Jul 25, 2024
Yudel Mark (Jason Weisinger, left) with Max Weinreich (Gideon Dabi, right)
The story of The Great Dictionary of Yiddish Language has often been unjustly minimized: A group of Yiddish scholars convene to write a dictionary. They fight, and the project collapses before they are able to publish anything beyond four volumes of words beginning with the letter aleph. The history of the project and the ideological tensions it occasioned has only recently received serious scholarly attention, in Alec Burko’s masterful “Saving Yiddish: Yiddish Studies and the Language Sciences in America, 1940-1970”. 1 1 Alec Burko, “Saving Yiddish: Yiddish Studies and the Language Sciences in America, 1940-1970,” PhD diss., (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2019), 1-78. In short: Between 1951 and 1988, some of the greatest scholars in the field of Yiddish Studies, Max Weinreich, Yudl Mark, Nahum Stutshkov, Joshua Fishman, and Marvin Herzog, to name but a few, collected more than 250,000 words for what was supposed to be the definitive Yiddish Dictionary, a moment before it was too late. The project resulted in the publication of four volumes covering only the letter aleph – the rest of the project remained unfinished. Two subsequent incomplete volumes were recently scanned and are available online. 2 2 Available at: https://yiddish5-6.com/
Now, this drama unfolds in operatic form. The Great Dictionary of Yiddish Language: A Chamber Opera (from now: GDYL Opera), which was performed this May in a staged concert at the Brooklyn Bang on a Can Long Play Festival, co-produced by the American Opera Project and The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life, is an ambitious, larger-than-life spectacle befitting the dazzling ambitions of the creators of the Yiddish dictionary.
3
3
More on the production in this link: https://bangonacan.org/people/... Composer Alex Weiser and librettist Ben Kaplan endow enchantment and glamor on its decidedly unglamorous protagonists and, most importantly, heighten our attention to their doubts and torments the way only an opera can.
Chamber Ensemble conducted by David Bloom
The opera distills the story of the dictionary into two acts (operas usually have at least three) and an intimate setting of six instrumentalists and five singers: two human protagonists, Max Weinreich (Jason Weisinger) and Yudl Mark (Gideon Dabi), and — and this is perhaps where the genius of this opera lies — three different forms or emanations of the letter aleph, played by Kristin Gornstein, Caitlin McKechney, and Kelly Guerra: Shtumer (silent) Aleph, Komets aleph, and Pasekh aleph. This multifaceted aleph is a Borgesian aleph, a Kabbalistic eyn-sof, eternity, but it is also the aleph of the four volumes of the dictionary, the only letter its creators were able to fully cover in their publications. Finally, the aleph is a reminder of the bitter fights over aleph between YIVO and the Yiddish press (?דערציונג or דערציאונג) (?איד or ייִד). These supposedly trifling matters of orthography, the opera reminds us, had a tremendous symbolic meaning for Yiddish speakers, for whom orthographical decisions were also decisions about what it meant to be a Jew in the modern world, how to relate to Jewish and non-Jewish pasts and presents, what it meant to bring a decimated language into the future, and the relationships between language and the people who speak it.
Shtumer Alef (played by Kristin Gornstein)‘s aria towards the end of the opera. This song reflects on a Yiddish letter’s view of Jewish history.
The operatic setting allows for a hierarchical characterization of the protagonists. On the stage, you could see an exceptionally fit Max Weinreich, representing the voice of YIVO (a deep baritone), bellowing over a dreamy-faced Yudl Mark, who responds with a sweet, melodic tenor. Takones! Takones! Takones!, a term alluding to the prewar YIVO orthographic “rules,” was a recurrent refrain, reverberating through the concert hall. Failure to adhere to the takones was the gravest accusation Max Weinreich leveled against Yudl Mark: first, in Weinreich’s cramped YIVO office (act I), and later, after his untimely death, as an apparition in the Jerusalem offices of the project (act II).
“And look! He broke with the Takones!
How can I put the YIVO logo
On a book that breaks
With YIVO’s spelling and rules?”
Indeed, how could he? How could Mark break with the prewar spelling rules, the ghostly remnant of a world in which Yiddish was still the language of the masses? But how can you not break the rules, retorted Mark, thinking of the challenges Yiddish was facing in the uncertain, radically impoverished postwar Jewish world. In recreating the Yiddishist polemics on stage,
Kaplan and Weiser excel at capturing the paradoxical nature of postwar Yiddishism, which was simultaneously petty and visionary, cosmopolitan and parochial, messianic, but also highly pragmatic, lachrymose and uplifting, tragic and comic, and everything in between.
In addition to the human drama, the opera also insightfully stages a theological drama. In the opera, Yudl Mark is possessed with divine visions, valleys full of dry bones of Yiddish words, and a celestial chariot carried by seraphim in the form of aleph letters. While it is difficult to locate a messianic strand in Yudl Mark’s correspondence, publications, or memoirs, there is something to be said about the GDYL project as Messianic lexicography. Indeed, the GDYL gestures simultaneously towards a present rupture and a future redemption. According to the opera, it is this messianic fervor that contributed to the failure of this project, turning lifelong friendship into bitter animosities (one committee member famously accused another of “a swindle worse than Watergate”). It is difficult, but perhaps necessary, to think of Yudl Mark in theological terms, not only as a traumatic subject, a scholar responding to the destruction of Eastern Europe, but also as a Yiddish prophet, who, through his lexicographical work, hoped to collapse the present and the future, to conjure a community that would be able to carry over Yiddish until the end of days.
Finally, and this is the aspect that fascinates me the most, the GDYL opera is also a deeply personal project. Alex Weiser is the Director of Public Programs at YIVO, and Ben Kaplan is the Institute’s director of Education. When Weiser/Kaplan are writing an opera about Weinreich/Mark, they are also saying something about their own relationship to YIVO — The opera is, much like the dictionary itself, a YIVO collaboration (not officially – again, like the dictionary). Thus, one wonders, what is the meaning of evoking this historically heated debate surrounding the GDYL, which seems anything but relevant today, by two YIVO staff members, no less? How does this heritage of passionate argumentation and messianic fervor resonate with the project of YIVO in the 21st century – for these artists and for the institution itself – and indeed for the readers of In geveb and the larger community of Yiddish scholars and enthusiasts?
I will limit myself to giving one possible answer. In the opera, it is the shtumer aleph, the aleph which is the quintessential representation of the fight between Yudl Mark and Max Weinreich over the orthography of Yiddish, which takes the lead over the other forms of aleph. I was thinking a lot about this choice. What does it mean to position a silent, purely orthographic sign at the center? To my mind, this is, among other things, an unapologetic celebration of Yiddishism for all that it is, as a culture which values cultural and linguistic specificity, while resisting the transformation of Yiddish into a metaphor. In this sense, the opera is also a suggestion of how to reside more or less comfortably in haunted institutions such as YIVO, how to ventriloquize their past respectfully but also playfully, be creative, and thrive.
