reader asked a question, another posed a query that responded to the first — almost.

Der Vortsman informed Reader 2 that his memory or hearing was faulty…that the phrase his parents used was actually ‘nit gefidlt’ meaning “so I/you/it didn’t fiddle”…that it was unrelated to “piddling.” The thought then occurred that the phrase was an apt folk-expression that would fit today’s teenage “whatever.” However, while looking up an entirely different word in Yitskhok Niborski’s indispensable dictionary of Holy Tongue (Hebrew/Aramaic) words in Yiddish, we came across “loy fidalti,” a Yiddishized Hebrew phrase meaning “so I didn’t fiddle.” Moreover, the “Hebrew” is actually a parody of the biblical phrase “loy filolti,” meaning “I had not thought [to see your face].” Niborski, unfortunately, doesn’t cite the precise chapter and verse. It’s Genesis 48:11, but, whatever.

Another reader, who knows Yiddish well, inquired about the word “tanebatek” and guessed that it meant, literally, “a fine fellow,” but that it was used ironically. She was not far off.

Again, Niborski to the rescue: The Aramaic “táne” refers to a highly-respected teacher of the Rabbinic period during the early years of the Current Era, who collectively created the Mishnah, the base of the Talmud. A “táne báre” is an “Unnamed Teacher,” i.e., not really a learnèd teacher at all. Yiddish took over the ironic phrase and further parodied it into tane-bartek, meaning “a not-so-nice guy.”

From ancient Aramaic teachers and tomes to…would you believe…Japanese!

Last month, the Forward ran a long article about a Yiddish-Japanese dictionary that contains 28,000 entries in 1,302 pages and goes for the modest price of 60,000 yen, or around $770!

The article makes much of the fact that the number of entries exceeds that of the Modern English/Yiddish, Yiddish/English Dictionary, but the writer mistakenly credits Max Weinreich as its compiler. It was actually Max’s son, Uriel.

(Der Vortsman notes that Nahum Stutchkoff’s Thesaurus of the Yiddish Language comprises over 150,000 words, idioms, phrases and proverbs.)

Finally, readers of this column who check will note that the very last word in the article is a grievous error in Yiddish.

Speaking of dictionaries, it’s important how one uses them. A friend and Yiddish-knower asked:

Were Der Vortsman a lexicographer, he’d add: “to decorate sloppily, tastelessly.” But such extended definitions by a tane bare might add untold pages (and yen-costs) to the Yiddish-Japanese dictionary; iz nit gefidlt.

The same Yiddish-knowing friend challenged another in her city over the legitimacy of the word “umgelumpert” and asked for validation. While Harkavy did not include it in the Yiddish-English part of his 1898 dictionary, he did in the much larger English-Yiddish section under “clumsy,” though spelling the Yiddish as “ungelumpert” with an “n” (a nun, actually). In his 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary, Harkavy got it right on all counts.

(There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Roald Dahl used “umgelumpert” when creating Willy Wonka’s Oompah Loompahs.)

Finally, a query from the devotedly meticulous editor of the English translation of the yisker bukh — memorial book — about the shtetl Felshtin, destroyed in 1919 by Ukrainian Nationalist pogromist brigands during the civil war following the Russian Revolution. He asked about a word that appeared in the 1936 original Yiddish edition, “obshay.” The dictionaries we’ve cited above show both that archaic spelling and the more modern “opshay.” The definitions include “respect, reverence, awe” and, in one case — as the first definition — “fear.”

A discussion with the Learnèd Editor of YidBits yielded some fascinating possibilities about the origins of the word — which we’ll spare our readers — but also the reminder that, in English, “awe” also metamorphoses into “awful.”

Awesome. Or, whatever.

Der Vortsman is Hershl Hartman, long-time Yiddishkayt Board Member and Education Director at the Sholem Community. You can write the Vortsman at info at yiddishkayt.org.